Ukraine, surely aided by US intelligence, has shown an uncanny ability to put High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, and the rockets they fire to devastatingly good use. It may take years for Washington and other countries to replenish their armories. The US reportedly provided one-third of its overall stockpile of Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine in the first, most desperate weeks of the fighting. The Ukraine war isn’t a fight between two great powers, but it is a case study in how hard it can be simply to keep fighting in high-intensity conflict: A free-world coalition led by a global superpower has struggled to meet the Kyiv government’s needs without dangerously depleting its own stockpiles. It consumes epic quantities of missiles, artillery shells and other munitions it can wreck hard-to-replace planes, tanks and warships in large numbers. Modern war is prodigiously costly: It destroys some of the most exquisite, expensive creations modern societies can produce. Yet that war also demonstrates that the US might struggle enormously to compensate for losses it suffered early in a conflict with China, and to provide itself - to say nothing of its allies - with the tools of victory. No one really knows what would happen, of course: The war in Ukraine demonstrates that motivation, leadership and other intangibles can make a huge difference. Wargames played under less favorable conditions typically result in a Chinese victory. Wargames played under fairly favorable conditions indicate that the US might be able to squeak out a victory in a war over Taiwan, albeit at a potentially prohibitive price in manpower and materiel. Source: Bloomberg, Chinese Ministry of Finance, National Bureau of Statistics But the willingness of many legislators, such as Pelosi, to antagonize Beijing for no good strategic purpose shows they do not realize just how alarming the situation has become.Ĭhina’s military expenditure has historically outpaced economic growth The Pentagon has been warning for years that China’s military buildup is changing the correlation of forces in East Asia.
Whether the US is ready for the train wreck that so many of its own officials see coming is a different matter. The impression one gets from conversations around Washington is that many officials believe that a major Chinese use of force against Taiwan - whether an outright invasion or simply a coercive blockade - could come in the next three to five years, once President Xi Jinping is more confident that his fast-modernizing People’s Liberation Army can prevail. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has characterized that threat as “acute.” In public, the Pentagon now says only that it does not expect an invasion in the next two years. This isn’t some well-kept secret: National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently told Bloomberg News that there is a “distinct threat” of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The crisis that erupted in August, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan and Beijing responded with its largest show of force in the Western Pacific in a quarter-century, made many US officials fear that the countdown to conflict had started. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February drove home the threat of autocratic aggression across the democratic world.
#Chinese victory day free#
Historians may one day look back on 2022 as the moment when the free world truly realized that “great-power competition” entails an inherent risk of great-power conflict. If America wants to win a potential great-power war with China a few years from now, it had better start rearming far more seriously before the shooting starts. Today, the US needs to take a vital lesson from the war in Ukraine - as well as from its own experience, generations ago, in World War II. “Wise men learn from other people’s experience.” It is always better to glean hard lessons from someone else’s war than from one’s own. “Fools learn by experience,” the very quotable German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once remarked.
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