War Planning Requires Paranoia
We should take Air Force General Mike Minihan's claim that the U.S. and China will fight a war over Taiwan in 2025 with a grain of salt.
Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. It was one of the more memorable articles of faith my dad hammered into my brother and me in our youth. He never served in the military. But his simple mastery of the adage—we often wondered if he just liked to show off how quickly he could recite the “7 Ps”—would’ve put him on a fast track to becoming a commissioned officer had he decided to go that route.
Planning is everything to the U.S. military, which, like it or not, has taken on the role of the world’s policeman. The Pentagon has contingency plans on the shelf to respond to—or in some cases, preempt—basically any scenario you could ever think of. That’s just how the organization operates. Better to put the effort in on the front end to develop a military response to ~name your extremely unlikely scenario~ than be caught flatfooted without one in the off chance that extremely unlikely scenario actually occurs and the President wants options.
Having ready-made contingency plans for flashpoints that carry a foreseeable risk for conflict is even more important. Taiwan, perhaps more than any other flashpoint on the horizon, certainly falls into this bucket. But while Chinese saber-rattling toward Taiwan has reached a fever pitch, it’s hardly a guarantee that Beijing will decide to use force to bring its “renegade province” back into the fold anytime soon.
That’s why U.S. Navy Admiral Phil Davidson’s famous testimony to Congress 2 years ago that China was poised to invade Taiwan by 2027 created a such a stir among the beltway think-tankers, many of whom promptly penned dueling essays in Foreign Affairs on how best to deter China from taking that step. Davidson was the 4-star Commander of all U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific for God’s sakes. He had to know something they didn’t.
It turned out that Davidson was basing his thinking around information that Chinese President Xi Jinping had ordered his military to develop the capability to capture Taiwan by force by 2027, the year that will also mark the 100th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) founding. But capability is different than intent, as General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, clarified months later. And the U.S. doesn’t possess any intelligence indicating that Xi has already made the decision to invade Taiwan, as he and other U.S. officials have repeatedly claimed since. Xi, it seems, merely wants to have the option in place, should he decide to cross that threshold.
This somewhat vanilla revelation soothed think-tankers’ concerns. A military man who was one-dimensionally focused on an adversary’s growing capabilities? Go figure. Many began to glibly refer to the fiasco as the “Davidson Window.” To them, his statement was an example of reductive and hyperbolic thinking that doesn’t consider the many risks and costs (military and nonmilitary) associated with an invasion that serve to discourage Beijing from going that route. Others posited that his comments were aimed at trying to convince Congress to approve his request for supplemental funding intended to help the U.S. military retain its edge in the Indo-Pacific.
To Davidson, of course, it wasn’t such a big deal that he was so forward-leaning in the saddle. Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. If there’s even a remote possibility of a cataclysmic event occurring, the U.S. military is going to take it seriously.
Davidson’s predecessor, Admiral John Aquilino, has so far refrained from providing his own two cents on when he thinks China might invade Taiwan. Asked last month to provide his thoughts on a possible timeline, he replied, “for me, the timeline…almost doesn't matter because we do have to be prepared today. And we're taking all those actions.”
Aquilino cited orders from the Secretary of Defense that U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) do all it can to deter China from initiating a military conflict, while ensuring that its forces are prepared to respond, should it come to that.
“Secretary Austin’s given us a task. Number one – to prevent conflict with the PRC by executing our deterrence options, and if deterrence were to fail, to be able to fight and win our nation’s war,” he said.
The U.S. is banking more on its sheer military power to deter China from invading Taiwan than perhaps any other tool it has at its disposal. As Senator Jack Reed, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, put it, “The credibility of American deterrence rests on a simple foundation. America prevents wars by convincing its adversaries they cannot win.”
In this context, deterrence means maintaining—perhaps even increasing—America’s massive military footprint in the Pacific. It means fielding the most advanced military capabilities available across all domains – ground, air, sea, cyber, space. It means deploying U.S. forces throughout its dozens of bases in the region. It means scattering large-range precision strike missiles across these bases to complicate Chinese targeting, while also hardening storage facilities that house those systems to improve their survivability. It means prepositioning stockpiles of munitions and fuel across the region to ensure the U.S. can sustain combat operations, should it come to that.
But deterrence also means improving the readiness of the force. It means engaging in realistic training and exercises that simulate and prepare forces for combat scenarios. It means refining tactics, techniques, and procedures that improve the effectiveness of U.S. operations. It means ensuring the various service elements are able to work hand and hand under pressure. It means preparing the force mentally for war—and signaling to your adversary that the force is prepared for war—even if such an eventuality is unlikely to occur.
And that’s the prism through which I view the leaked (but not classified) memo penned by U.S. Air Force General Mike Minihan, the head of Air Mobility Command (AMC), that made headlines a little over a week ago.
The media has leapt on some of the more jarring parts of the memo, namely his “gut” prediction that the U.S. and China will be at war with one another over Taiwan in 2025 – a claim the Pentagon promptly distanced themselves from. And to be fair, it’s a bit unsettling to see such a bold statement on a document bearing the Air Force seal, not least because Minihan appears to assume that the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s defense if China mounted an invasion, which is not a guarantee. But like the “Davidson Window,” I’d urge people to take Minihan’s claim with a grain of salt.
That’s because the obvious spirit and purpose of his memo—which wasn’t intended for public consumption—is to inject a sense of urgency in his wing commanders to improve the readiness of forces under their command. And by suggesting that a war over Taiwan could occur well before anyone thinks, he’s lighting a fire (no, a blaze) under their butts to hone their units’ operational proficiencies ASAP.
If his dire prediction actually comes to pass, they may be at war before their 3-year rotation is up and they’re back in some has-been military theatre like the Middle East, where the only threat to their lives is some jihadi detonating a dirty bomb near the entrance of their base at the exact moment they’re retrieving an Uber Eats order.
So it’s incumbent they get their ducks in a row—both mentally and operationally—and prepare for a high-intensity conflict with a nuclear-armed near-peer adversary. If they aren’t prepared to FIGHT TONIGHT, they damn well better get there.
“Go faster. Drive readiness, integration, and agility for ourselves and the Joint Force to deter, and if required, defeat China,” the memo states.
AMC, and its 50,000 airmen and over 400 heavy-lift aircraft, would quite literally be the most central cog in the U.S.’ attempt to overcome the Tyranny of Distance in a war with China. They’d be responsible for transporting—and sustaining—a steady flow weapons and troops to the front lines and providing aerial refueling for U.S. fighter jets and bombers engaged in the fight. And they’d be operating in the most contested aerial environment the U.S. Air Force has ever flown in, ESPECIALLY when they breach the First Island Chain – an area Minihan calls the “scary place” because that’s where Chinese fifth-generation fighters and surface-to-air-missile batteries will be waiting for them.
This will require a whole lot of guts, cajones, HUTZPAH. Which is why it can be surreal to think that a war with China could ever occur, and why, I suspect, someone at AMC leaked the memo in the first place. We all process shock differently.
But Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Timelines don’t matter. In the Pentagon’s roundabout logic, if you’re not demonstrating your readiness to fight in peacetime, then you’re eroding deterrence – thereby making the contingency everyone hopes won’t happen more possible.
“Generate your courage, point the pointy end at the scary place, and execute,” Minihan pronounced to a convention center packed full of airmen last year, China’s order of battle projected on a screen behind him.
Apart from Minihan’s bold—perhaps feigned—prediction on the possibility of WW3, the media has made much of the provocative and colorful language peppered elsewhere in the memo. One example they point to is his order that AMC personnel undergoing weapons training “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.”
It’s a statement full of bluster that’s no doubt intended to rile up his airmen. But for the uninitiated, I can understand how language like “unrepentant lethality” can feel a little unsettling. It’s easy to forget that behind the crisp uniform and the self-effacing public persona lies a soldier, sailor, airman or marine whose job is to blow shit up and kill people.
Still, some readers of the memo have come away convinced that Minihan is a modern-day Curtis LeMay, the trigger-happy, circa height-of-the-Cold War U.S. Air Force General for whom the main character in Dr. Strangelove is based.
Having had some interaction with Minihan at his last post at INDOPACOM—where he served as Admiral Davidson’s number two—I can promise you this characterization is dead wrong. Minihan is no power-hungry loon.
In fact, the opposite. He is, perhaps, one of the most approachable and unassuming flag officers you’ll ever encounter. Anyone who’s been around him will corroborate this. The guy wears his heart on his sleeve, and he’s not afraid to admit it. He prefaced his keynote address at an Air Force conference last October by warning that he’s “not scared to cry in front of people [he doesn’t] know,” then proceeded to do just that over the course of an animating Tony Robbins-like speech about the courage that will be required of U.S. troops should things come to blows with China. Last year, he tweeted out a picture of his calendar, which included an appointment with a therapist. “Warrior heart. No stigma,” was his caption. (You think Curtis LeMay ever went to therapy?)
At INDOPACOM, Minihan served as the de facto pep-talker-in-chief. He brought levity to what was an otherwise demanding and high-stress environment. An avid surfer (which was surprising given his towering height), he was known to scream out “YEEEW!” during a segment of a morning briefing when the resident meteorologist summarized the surf conditions throughout the theatre. He’d close out meetings with an enthusiastic “LET’S GO!” and high fives all around, as if an NBA coach hyping his players up. (You think Curtis LeMay ever doled out high-fives?)
To be clear, Minihan may sincerely believe that the U.S. and China will fight a war over Taiwan in 2025, even though I believe his statement is merely intended to inspire a sense of urgency in his airmen.
Then again, you might too had you spent a decade at the tip of the spear, like he did, watching the Chinese build up their military at a historic clip and reach near-parity with the U.S. military, then erode norm after norm.
It never hurt to plan for the worst. Must I repeat the tongue twister?
War Planning Requires Paranoia
Jack very good read. This article could easily be published in any legitimate news article. You are a great story teller with incredible insight. I honestly forget you are my son as I read through and can’t wait to finish the article. Very cool how you threaded in the 7 -P’s