President Xi Jinping of China has ordered his armed forces to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027. Though the United States maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity on how it would respond to an invasion, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have said that America would defend the island nation. The Pentagon has produced a classified, multiyear assessment that shows how such a conflict would play out: the Overmatch brief.
The report is a comprehensive review of U.S. military power prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and delivered most recently to top White House officials in the last year. It catalogs China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the U.S. military’s supply chain choke points. Its details have not been previously reported.
The picture it paints is consistent and disturbing. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, said last November that in the Pentagon’s war games against China, “we lose every time.” When a senior Biden national security official received the Overmatch brief in 2021, he turned pale as he realized that “every trick we had up our sleeve, the Chinese had redundancy after redundancy,” according to one official who was present.
The assessment shows something more worrying than the potential outcome of a war over Taiwan. It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones. And it traces a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power.
War games can be wrong; analysts sometimes overstate adversaries’ abilities. Yet this larger point should not be ignored. Nearly four decades after victory in the Cold War, the U.S. military is ill prepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies.
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You know you are in trouble when even the NY Times is sounding the alarm over national defense.
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