The Next World War | Episode 15 | The Quarantine of Taiwan

In the season 2 premiere, China launches an invasion of the Kinmen Islands, inciting a reaction from Taiwan that serves to justify the PRC's complete quarantine of the island nation. Background: There’s much to tell in this episode, laying the groundwork for the entire season - so for those looking for beginning-to-end action, this one is a slow-burn. To begin, I wanted to start with China’s “justification” for the quarantine and in a way that would be the most troublesome to Taiwan and its allies. In talking to my network of SMEs, an invasion of the Kinmen Islands - and in particular using unidentified forces (though clearly PRC), would do nicely. The difficult challenge for Taiwan, the US, Australia, UK and Japan would be how to respond without going kinetic. I also wanted to give a peek into the decision making process in Washington, most notably, their debate about Taiwan’s willingness to fight and the US commitment to Taiwan’s defense. Toward that, I wanted to insert a nod to the very small but important US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), who doesn’t receive much love, but from my own research… does some amazing work. Lastly, a ton of time went into the episode, from pouring through historical documents of NSC meetings, to interviews with subject matter experts, think tank white papers… the list goes on, all before the script, filming and editing even began. To speed up production, the creator of the YouTube Channel, FIXEDIT, offered his valuable time and knowledge of DCS, to film several of the scenes based on my script. A HUGE thank you to him. That, alone, cut my time in filming by a third. Otherwise, this episode would not have gone out until February. Some important thank you’s: - Darth Rust and Tzu-Chi Hsu for insight and suggestions for this episode - FIXEDIT for the beautiful DCS video clips. Check out his amazing YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BobChanel - Michael Hilliard, creator of the geopolitical podcast, The Red Line for his in-depth insight and information about the complexities of a potential Indo-Pacific conflict. I HIGHLY recommend the Red Line Podcast: https://www.theredlinepodcast.com/ Some initial comments about episode 15: Pronunciations of places, names and translations are my best guess or through open resources such as Google Translation, etc. As always, uniforms are not always exact. Also, for the Little Green Men on Kinmen, I purposefully bastardized the PRC’s uniform to make them unidentifiable, but remain using some of their standard kit. Taiwanese and Chinese faces. The gaming platform, ARMA3, has a few mods that provide regional faces, but they are few and far between, and not always great. In the time and resources I have… I get what I get. That also goes toward 3D models of female characters. I hope that at some point there will be more available in ARMA. That drone that hit the Orion seemed to be going insanely fast. Yep! Filming that scene was challenging. What eventually “worked” was firing a missile at the Orion, then superimposing a drone. Not ideal, but gets the point across. Lastly, as always, there is only so much I can do as a one-man-show in putting this series together to get it perfectly “right”. The gaming platforms I use are limited, the mods available within them can be limiting as well, so there are times when a rank or uniform might not be right, or a version of equipment, etc. I work with what I have, in the time that I have, so I ask for a bit of grace in focusing more on the story, tone and feel. That said, I’m always happy to receive constructive criticism. This is all about making the story and presentation better. Thanks! This video was created in part using content of Bohemia Interactive a.s. Copyright © 2018 Bohemia Interactive a.s. All rights reserved. www.bistudio.com Other games and software used include: Command: Modern Operations by Slitherine Software https://www.slitherine.com/game/command-modern-operations Digital Combat Simulator | DCS World | Combat Simulator by Eagle Dynamics https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/ Cold Waters https://killerfishgames.com/games/cold-waters Celestia https://celestiaproject.space/ Map.Army https://www.map.army/ Voice Over: https://elevenlabs.io/ GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program https://www.gimp.org/ Davinci Resolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve