Winning

Th editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the same wargames that I commented on earlier:

War games are a product of choices and assumptions, but there were four preconditions to defeating an invasion, none of them guaranteed. First the Taiwanese have to fight. The island is ramping up its spending on defense but its conscription and readiness are underwhelming. Condition two: Arms need to be pre-positioned; the U.S. can’t pour in weapons over friendly borders after the fight starts a la Ukraine. American weapons deliveries to Taiwan now lag years behind orders.

Three: The U.S. must be able to rely on its bases in Japan. American fighter jets lack the range to commute to the war without Japan’s outer islands, one more reason Tokyo is America’s most important Pacific ally. The fourth condition? The U.S. “must be able to strike the Chinese fleet rapidly and en masse” with long-range weapons.

The cost in blood of U.S. sailors and airmen would be enormous. “In three weeks,” the report notes, the U.S. would suffer “about half as many casualties as it did in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Commanders would have to “move forward despite a high level of casualties not seen in living memory.”

The American public has no experience since World War II of enduring dozens of lost ships, including two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers (crew: 5,000) badly damaged or lost in most scenarios. The casualties and equipment losses compound the longer the U.S. waits to intervene, a warning about the costs of political indecision in a crisis. It’s also worth asking if a U.S. President in his 80s would have the stamina and concentration to manage the flood of difficult decisions coming at him.

I’m not comfortable with commenting on the pros and cons of particular tactics or weapons systems. I wish the editors had devoted more attention to cost-benefit analysis.

IMO we need to start looking at matters in a much more steely-eyed manner. Defending the U. S. homeland and possessions is not subject to cost-benefit analysis but defending other countries is. Furthermore, to a certain extent our strategy is working at cross-purposes. The stronger and more interventionist we are, the less our notional allies are willing to stand up and defend themselves. To my eye the lesson of the wargames was that we can’t do it alone.