Indicators & Warning Board | Interactive Deterrence

Aggregate board

Indicators · discussed in open sources

Mark exercise-typical indicators

How to read it

Each tile is an indicator that analysts have publicly named as a possible sign that Beijing is preparing for large-scale action against Taiwan. Set each one to not observed, ambiguous or observed, or start from a preset. The gauges show how much of each domain is lit, weighted by how diagnostic the indicator is (the dots on each tile, one to three). Tags say how often exercises produce the indicator too and how far ahead of action it would usually appear ("lead"). The line on each gauge marks where a domain counts toward breadth.

The analytic point is that exercises produce many indicators too. A Joint Sword-type drill lights up closure zones, forward deployments, coast guard massing and harsh rhetoric within hours. What separates preparation for war from a drill is the combination: slow, costly steps that an exercise does not need, such as halting demobilization, ordering national mobilization, repatriating assets or running blood drives, appearing together across several domains and persisting over weeks.

Timing matters for a second reason. Major PLA exercises around Taiwan have been short. A TSM-affiliated working paper on imagery-based warning argues that satellite imagery of PLA bases, the most widely used open source, is a surveillance tool rather than a warning tool: short surges fall below what imagery can reliably detect, and the signatures large and long enough to see are those of mobilization, not exercises. The paper proposes that any claimed warning indicator be published with its detection limits.

How long major PLA exercises around Taiwan lasted, 2022–2025 (announced or reported dates)

Dates from TSM's exercise-event list, compiled from the linked sources; each bar links to one source. Bars show the announced or reported window. The August 2022 activity ran past its announced end: follow-on drills continued until the Eastern Theater Command declared operations concluded on August 10. Beijing never announced the December 2024 deployment as an exercise; it declared seven temporary reserved airspace zones along its coast for December 9–11, and the linked source dates the activity December 9–12. The same list also records shorter unnamed events and an unannounced September 11–18, 2023 surge of air and naval activity, which are not charted. The shaded band marks two weeks, the shortest sustained surge the working paper finds base imagery can reliably detect.

Replay day by day in Anatomy of an Exercise:

Method and limits

Indicators, descriptions and ambiguity notes paraphrase the sources listed below. Each indicator cites at least one source that discusses it. Two gaps: public blood drives rest on a single analyst source, and no source was found that treats evacuation of PRC nationals abroad as a Taiwan indicator, so that idea is folded into the travel-advisory indicator with a note.

Weights (1–3), exercise overlap (high 0.8, some 0.4, low 0.1), timing factors (days 0.75, weeks 1.0, months 1.1) and band thresholds are notional. They were set by hand to show the logic of combination and timing, not estimated from data. Lead times use the sources' ranges where they give one.

The "routine year" and "major exercise" presets are stylized composites for teaching. They are not a record of any specific year or exercise. The pre-conflict preset is invented.

"Hard-to-fake signal" counts each lit indicator by its weight times one minus its exercise overlap. Strategic warning requires that signal to be high and spread across at least four domains, and it is withheld when everything appeared within days.

This board is a teaching model of indications and warning. It is not an assessment of current PRC activity.

How to read it

Method and limits

Sources