In America, growing fears of war with China

To hear one of America’s most experienced four-star generals tell it, the United States will be at war with China within two years. That sombre prediction, in a leaked memo to the 110,000 troops under the command of Air Force General Minihan, highlights widespread assumptions in the US military that the country will counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Minihan’s memo made its way on the internet before being published by the Air&Space Forces magazine in January said: “I hope I’m wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025…Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer (Chinese President) Xi Jinping a reason (to invade). United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”

The Pentagon distanced itself from the memo, saying it did not reflect the Defense Department’s views. China reacted angrily, warning of “reckless and provocative” statements. Minihan shrugged off criticism of his memo, which made international headlines early in the year, telling a reporter late in July it had been an internal communication meant to prepare his Air Mobility Command for difficult conditions.

Predictions of the timing of conflict with China vary. But war has become “a broad narrative in the national security community,” according to an analysis by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank well-connected with the military.

In January, CSIS published a report titled "The First Battle of the Next War" on what would happen if China attempted an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. It played out a wide range of scenarios - most of which combined forces of the United States, Taiwan and Japan to defeat the invaders.

But the battle, the war gamers found, came at a high cost. “The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft and tens of thousands of service members. Taiwan saw its economy devastated. Further, the high losses damaged the US global position for many years. China also lost heavily and failure to occupy Taiwan might destabilize Chinese Communist Party rule.”

Senior military officials commenting on the outcome of the exercise and its assumptions included the former and present commanders of America’s Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Philip S. Davison, who ran it until April 2021, and his successor, Admiral John C Aquilino. Davison said the threat of a Chinese invasion may "manifest…in the next six years.” For Aquilino, “This problem is much closer to us than many of us think.”

One of the reasons for the belated realisation that war may be closer than many expected is that the military was late in switching its focus on China and Russia – i.e. large-scale conflicts – after decades of fighting insurgencies, partly from 30,000 feet with precision weapons controlled by drone operators in the US, thousands of miles from their targets.

The emphasis on smart weapons for push-button war contributed to the decline of the military-industrial complex which began after the end of the Cold War. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine served as a sharp reminder of how much the US defence has shrunk over the years. There is not a single American factory which can produce 155mm artillery shells as fast as the Ukrainians are using them up.

According to the National Defense Industrial Association, 17,045 companies have left the “defence ecosystem” and today’s defence workforce is roughly a third of what it was in the final stages of the Cold War.

All this does not mean that the United States is no longer the world’s pre-eminent military power it became after the end of World War II but it does mean that its antagonists are catching up – China at a faster pace than any other.

The most widely gauged measure of relative military strength around the globe is defence spending, monitored annually by the authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Its latest report shows that the US accounted for 39.5 per cent of all spending. That is as much as the combined spending of the next ten countries in the rankings.

They are China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan and Ukraine. Though China does not come close to the US overall in military power, it exceeded the US Navy in sheer size several years ago and now operates the world’s largest fleet of warships.

Whether military spending necessarily translates into dominance is a matter of dispute. A thoughtful analysis a few years ago on War on the Rocks, a website of expert debate on national security, argued that “defence spending does not directly correlate with military effectiveness. Tactical proficiency is significantly more important than, and not directly related to defence spending.”

Over the past few years, dozens of war games similar to exercise by CSIS have been conducted, the latest in April by the House Select Committee on competition with China. The outcomes varied but they all had a common end, with the US running out of long-range air-to-surface missiles within days and dozens of its aircraft wrecked on the ground.

This is why the CSIS report concluded that “victory is not enough. The United States needs to strengthen its deterrence immediately.”

In the flurry of debates over how to prevent war between the United States and an increasingly assertive China, one remark stands out and is worth remembering. It came from Henry Kissinger, whose deep knowledge of China dates back to his role in the 1972 rapprochement between China and the US prompted by President Richard Nixon’s breakthrough visit to Beijing.

In a lengthy interview with The Economist in May, just before his 100th birthday, Kissinger suggested that the future of humanity depended on averting war between China and the US. What was needed, he said, was lowering the temperature, building confidence and eventually having a meeting between the two countries' leaders in which the American president would tell his counterpart: “Mr President, the two greatest dangers to peace right now are us two. In the sense that we have the capacity to destroy humanity.”

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

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