The Wall Street Journal reported that in the past five years, the U.S. military has shifted its focus to defending Taiwan in response to the new situation of competition with China and Russia. However, the U.S. military still has a long way to go in transforming itself for future wars.

The picture shows the US Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey aircraft.

(Reuters file photo)

[Central News Agency] The Wall Street Journal reported that in the past five years, the US military has shifted its focus to defending Taiwan in response to the new situation of competition with China and Russia.

However, due to factors such as budget constraints, slow weapon production, and difficulty in recruiting personnel, the U.S. military still has a long way to go in transforming itself for future warfare.

This long report examining the challenges faced by the U.S. military in response to the new international situation wrote that after then President Lee Teng-hui visited the U.S. in 1995, Beijing launched several military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, prompting the U.S. government to display the most powerful U.S. military in Asia since the Vietnam War, dispatching several ships The warships crossed the Taiwan Strait, and two aircraft carrier battle groups were deployed in the region every other year.

But strategists at the Pentagon's internal think tank see hidden worries.

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They are worried that if Beijing uses long-range missiles, anti-satellite weapons and electronic warfare, it can attack the bases and ports of the United States in the Western Pacific, which shows its military dependence, so that the United States will not dare to intervene when regional conflicts break out.

Led by defense strategists, former U.S. President George W. Bush campaigned to skip a generation of technology and counter Beijing's anti-access strategy with advanced tools such as long-range weapons, sensors and data-sharing technology.

Unexpectedly, on September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists, which changed the threat facing the United States and the mission of the Pentagon.

Jeff McKitrick, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), who used to work at the Pentagon think tank, recalled: "At one point, we thought, 'Wow, the transformation of the military is really going to start', and then 9/11 happened, Everyone's focus is on the global war on terror."

After the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has finally shifted its focus. The Pentagon's 2018 National Defense Strategy announced that the United States will respond to the new situation of "great power competition" with China and Russia.

Among them, preventing China from aggressing Taiwan is a challenge for the United States.

Pentagon officials concluded that an attempt to retake Taiwan after China conquered it would plunge the United States into a long war that could prompt China to use nuclear weapons.

The United States must demonstrate the ability to prevent Beijing from taking over Taiwan, a requirement included in the national defense strategy released last year by the administration of current President Joe Biden.

Back in 2019, Lieutenant General Clint Hinote, who was transferred back to Washington from Baghdad, used his authority in the U.S. Air Force’s Future Warfare Office to plan a confidential war game to evaluate how the two U.S. military forces would perform against China’s use of force against Taiwan. .

The US long-range bombers and missiles constitute the "foreign force", while the "internal force" composed of aircraft, ships and troops fight within the attack range of the Chinese side.

The conclusion is that neither approach can succeed alone.

"We have to mix to defend Taiwan and Japan," Jinot said.

Since then, the US side has been simulating and experimenting to get the best formula.

The Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff recently tweeted that if a conflict broke out in the Taiwan Strait in the late 2020s, the United States could prevent China from invading Taiwan by force, but both sides suffered heavy casualties.

This push assumes that the United States will master new weapons, tactics and take advantage of the Pentagon's current planned military deployment.

In response to future warfare, the U.S. Marine Corps has abandoned tanks and transformed into a maritime infantry force, which can attack Chinese ships from small islands in the Western Pacific.

The new Marine Corps Littoral Regiment, which operates near the coast and will be equipped with anti-ship missiles, is scheduled to be stationed in Okinawa, Japan, in 2025.

During an exercise in May 2021, the U.S. Marine Corps transported the High Mobility Multiple Launch Rocket System (HIMARS) by sea to the coastline of Alaska, loaded it into a C-130 transport plane, and carried it to a base in the wilderness for the purpose of training the Marine Corps Tactics for attacking the Chinese navy on islands in the western Pacific.

After the U.S. Army’s electronic warfare, short-range air defense and engineering capabilities have been weakened due to budgetary pressure and the war on terrorism, it is developing a new generation of weapon systems that can attack more distant targets. It plans to deploy a new type of hypersonic missile this fall, but it must obtain deployment rights in the Pacific region , in order to play a role in dealing with China.

The U.S. Navy is facing budgetary pressures, personnel shortages, and limited U.S. shipbuilding capabilities. At this stage, it plans to expand the fleet to more than 355 manned ships, but it is still smaller than the current number of the Chinese Navy.

The United States will have about 290 ships in the short term.

The U.S. Air Force has one of the oldest and smallest fleets in its 75-year history, but the first B-21 bomber leaves the factory as the military tests a new hypersonic missile that can be fired from fighter jets, laying out plans to disperse aircraft deployments in the Pacific draw, retrofit aging B-52 bombers to fill gaps in the fleet, and procure advanced weapons for attacking China's invading forces.

The U.S. annual military expenditure has exceeded 800 billion U.S. dollars (approximately NT$24.5 trillion), but current and former U.S. defense officials and commanders say that the transformation over the years has been due to the focus on the war on terrorism, the pursuit of high-priced weapons but lack of results, and the budget within the U.S. government Bickering, delays caused by differences over the urgency of China's threats, lingering worries in the Middle East, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine also sucked attention and resources.

The consolidation of the U.S. defense industry has left the Pentagon facing a reduction in arms suppliers. Shipyards are struggling to produce the submarines that the U.S. Navy says are essential to counter the larger Chinese Navy. Weapons designers are busy catching up with China and Russia to develop hypersonic missiles. .

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, last year simulated China launching an amphibious attack on Taiwan. The results showed that the US ran out of long-range anti-ship cruise missiles in less than a week.

In addition, the recruitment of U.S. military personnel is difficult to meet the standards. The people are tired of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for many years. The full recruitment system may cause a shortage of U.S. military personnel. The plan to station more U.S. troops within the attack range of China has not yet been completed.

If the U.S.-China conflict gives Russia the confidence to take further action against Eastern Europe, the U.S. and its allies will have to fight on both sides.

Both China and Russia have nuclear weapons, and the war could spread to the Arctic Circle, where the United States does not have as many icebreakers and ports as Russia, and Moscow seems ready to welcome Beijing's help in the Arctic Circle.

Once China takes control of the South China Sea and Taiwan, it will control the important waterways through which trillions of dollars of goods pass through each year, and will also control the supply of advanced semiconductors, threatening the security of Japan and other US allies, and challenging the US's dominant position in this region since World War II.

The U.S. military still outperforms its main rival in capabilities, China faces obstacles in improving its large-scale amphibious assault capabilities, and the Russian military's weaknesses are fully exposed in Ukraine, the report wrote.

However, even if the U.S. military expands the use of bases in the Philippines and Japan and deploys them dispersedly, defending Taiwan still requires troops to travel far and wide to fight within China’s attack range, and many of the cutting-edge weapons developed by the U.S. military for the New World Bureau will not be ready until the 2030s.

Hinot said frankly that the pace of transformation of the U.S. military is sometimes not ideal, and the struggle for budgets often suffers. "The sense of urgency is deeper now, but we know how far this road has to go."