In think tank’s Taiwan war game, US beats China at high cost

The Marines’ key weapon, the Naval Strike Missile, simply can’t shoot far enough with its 100 nautical mile range, making it ineffective for strikes from the Philippines to Taiwan, which is where Marines might be stuck if their access to the area around Taiwan is denied.

“If I’m not on Taiwan, that weapon is basically useless,” Dougherty said. The CNAS expert has confidence that the MLR can be effective but he thinks the unit needs a longer ranging weapon than the NSM for this kind of scenario.

And in every scenario, once the conflict stars there’s a “forest of Chinese ships” around Taiwan. In other games the Chinese military sunk an entire Amphibious Ready Group twice. And twice when the MLR did get onto Taiwan, it ran out of supplies and Chinese fires destroyed both its aerial and sea-based resupply.

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