The primary focus of Talmadge and Green's analysis is how Chinese control of Taiwan would affect China's ability to conduct the surface denial mission—attacking U.S. surface forces operating in the Philippine Sea post-reunification.

Chinese imaging satellites are inefficient for finding U.S. surface forces because there are not many of them, they are very inefficient random searchers across the enormous Pacific, and carriers, while large, are not that big relative to the size of the ocean.

U.S. policy toward Taiwan is ultimately a political question that cannot be answered by military analysis alone, but understanding Taiwan's military value is an important input to political decision-making.

Taiwan's strategic location in the Western Pacific at the center of the first island chain, sitting astride major exits from China's coastal seas into the Philippine Sea, gives it inherent geostrategic military importance.

Chinese submarines are currently based inside the first island chain, concentrated especially at Hainan Island, which requires them to pass through anti-submarine warfare barriers and choke points to reach the Philippine Sea where they could threaten U.S. surface forces.

The United States deployed the SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System)—a hydrophone network of passive acoustic sensors—across the northern Atlantic during the Cold War to detect Soviet submarines attempting to transit to the North Atlantic, and similar systems are currently deployed along the exits of the first island chain.

Passive acoustic sensor arrays deployed off Taiwan would be more survivable and reliable than the alternative sensing methods China currently relies on (Over-the-Horizon radars, SIGINT satellites, imaging satellites, aircraft and ship-based sensors) because they are difficult to locate and can be protected by air defense networks and mining.

Over-the-Horizon (OTH) radars, which China could use to find U.S. surface forces in the status quo, are vulnerable to jamming and kinetic attack in wartime because they are big, fixed, emitting targets that would likely be destroyed early in a conflict.

If the U.S. cannot interrupt the hydrophone kill chain feeding information to Chinese satellites and missiles, it would face the difficult strategic choice of escalating to anti-satellite warfare, which would be a bad day as president and represents a significant operational problem.

Even if the U.S. completely exits the region and abandons all regional commitments, a war over Taiwan could still become a major power war involving Japan and China because Japan understands Taiwan's military value and would likely become militarily involved in efforts to stop a Chinese takeover.

China is constrained by its geography in ways it needs to break out of, and its activities in the South China Sea, while perhaps not as significant for U.S. military power, do have implications for balances of power vis-à-vis China's regional neighbors.

Developing submarine port infrastructure like what China could use on Taiwan—even for a technologically advanced nation like the United States—would take approximately five to ten years, though China may be able to accomplish it more quickly given its capability for rapid construction.

Chinese submarines have not achieved the quietness levels of U.S. submarines because submarine noise reduction is very technically hard, requires continuous innovation over many years, and is not as simple as acquiring intellectual property through espionage.

U.S. security cooperation with Philippines through Title 10 and Title 22 programs provides tools for enhancing regional defense posture and should be intensified to support potential countermeasures to Chinese Taiwan control.

Taiwan's own defense posture and readiness to commit resources to defense are central to effective deterrence against Chinese coercion or attack, independent of U.S. capabilities.

Taiwan's lack of urgency in defense planning over the last 20 years regarding submarine and sensor capabilities appears to be changing, possibly in response to increased threat perception.

Scenarios where China coerces Taiwan (short of military invasion) and Taiwan capitulates would free up Chinese military resources, political energy, and bureaucratic capacity previously dedicated to Taiwan contingency planning for use in other strategic domains like the Indian Ocean.

MacArthur famously described Taiwan as an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender, but analysts typically mention this reference without substantial analysis of what it would actually mean if China controlled the island.

The United States does not claim that Chinese submarines would gain advantage over U.S. attack submarines in the Philippine Sea, as U.S. submarines retain significant survivability advantages versus Chinese anti-submarine warfare capabilities, which are relatively underdeveloped.

The oceans becoming transparent through open-source technology and artificial intelligence would be bad for the United States because it would take away a relative advantage, but it would be even worse for other countries with fewer undersea advantages.