Beyond that, skilled labor is sorely lacking, and the learning curve is steep. Among the deficiencies: components of solid rocket motors, shell casings, machine tools, fuses and precursor elements to propellants and explosives, many of which are made in China and India. All of a sudden, Washington is reckoning with the fact that so many parts and pieces of munitions, planes, and ships it needs are being manufactured overseas, including in China. manufacturing base has become since the Cold War. “There is a recognition of the challenge that goes to the top of the Pentagon, but across the board there is more talk than action,” says Seth Jones, a former Obama-era defense official who compiled a report on one of the wargames conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.īut a swift response may not be possible, in large part because of how shrunken the U.S. Yet critics on both sides of the aisle say the Biden administration has been slow to respond to what is minimally required to prevent an Indo-Pacific catastrophe, which is the need to rapidly build up a better deterrent - especially new stockpiles of munitions that would convince China it could be too costly to attack Taiwan. military posture vis-a-vis Taiwan, many defense experts say. defense industrial base should be sounding alarms for the U.S. In other words, the failure to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine and the stress this has put on the U.S. has allocated nearly $50 billion in security aid to Kyiv, possibly cutting further into its deterrent against China. munitions stockpiles, and China dramatically escalated both its military spending and aggressive rhetoric against Taiwan. The problem has come into sharp relief only in the last few years as Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to a prolonged war that has drained U.S. “The most common thread in these exercises is that the United States needs to take steps now in the Indo-Pacific to ensure the conflict doesn’t happen in the future. And the impact of that on our society is quite devastating,” said Becca Wasser, who played the role of the Chinese leadership in the Select Committee’s wargame and is head of the gaming lab at the Center for a New American Security. “The thing we see across all the wargames is that there are major losses on all sides. “They knew exactly what we were going to do before we did it.”Īnd that’s assuming the U.S.-China war doesn’t go nuclear. The Chinese “just ran rings around us,” said former Joint Chiefs Vice Chair Gen. was much slower to rebuild, taking years to replace ships as it reckoned with how shriveled its industrial base had become compared to China’s.

And as a protracted siege ensued, the U.S. The United States and its main ally, Japan, lost thousands of servicemembers, dozens of ships, and hundreds of aircraft. managed to even the odds for a time by deploying more sophisticated submarines as well as B-21 and B-2 stealth bombers to get inside China’s air defense zones, but Washington ran out of key munitions in a matter of days and saw its network access severed. and allied air bases and ships in the Indo-Pacific. Having taken seriously President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend the island, Beijing also struck pre-emptively at U.S. The war began in the early morning hours with a massive bombardment - China’s version of “shock and awe.” Chinese planes and rockets swiftly destroyed most of Taiwan’s navy and air force as the People’s Liberation army and navy mounted a massive amphibious assault across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait.

Awaken i am band seas