"There is nothing more expensive than fighting a war," the general said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing in spring. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agree America needs to bolster its readiness. While the US has plenty of advantages, years of underinvestment and complacency have left America lacking in several key areas that it would need to strengthen to successfully counter threats from China. Any war with China would be fought on multiple fronts - from the air and sea to the web and financial markets. A war would likely devastate the militaries involved and plunge the global economy into peril - a bleak scenario with far-reaching consequences. But as major rivals, the US and China could also find themselves at war for other reasons, such as China's militarization of the South China Sea, where US and Chinese military ships and planes often find themselves in close proximity.Īmerican intelligence officials have asserted that China is the "most consequential threat to US national security," and experts told us that a conflict with Beijing would trigger an "onslaught" of military threats for which the US was unprepared. President Joe Biden has said that the US would come to Taiwan's defense if China attacked, a break from previous administrations' policy of strategic ambiguity. Were the US to end up in a war with China, the likely cause would be a Chinese military assault on the self-run democratic island of Taiwan, which Beijing has long claimed as Chinese territory and is seen as a challenge to its authoritarian rule. War in the Western Pacific is likely not an immediate danger, according to experts, but it is a possibility. Now politicians, experts, and even America's military leaders have started to raise the question: Just how prepared is the US if the threats from Beijing become something more serious? While the world should hope a full-scale conflict between US and China can be avoided, relations between the two superpowers continue to deteriorate. The mobilization required to fight in a global conflict is monumental, and until the fighting starts, it can be impossible to anticipate the scope of resources that are required. In a showdown between the world's two largest powers, neither side is ever going to come to the table fully prepared for war. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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