> 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.
Kind-Armadillo-2340 on
Interesting, but you always have to be careful when interpreting publicly released war game scenarios. People need to remember the military is not in the business of educating the public. So that is never the intention of releasing these reports. On top of that most war game reports are classified.
So the reason for releasing this report publicly is either to create political will to allocate more money to improve the military. Unlikely since the U.S. military never seems to have problems getting more $ from Congress. Or to lull China into a false sense of security. At least that’s what I can come up with. Any other thoughts?
Pretty_Marsh on
Well, good thing we just cancelled a major shipbuilding program in order to [checks notes] build more ships.
bigwang123 on
im crashing out Gen. Berger divested the USMC’s Abrams not because the systems are shit like the editorial board is claiming, but because it doesn’t make sense for FD2030 holy fuck more slop from the slop factory yum yum yum
ask the Ukrainians if they want more MBTs Jesus Christ
You cannot make useful criticisms of the military if you do not engage with the lessons of current kinetic conflicts and lack an understanding of doctrine
Previous_Pay_2353 on
Setting tactics and equipment aside, I genuinely don’t think the American public is prepared to sacrifice American lives to defend Taiwan.
I’m not even convinced the public would to it to defend the Baltic states from Russia, but it’s maybe more likely (and on some level public opinion matters less since we have Article V commitments.)
5 Comments
> 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.
Interesting, but you always have to be careful when interpreting publicly released war game scenarios. People need to remember the military is not in the business of educating the public. So that is never the intention of releasing these reports. On top of that most war game reports are classified.
So the reason for releasing this report publicly is either to create political will to allocate more money to improve the military. Unlikely since the U.S. military never seems to have problems getting more $ from Congress. Or to lull China into a false sense of security. At least that’s what I can come up with. Any other thoughts?
Well, good thing we just cancelled a major shipbuilding program in order to [checks notes] build more ships.
im crashing out Gen. Berger divested the USMC’s Abrams not because the systems are shit like the editorial board is claiming, but because it doesn’t make sense for FD2030 holy fuck more slop from the slop factory yum yum yum
ask the Ukrainians if they want more MBTs Jesus Christ
You cannot make useful criticisms of the military if you do not engage with the lessons of current kinetic conflicts and lack an understanding of doctrine
Setting tactics and equipment aside, I genuinely don’t think the American public is prepared to sacrifice American lives to defend Taiwan.
I’m not even convinced the public would to it to defend the Baltic states from Russia, but it’s maybe more likely (and on some level public opinion matters less since we have Article V commitments.)