A Navy SEAL unit that killed Osama bin Laden may be training Taiwanese forces to defeat a possible Chinese invasion, experts say

• A Navy SEAL unit is busy preparing for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the Financial Times said.
• It may be training Taiwan's forces to fight back against Chinese forces, retired Navy officers told BI.

An elite Navy SEAL unit may be preparing Taiwanese forces for reconnaissance operations and missions to repel a Chinese invasion, retired Navy officers said after a report said the unit had been training for such an eventuality for over a year.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that SEAL Team 6 — famous for killing Osama bin Laden in 2011 — has spent more than a year planning and training at its Dam Neck base in Virginia for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

The unit is conducts sensitive missions around the world, including battles in Afghanistan in 2002, a presence in Yemen, Syria, and Somalia in the early 2000s, and the 2011 nighttime raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.

However, the unit's contingency plans — like most of its missions — are highly classified, and people familiar with its planning did not provide details to the FT about the specific missions it's preparing for.

According to three retired Navy officers, the unit may be training Taiwanese soldiers to fight back against China should it invade Taiwan.

Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, expects SEALs to do two things.

One, he told BI, "is training Taiwanese forces in reconnaissance and perhaps direct attack, focusing on missions that might be required to defeat a Chinese invasion."

"Naval reconnaissance forces would locate Chinese forces for long-range attacks," he said, adding: "They might also launch attacks against offshore ships or shipping in Chinese ports."

Another one, he said, is familiarizing themselves with the terrain so that they might be better employed if necessary.

Bradley Martin, a retired surface warfare captain who served in the Navy for 30 years, said the SEALs' "broad" missions include intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and potential actions against an invading force.

Those are "well-established in the SEAL mission set," he told BI.

Sam Tangredi, a retired US Navy captain and surface warfare officer, made a similar assessment.

He told BI that in a "conventional" war between the US, its allies, and China, SEALs would likely take on their "traditional" naval roles.

These include direct reconnaissance of coastal areas before major amphibious-type operations, identifying naval mined areas and obtaining knowledge of capabilities and mine patterns, sabotage operations against enemy naval units and ports, and land operations from the sea, he said.

"A 'great power war' — which inevitably involved oceans or ocean access — would require the traditional naval role," he said.

"After all, Taiwan is an island. The bulk of PRC combat capabilities in an invasion would travel by sea," he said, using the initials of the People's Republic of China.

Preparing Taiwan for an attack

For decades, the US has adopted "strategic ambiguity" toward Taiwan, positioning itself as the island's most steadfast ally while declining to explicitly say whether it would come to Taiwan's aid if China attacked.

However, over the last few years, the mood in Washington, DC, has shifted toward greater hawkishness, Graeme Thompson, an analyst with the Eurasia Group, told Business Insider last November.

President Joe Biden himself has repeatedly suggested the US would respond militarily if China attacked Taiwan.

Reports have already given clues as to how the US is preparing for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Last year, US officials told The Wall Street Journal that the US planned to quadruple the number of troops deployed to Taiwan compared to the year before, from about 30 in 2022 to between 100 and 200 soldiers in 2023.

In January, US officials told Reuters the US is trying to spread its military logistics hubs across the Pacific, including warehouses in Australia.

Speaking at the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Shangri-La Dialogue Summit in June, Adm. Samuel Paparo, the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, told The Washington Post that one of the US' plans is to launch thousands of uncrewed systems, from surface vessels and submarines to aerial drones, to fight any Chinese invasion as soon as it begins to cross the Taiwan Strait.

According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, Taiwan is also one of the largest purchasers of US defense equipment.

Martin said he would expect SEALs to be involved in a contingency response but added that didn't represent a change in current US policy.

"There might be more attention than in previous periods, but contingency planning has been going on for decades," he said.

Cancian said contingency plans were not policies or commitments.

"The United States has not abandoned strategic ambiguity," he said.

Preparations intensified after a US admiral predicted China could invade Taiwan by 2027

In its report on SEAL Team 6, the FT said preparations had intensified since Adm. Phil Davidson, then the US Indo-Pacific commander, said that China may invade Taiwan by 2027.

During a 2021 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Davidson said Taiwan was "clearly" one of China's "ambitions" and that he believed the threat would be "manifest" in the "next six years."

Since then, military experts and former defense officials have made similar assessments, some varying on China's timeline and means, while others focused on which allies Taiwan could rely on.

Most say signs — like China's rapid modernization of its armed forces over the past two decades and drills around Taiwan — point to Chinese military action to seize the island by force, possibly in just a few years.

But experts from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War said in May that an aggressive Chinese coercion campaign — short of war but still threatening — was more likely than a full-scale invasion and that the US needed to prepare for such an eventuality.

Adm. Paparo told Japan's Nikkei newspaper in May that China's two-day drills around the island "looked like a rehearsal" for an invasion.

A June report from the American think tank RAND Corp. said the US might have to defend Taiwan alone, as several of its biggest allies were unlikely to commit troops.

Meanwhile, US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said this week that he'd seen growing concern and alarm from other countries in the Indo-Pacific region over China's capabilities and intentions over the past 15 years.

Speaking at a keynote address at an Air & Space Forces Association convention, he said that the threat of a war between the US and China was growing.

"I am not saying war in the Pacific is imminent or inevitable. It is not," Kendall said. "But I am saying that the likelihood is increasing and will continue to do so."