The First Battle
This isn't a guess. It's what the most-wargamed event on Earth looks like when you run it — the opening hours, the crossing, the submarines that decide it, and the price of "winning." Drawn from the published wargames (CSIS, RAND). Scroll.
The opening barrage
Without warning, the PLA Rocket Force opens with a shock-and-awe salvo — Taiwan's air defences, airfields, command nodes and navy at its piers, then the US bases that would answer: Kadena on Okinawa, and Guam. The wargames are blunt: up to ~90% of allied aircraft are destroyed on the ground, not in the air. Around twenty missiles can put Andersen Air Force Base on Guam out of action.
The crossing
Behind the missiles, the largest amphibious assault since 1944 sorties across the 130-kilometre strait — hundreds of ships and civilian ferries carrying the invasion force toward Taiwan's western beaches, screened by warships and air cover.
The submarines do the killing
America's decisive weapon isn't its carriers — it's its attack submarines. They operate inside the missile bubble where surface ships cannot survive, and with bombers firing long-range anti-ship missiles from beyond it, they gut the invasion fleet at sea. In the games, at least 90% of China's amphibious fleet is destroyed before the troops can be sustained ashore.
The carriers can't come
America's carriers — the symbol of its power — must stay outside the red ring. China's DF-21D is a purpose-built carrier-killer; inside its reach a carrier strike group is a target, not an asset. Even held back, two US carriers are sunk. The airpower flies from Japan instead — which is why Kadena, already cratered, is the hinge of the entire war.
Australia: the rear-area enabler
Where is Australia in this? Not over Taiwan. The honest assessment — USSC, ASPI, Carnegie — is a boutique force of ~72 F-35As that can't be spared from home, no submarines in the strait, and munitions that run dry. Australia's real contribution comes from the rear: surveillance (P-8A, the JORN radar), air-to-air refuelling (KC-30A), and guarding the southern sea lanes. Useful. Small.
Three weeks. A pyrrhic victory.
In roughly 22 of CSIS's 24 runs, the invasion is defeated — Taiwan holds. But this is what 'victory' costs, in about three weeks of fighting — a loss rate approaching the Second World War, and Taiwan's economy in ruins. CSIS's own word for it: pyrrhic.
The only winning move
CSIS's conclusion is the book's: "Victory is therefore not enough. The United States needs to strengthen deterrence immediately." And the win is fragile — it hinges on access to Japanese bases and on enough missiles; remove either, and China can win outright. The lesson was never that we'd prevail. It's that the only victory worth having is the war that never starts. In this scenario, Australia watched from the rear. The next one reaches home.
Everyone loses. That's the argument.
The defence usually holds — but a war over Taiwan would be the bloodiest fighting the US and its allies have seen since 1945, and it would reshape the world economy overnight. The point of seeing it clearly isn't fatalism. It's deterrence: the only victory worth having is the one where the war never starts.
Scenario and figures: CSIS, 'The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan' (Cancian, Cancian & Heginbotham, Jan 2023, 24 iterations), cross-checked against RAND, USSC and Naval News reporting. Loss figures are base-case averages and vary by iteration; the favourable result is contested and depends on Japanese basing and munitions stocks. This is a scenario drawn from published wargames — not a prediction.