China's President Xi Jinping (centre), with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un and Russia's President Vladimir Putin following a military parade in Beijing in September. Photo / Getty Images
China would defeat the US military in a war over Taiwan, according to a top-secret US Government assessment.
US reliance on costly, sophisticated weapons leaves it exposed to China’s ability to mass-produce cheaper systems in overwhelming numbers, the highly classified “Overmatch Brief” warns.
A national security official under President Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, the New York Times reported.
Losing Taiwan, the US’ key bulwark against Chinese power in the western Pacific, would deliver a severe strategic and symbolic blow to Washington.
The country’s most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford – recently sent to the Caribbean for US President Donald Trump’s drug crackdown – is often destroyed in the wargames outlined in the brief.
The US$13 billion ($22b) vessel, which entered service in 2022 after years of delays, is vulnerable to attacks from diesel-electric submarines and China’s arsenal of some 600 hypersonic missiles, capable of travelling at five times the speed of sound.
Beijing displayed its ship-destroying YJ-17 missiles, estimated to travel at eight times the speed of sound, at a military parade in September.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon is planning to build nine additional Ford-class aircraft carriers, while it has yet to deploy a single hypersonic missile.
Eric Gomez, a research fellow at the Taiwan Security Monitor, said the end result was unclear when he participated in a wargame for a Taiwan conflict, but noted the US suffered heavy losses.
“The US loses a lot of ships in the process. A lot of F-35s and other tactical aircraft in the theatre are degraded pretty rapidly too,” he told the Telegraph.
“I think the high cost of it was really sobering when we did the after-action summaries, and we’re like, ‘Okay, like, you guys lost 100-plus fifth-generation aircraft, multiple destroyers, a couple of submarines, a couple of carriers’.
“It’s like, ‘oh gosh, man, that was a heavy toll’.”
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
China has significantly expanded its arsenal of short, medium, and intermediate-range missiles, which means it could destroy many of the US’ advanced weapons well before they could reach Taiwan.
Meanwhile, the “big five” defence companies, a number which has dwindled from 10 times that amount in the 1990s, continue to sell the US government costlier versions of the same ships, aircraft and missiles, according to the New York Times.
Defence officials have realised the US is vulnerable because these complex weapons are impossible to mass produce, following a series of recent wars, including the Ukraine-Russia conflict, which have shown the devastating capabilities of relatively cheap weapons like drones.
Congress has earmarked around US$1b to produce 340,000 small drones over the course of the next two years.
Trump has appointed Dan Driscoll, the US head of the armed forces, as his “drone guy”, charged with modernising America’s outdated tech and countering enemies’ drone efforts.
However, the US is nevertheless playing catch-up with its adversaries, and experts have previously told the Telegraph that it cannot compete on expense with countries like China, where labour costs are lower and regulations looser.
A decisive change in US policy would likely need substantial investment, yet defence spending is at its lowest level in around 80 years, at roughly 3.4% GDP.
Jake Sullivan, the former national security adviser, has warned the US would quickly run out of essential munitions like artillery shells in a war with China.
Internal Pentagon assessments show China vastly outnumbers the US in its arsenal of almost all cruise and ballistic missiles. Both superpowers maintain a stockpile of 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
The US reportedly used up roughly a quarter of its high-altitude missile interceptors to defend Israel against Iran’s 12-day ballistic missile barrage in June this year.
Moreover, China’s state-sponsored hacking group Volt Typhoon has installed malware on critical computer networks for power grids, communications systems and water supplies for American military bases.
The security threat, which US officials have struggled to locate, could hamstring the military’s ability to move weapons and forces if war breaks out in the Pacific.
Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, claims taking over Taiwan is an “historical inevitability” and has ordered his military to be ready to seize the island by 2027.
Nevertheless, he is thought unlikely to move unless China achieves such an overwhelming military advantage that it could effectively be certain to take the island.
Failing to do so would be a humiliating blow that would likely end his 13-year-premiership.
The US has no formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan and, since the 1970s, has pursued a policy of “strategic ambiguity”, avoiding saying explicitly whether it would militarily defend the island chain.
However, since the days of Dwight D Eisenhower, it has viewed the island as an important check on Chinese expansionism and is obliged by law to provide weapons for Taiwan to defend itself.
Trump has stuck to the “strategic ambiguity” policy, although he has complained about the cost of protecting Taiwan.
“I think Taiwan should pay us for defence. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything,” he told Bloomberg last year.
He went on to note that Taiwan was a short distance from China’s coast compared to thousands of kilometres from the US, which gave Beijing “a slight advantage”.
“That’s the apple of President Xi’s eye,” he added.
In the Trump Administration’s national security strategy, published last week, it said the island was important to the US economy because a third of global shipping passes through the South China Sea.
The US priority is to preserve “military overmatch”, it stated, meaning that America’s military capabilities must outstrip China’s so far as to deter Xi against making a move, something which, according to this memo, it has failed to do for some time.
China and the US have launched a frantic arms race to prevent either from achieving a decisive advantage that could embolden Beijing or deny its imperialist ambitions.
In January, the Telegraph reported China had constructed D-Day-style barges that could be used to bypass Taiwan’s beaches and provide multiple fronts for tanks in an amphibious invasion.
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