Although most Americans don’t realize it, our military leaders assume that armed conflict with the People’s Republic of China is a matter of when not if.
Pentagon thinkers who are briefed on our best intelligence about Beijing’s intentions assess that 2027 is the year that Chinese President Xi Jinping rolls the dice in an effort to reunite Taiwan with the mainland. Some defense pundits don’t think we even have that long. The odds of a war with the PRC during the second Trump administration loom large and ominously.
I recently discussed conflict scenarios with a senior defense official who’s involved in highly classified war planning at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Honolulu. I learned that Pentagon planners aren’t excessively concerned about a direct invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army. That’s highly risky for Beijing. A less risky option is a blockade of the island, which would represent an ambiguously packaged form of Chinese aggression. PLA warplanes and warships regularly surge toward Taiwan, provoking its response while testing reaction times. These are provocative military exercises. One day, it may be real.
What happens then? Particularly considering that the blockade will be presented by Beijing as an internal Chinese matter, an argument that many United Nations members may accept.
If Washington decides to break the PLA’s blockade of Taiwan, it will result in a shooting war within a few days at most. Each side brings strengths and weaknesses to that fight. China enjoys significant geographic advantages. The tyranny of distance is real, and the U.S. military will be operating far from its bases while the PLA in southeast China will conduct air and missile strikes on Taiwan and our forces at relatively close range. The F-35, which is employed by our Air Force, Marines, and Navy, is a highly advanced but relatively short-range fifth-generation fighter jet that requires more refueling assets than the Pentagon possesses.
There’s also great Pentagon concern about Beijing’s long-ranged “carrier killer” missiles, the D-21 and D-26, that will target Navy “big decks” in the Western and even Central Pacific. Whether such untried technology works as advertised is another matter. Nevertheless, the Ukraine war has demonstrated the limits of U.S. military technology, too. Expensive Western precision munitions that are dependent on GPS for targeting are routinely jammed by the Russians, rendering them almost useless, and the Chinese have learned to do the same.
Our military, pound for pound, is better trained and equipped than China’s, often significantly so, but the PLA’s advantages in numbers of naval and air units are rising. Quantity, as Stalin said, can have a quality all its own. Neither is the Pentagon logistically ready for any sustained conflict. Long-range U.S. Navy precision missiles are accurate but expensive and slowly replaced, plus Pentagon stocks are running low given what’s been fired at Houthi rebels in Yemen. Oh, and then subtract what’s been gifted to Ukraine and Israel.
The U.S. military possesses one unambiguous advantage over China in the Pacific: the Navy’s prowess with attack submarines. Beijing is trying to catch up, but the PLA remains decades behind us in the secret struggle under the sea. However, serious problems with U.S. Navy readiness — up to 40% of our subs are out of service, awaiting backlogged repairs — mean that while our submarines will take a heavy toll on Chinese ships, we won’t have as many of them on hand as INDOPACOM would like.
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China’s big advantage is intelligence. The daunting extent of Beijing’s espionage against the West, especially the United States, employing both cyberespionage and traditional human spying, means that the PLA possesses an information advantage in any conflict. Industrial-scale hacking operations such as Salt Typhoon have given Chinese intelligence access to an astonishing array of American secrets, including deep inside Washington.
If Beijing is inside our secure communications, that will cost large numbers of American and allied lives and may lose us any Taiwan war before it starts. Fixing this counterintelligence disaster should be the new Trump administration’s top national security priority.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.