A critical debate on the Ukraine-Taiwan weapons trade-off
Tom Rogan
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The Hudson Institute think tank hosted a much-needed debate on Monday. The motion: “Winning in Ukraine is critically important for deterring a war in Taiwan.” Hudson’s President John Walters proposed the motion, with the Marathon Initiative’s Elbridge Colby opposing.
The debate focused on whether the provision of U.S. arms support to Ukraine was excessively degrading the U.S. capacity to supplement Taiwan’s defenses against a prospective Chinese attack. The U.S. government has stated that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to attack Taiwan by 2027. A successful Chinese conquest of Taiwan would provide Beijing with access to high-tech supply chains, subvert the democratic sovereignty of nations (including South Korea, Japan, and Australia), and recenter the global balance of power in China’s autocratic favor. It would be a catastrophe for American security, prosperity, and values.
THE US SHOULD HELP UKRAINE DISSECT CRIMEA FROM RUSSIA, NOT SEIZE IT
Hence why this debate was so important. Indeed, it’s a tribute to the Hudson Institute that this debate even took place. Think tank deliberations too often have an impulse toward unity and groupthink. That discourages creative thinking and undermines the delivery of innovative ideas. To their credit, Walters and Colby were respectful of one another, focusing on each other’s arguments first and foremost.
Walters argued that supporting Ukraine was a priority U.S. national security interest, critical for the defense of democratic values and consolidating America’s security architecture. He called for the continued provision of arms and financial aid to this effect.
On financial aid and in relation to armored forces, artillery shells, ammunition, infantry combat gear, and intelligence-sharing (U.S. signals aircraft could be redeployed to the Pacific in the event of a Taiwan war), I broadly agree with Walters. While concerns over corruption in Ukraine are necessary, Walters is also right that the United States wastes a lot more money in a lot more areas with a lot less national value than its allotments to Ukraine. I do, however, believe the U.S. government should be far more public in its pressure on Western European powers such as France, Germany, Spain, and Italy to do much more for Ukraine.
Walters is also correct that Ukraine’s degrading of Russian military forces is in the interests of the U.S. and NATO, although I would argue that this has little bearing on China’s ability to leverage Russia’s threat against Taiwan. The most capable Russian naval forces remain intact, after all. However, it is in the U.S. national interest that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperial gambit fails. The U.S. should enable Ukraine to bleed out Russian forces and recapture its territory. The question is whether this support should be maximal in all areas. Like Colby, I believe exigent U.S. concerns over Taiwan mean it should not be.
Walters suggested that maximal support is possible in both areas, referencing Reagan’s famous “we win, they lose” statement as a confident call to arms. It sounds good. The problem is that this rhetoric is cheap without attenuated capability.
The U.S. must prioritize Taiwan when it comes to relevant weapons systems. Colby hit the nail on the head when he observed that the scale of China’s challenge is utterly unprecedented. He rightly noted that China’s economy is a peer with that of the U.S., providing it with vast military potential. “We have never dealt with that in our history,” Colby said. He noted that “they have 13 naval shipyards, we have four. One of theirs is bigger than all of ours combined.” He argued that the U.S. must “pick your priorities and ruthlessly ensure you meet them.”
His argument reflects the belief by most China military experts in the government and the U.S. military that the People’s Liberation Army and China’s attenuated power mean that any U.S.-China conflict will provide a vast military challenge — one that most Americans simply cannot conceive of. Put simply, a war over Taiwan is, in the best case, a war the U.S. may still lose.
Walters asserted that “empirically, America’s substantial support for winning the war in Ukraine has not and will not deplete America’s military assets required to fight in Taiwan because the nature of the two wars, I repeat, are fundamentally different. The Ukraine war is predominantly a ground war, while the Taiwan war is primarily a naval, space, cyber, and air war.”
Colby disagrees, and so do I.
For one, it’s not just about Ukraine per se. The U.S. has sent keystone capabilities such as F-22 fighter squadrons and naval destroyers to Europe in order to deter Russia. These deployments drain resources from the Indo-Pacific and complicate already highly problematic maintenance demands. And while it is true that the Ukraine war is primarily a ground war, the provision of Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-air missiles to Ukraine comes as an undeniable detriment to Taiwan’s defensive potential. Both Javelin and Stinger stocks have been greatly depleted by transfers to Ukraine. But both weapons would be of very significant value to Taiwanese forces contesting PLA air-to-ground support and PLA beachheads. And if the PLA can establish beachhead strongholds, Taiwan will likely cease to exist. Both those weapons, then, might decide the outcome of the next war.
I also disagree with Walters’s claim that “to the extent Ukraine and Taiwan come into competition over military goods, the U.S. should, as it is doing, shore up its defense industrial base rather than hoarding resources in a strategic crisis with long-term significance.”
I’m sorry, that’s a dodge. The U.S. military industrial base is presently a disaster. It is paralyzed by bureaucracy, unpatriotic cronyism, excessively powerful unions, and utterly inadequate scale. The U.S. is not shoring up its industrial base. It is tinkering with mild reforms. The industrial base will not be able to match China at scale for the foreseeable future. Would a crash defense industry construction program be beneficial? Absolutely. Is it politically feasible? No. We must live in the real world: limited military means, near infinite military wants.
Colby is also clearly correct in stating that Xi’s judgment on whether to attack Taiwan will rest not on the outcome of the war in Ukraine, but whether he believes China will win or lose. This is a question of destiny for Xi and nationalist populism for most people in China. Nor is Walters on firm ground when he argues that Taiwan-related “unity in the Indo-Pacific is greater” as a consequence of Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron’s overt submission to Xi, made even more stark by his simultaneous failure to extract Xi’s pressure on Putin over Ukraine, testifies to the opposite. Even America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom, is hardly reliable on China. Only on Tuesday did U.K. Foreign Minister James Cleverly call for cooperation with China in a keynote speech.
Top line: The U.S. may have to fight alone or alongside only Japan for Taiwan. And it would be a very hard fight — one made harder by Taiwan’s unwillingness, unlike Ukraine, to take its own defense seriously. To emphasize the point, America may well lose. I would offer three basic examples.
First, China’s varied anti-ship ballistic missile forces have the capacity to hold U.S. aircraft carriers far away from the fight, further mitigating the already inadequate combat potential of their carrier air wings. This matters because, contrary to the arguments of the Heritage Foundation and defense lobbyists, the F-35 is poorly suited to a China conflict. The jet’s stealth profile is unlikely to withstand saturated PLA radar and electronic warfare forces in the Taiwan Strait, and unlike the F-15EX, its weapons payload and range are pathetically inadequate. Second, China’s air defense destroyers and space-based capabilities are increasingly numerous and exceptional — rivaling those of the U.S. in some areas. Third, China’s force disposition is vastly greater than that of the U.S. and only growing. Oh, and the PLA has rearm-repair-refuel geography on its side.
This debate underlines the temptation in Washington, D.C., both in think tanks and high-level policy circles, to believe that deterring or defeating China will be difficult, dangerous, and probably deadly, but not extraordinarily so. I believe such assessments are a profound mistake. In turn, the U.S. must make harder choices about what resources it can expend in Ukraine, and America must demand the European Union to do more for Ukraine, including by providing the country with weapons stocks from European field armies. That does not mean abandoning Ukraine. But it does mean more difficult choices, especially when it comes to man-portable anti-air and anti-armor weapons systems.