The US Navy’s elite special operations unit, SEAL Team Six, has been training to “help Taiwan” in case of a “Chinese invasion,” according to the Financial Times (FT). The unit carried out the 2011 mission that killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
SEAL Team Six “has been planning and training for a Taiwan conflict for more than a year at Dam Neck, its headquarters at Virginia Beach about 250km south-east of Washington,” the FT reported on Thursday, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.
The US has sent special forces to Taiwan in the past several years to train the island’s military against a potential attack from the mainland. No details were given about the SEAL activity, which is “highly classified.”
The US Special Operations Command referred any questions about Taiwan plans to the Pentagon, which did not comment on specific details.
So far, the only hints of US plans for a potential conflict around Taiwan have come from Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, in an interview in June.
“I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities so I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything,” Paparo told the Washington Post.
Taiwan has been run by descendants of Chinese nationalists since they fled the mainland in 1949, following a communist victory in the civil war. Washington did not recognize the People’s Republic of China until 1979, treating the government in Taipei as the ‘Republic of China’ in the meantime.
Though it has officially adopted the One-China policy, the US maintains informal diplomatic and economic ties with Taipei, which is a major source of semiconductors and chips for Western markets. Washington has also supplied Taipei with weapons, ammunition, and equipment to “deter” Beijing.
Taiwan is “the very core of China’s core interests and the first red line that must not be crossed in the China-US relationship,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington has said, urging the US to “stop creating factors that could heighten tensions in the Taiwan Strait.”
The US government claims that Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to modernize to achieve the capability of forcibly seizing the island by 2027.
Beijing’s official Taiwan policy is peaceful reintegration, though China has not ruled out using force in the event of the island declaring independence.