By Daniel Levi
As military escalation between Russia and Ukraine intensifies, Russia is at the highest combat readiness in its since the fall of the USSR on December 26, 1991. According to the Ukrainian Intelligence, Russia has amassed more than 100,000 troops at Ukraine’s borders. Russia has also asked the United States that Ukraine should never be allowed to join NATO. But the question that military experts have been asking is “what role China might play in the ongoing conflict?”
In a telephone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke about the military escalation between Russia and Ukraine and used the call to tell Blinken to “stay calm” and also warned the United States to stop creating “anti-China cliques.”
Apart from the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, China has not given up its ambition to reunite Taiwan with mainland China. Taiwan currently accounts for 63% of the global semiconductor market share. As such, a war with Taiwan will have a catastrophic effect on the entire tech industry including tech startup companies. Foxconn, the largest supplier of semiconductors is a Taiwanese company that supplies chips to Apple, Dell, Microsoft, etc.
Christopher Miller, an assistant professor of international history at Tufts University, and co-director of the school’s Russia and Eurasia Program, gave some insights on the role China is going to play in the event of a war between Russia and the United States. Miller wrote:
“Because China is deeply intertwined with Russia in terms of trade and, to a lesser extent, finance, it would be unable to sit on the sidelines. Beijing would either have to reject US sanctions and export controls, help enforce them, or do some mix of both.”
However, the question on everyone’s mind is what would happen in case of a full-blown war between China and the United States. To answer this question, we go back to a statement made by the US military in the summer of 2020. The Pentagon said that China is well on its way to becoming a world-class military’ to match the U.S. military by 2049. Two months later, China’s Air Force released a video showing a nuclear-capable H-6 bomber with a simulated attack on a U.S. base in Guam.
Then in the fall of 2020, a previously classified war game conducted by the U.S Air Force made public showed that the U.S. will lose a military to conflict with China. Many details of the war game remain classified and had not been made public until recently. According to the report, the U.S. Air Force simulated a conflict set more than a decade in the future began with a Chinese biological-weapon attack that swept through U.S. bases and warships in the Indo-Pacific region.
Last fall, the U.S. Air Force played out a war scenario with China, in which China begins its attack by deploying a biological weapon throughout the Indo-Pacific region. The outcome turned out to be disastrous for the US, a new report revealed.
In an exclusive interview with Yahoo News, Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements, said:
“More than a decade ago, our war games indicated that the Chinese were doing a good job of investing in military capabilities that would make our preferred model of expeditionary warfare, where we push forces forward and operate out of relatively safe bases and sanctuaries, increasingly difficult.”
Hinote continued:
“At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster. After the 2018 war game I distinctly remember one of our gurus of war gaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again, because we know what is going to happen. The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast. In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.”
China is not the only country defeating the U.S. in a war game. David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development, pointed out that Taiwan routinely defeats the U.S. Blue Team.
“Whenever we war-gamed a Taiwan scenario over the years, our Blue Team routinely got its ass handed to it, because in that scenario time is a precious commodity and it plays to China’s strength in terms of proximity and capabilities,” said David Ochmanek, a senior RAND Corporation analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development. “That kind of lopsided defeat is a visceral experience for U.S. officers on the Blue Team, and as such the war games have been a great consciousness-raising device. But the U.S. military is still not keeping pace with Chinese advances. For that reason, I don’t think we’re much better off than a decade ago when we started taking this challenge more seriously.”
You can watch the video below.
Below is another video of why the US Military worries about Chinese airpower.
