III. War with China: Could America Survive the Trauma?

The 3rd and final installment of our series on going to war against China. Part I (below on our front page) compared the assets the U.S. and China could bring to the fight. Part II (also there) explored how China would invade Taiwan and the likely results. In this segment we look at what happens to the U.S.

Naval and ground exercises, especially with allied forces, are essential for working out communication and coordinated movement, but they don't serve to predict what will happen when up against an actual enemy. For that, military strategists and planners turn to war games in which blue team U.S. and allied nations square off against red team foes.

Two years ago, the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies conducted a weekslong series of 24 war games against
China's sailors "manning the rail" as ship enters port.

China. Each began with a different opening scenario and ran for seven hours to represent the first three weeks of war in which China attempts an amphibious landing on Taiwan.

The scenarios led to different results but the difference in all cases was the degree of devastation which all sides suffered. “If war breaks out, everyone who participates is a loser—China, Taiwan, the U.S., Japan—because they will see massive attrition on both sides,” said retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, and a participant in the war games.

Except in a scenario where Taiwan is left to fend for itself, China is defeated in most games. They attack American bases in Japan and on Guam while landing troops on Taiwan to seize the island’s southern third (the capital Taipei is at the northern tip), but the U.S. breaks through to bomb Chinese ports, sinks much of the picket line of ships shielding the invading forces, and our submarines and fighter-bombers sink much of china's amphibious force trying to ferry troops, supplies, and ammunition across the Taiwan Straits.

But Taiwan is reduced to ruins, essential services such as electricity blacked out, its economy shattered, the world's most advanced semiconductor chip plants inoperative.

United States forces run out of long-range anti-ship cruise missiles within a week. Our stocks of ordnance were insufficient for conducting a war against a major power then, and compounding that since the war games were held is the huge depletion of our inventories brought about by supplying Ukraine and Israel. The United States is unable to outproduce China in advanced weapons and munitions needed in a war.

Whatever our successes, they come at a horrendous cost. The games, at the extremes of their various scenarios, foresee losses of 200 to 484 aircraft, and between 8 to 17 ships, including two aircraft carriers in most rounds — victims of China's anti-ship missiles reported in our earlier articles. Thousands of sailors and airmen would lose their lives. The Center’s report says that, in the three weeks of the games, the U.S. would suffer “about half the number of casualties as in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan." Since then, a year and a half ago, Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly said that China’s forces are “designed to inflict more casualties in the first 30 hours of combat than we’ve endured over the last 30 years in the Middle East.”

Americans are mentally unprepared for a war against China. How will they react when they wake up to the news that China has sunk a couple of our ships with heavy loss of life, or that China has downed a number of our pilots and most advanced jet-fighters as they attempted to cripple ports along the China coast?

And then comes the report that a shower of China's anti-ship missiles have found one of our Nimitz-class carriers and sent it to the bottom of the East China Sea with its 90-or-so planes. And then possibly a second carrier in short order, as most war games foresaw, sunk or crippled by a "carrier-killer" missile descending from space at hypersonic speed.

How will Americans react when only then do they learn that these carriers have crews of 5,000 souls, and that almost all have lost their lives? It's a safe bet that Americans will immediately react with furor to the nation's leadership for the idiocy of sacrificing thousands of lives to protect some island named Taiwan. They won't blame themselves as well for their failure to realize that America is no longer invincible.

Unlike our international wars of the past, our oceans will not protect us from a war with China. It is believed that China has burrowed inside the electronic networks that control critical infrastructure in the U.S. If we engage with them over Taiwan, we can expect from them cyberattacks that might disrupt our electrical grid, oil and gas pipelines, water, rail systems, to name a few vulnerabilities. We can only hope the U.S. is capable of doing the same within China, and that they know it, and may be deterred.

China long ago showed that, like the U.S. and Russia, it can destroy satellites. China says it has even developed a satellite with a grappling arm that can yank our satellites out of orbit. They are reportedly building their own global positioning system to equip them to disable the U.S. GPS system 12,000 miles above Earth that we and the rest of the world rely on. Airlines and air transport would be grounded, unable to navigate. The Internet would go dark. Smartphones would go dumb. Credit cards and bank ATMs would fail, leaving us with paper money we no longer keep. And in the battle, communication and precision-guided weaponry that relies on GPS would be rendered impotent.

The RAND Corporation estimated that America’s gross domestic product (GDP) would plunge 5% to 10% in a yearlong conflict. In comparison, in 2009, the worst year of the Great Recession, the decline was only 2.6%. Millions would lose their jobs, largely because the U.S. relies so heavily on Chinese imports for materiel that we no longer produce or never did — goods that are critical components of what we do manufacture. We would lack for electronics, essential chips from flattened Taiwan, chemicals, metals and rare earth minerals needed for batteries, the medicines we import from China that keep us alive. Bloomberg Economics estimates a $10 trillion hit to the world economy.

The war would leave the U.S. military severely weakened, with years needed to rebuild. Battered and reduced, we will be seen as a questionable global power. Our sophisticated and far too expensive ships, aircraft, and weapons will take years to replace. Personnel losses would discourage enlistments. We would probably need to reinstitute the draft. Our other adversaries — Russia, North Korea, Iran — will see opportunity and are likely to pounce.

America became a super-power after its triumphs in World War II, and that belief survives in the assumption that no adversary would be able to surpass us in military power. None of the leadership, left or right, has undertaken to educate the American public that soon we will no longer be the world's most powerful hegemon, and their failure to do so begins with leadership having no recognition of it themselves. On Capitol Hill "vehement opposition to China may be the sole thing Democrats and Republicans can agree on”, writes former State Department senior adviser Jessica Chen Weiss in Foreign Affairs, where, with few exceptions, the membership has no clue that America could lose a war against the Middle Kingdom with catastrophic disruption at home.

We fell hard for the "peaceful rise" assurances — China's claim that it had no aggressive intentions — heedlessly importing staggering quantities of Chinese goods for over two decades (forgetting how to make them in the process), while China covertly used the proceeds to build the military that is now poised to drive us from the Pacific. With even greater mindlessness, we have spent ourselves into the oblivion of $39 trillion of debt with no thought to cut spending and raise taxes.

Our sights need to be adjusted downward by a strong measure of reality. And yet we go on thinking we are the police force for the world ith our secretary of state just now completing a swing through six Indo-Pacific nations to deliver assurances of support with new military agreements with Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and South Korea. And that's in addition to NATO, Israel, and even Saudi Arabia which Biden wants to shield from Iran. All this from an America that has neither the economic nor military strength to engage in a war with China.

We should prepare for a coming world in which there is a rival stronger than the United States. The United States is not ready to accept not being number one. A devastating loss of war is not the way to learn that lesson.