ANALYSIS – Air Force General Mike Minihan, commander of the U.S. Air Mobility Command (AMC) recently created a firestorm by telling the 110,000 active, reserve and Guard Airmen under his command in an official memo that that they should be prepping for war with China by 2025 – in just two years.
The very ballsy Minihan is probably right about his timeline for conflict with China, even as the bureaucrats at the Pentagon and elsewhere tried to downplay and distance themselves from his comments.
But China may try to achieve its objective of subjugating Taiwan by less direct means. And that process has probably already begun.
In reference to China, Minihan warns: “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
He goes on to give his astute geopolitical/strategic rationale: “Xi secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason.”
Minihan continued: “United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”
Minihan’s colorfully written memo, distributed to motivate his troops to prepare for war, ordered his Airmen with weapons qualification to brush up on their marksmanship and “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.”
“Aim for the head,” Minihan added.
Kudos to this amazing American warrior.
This is solid clear-headed, non-woke analysis and advice and much-needed old-school military motivation.
And despite all the effete handwringing and pusillanimous sidestepping over his comments, Minihan isn’t the only senior military leader warning of the same thing.
As I have previously written, Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), said in October the U.S. should prepare to fight in 2022 or 2023.
“I can’t rule that out,” Gilday said.
Also, in 2021, Adm. Phil Davidson, then-head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), predicted China might take military action against Taiwan by 2027.
As RealClearDefense writes, this realistic timeline that has been dubbed “the Davidson window.”
And let’s understand, Minihan isn’t just a C-130 transport or aerial tanker guy in charge of AMC. He has served in crisis and combat and earlier served as the deputy INDOPACOM commander from 2019-2021.
But what if China doesn’t invade Taiwan and simply blockades it, as I have previously suggested?
They could do this alone or in conjunction with the limited seizure of a couple of Taiwan’s more isolated outer islands.
China may have shown its strategic hand in its rabid response to the visit to Taiwan by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in August.
As Grid notes:
“What I fear is that China will not do a frontal assault on Taiwan, but they will begin to do one thing after another that never quite gives the United States or Japan or the Quad Alliance any casus belli,” or justification for war, Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, told Grid last August.
In this scenario, Beijing’s campaign to snuff out Taiwan’s political autonomy would involve not hundreds of thousands of troops crossing the Taiwan Strait, but a more subtle approach: ships interdicted at sea and undersea cables snipped in mysterious circumstances. Many experts believe these tactics are more likely than all-out war.
“A full military attack is uncertain,” Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, told Grid. “To fight a war, you need at least some level of confidence that you’ll win, and the Chinese don’t have that at this point.” Sun said China’s concerns about a war in Taiwan have likely increased since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — an operation many seasoned military analysts assumed would be a weeklong cakewalk but which shows no signs of ending after nearly a year of war.
Tactics meant to isolate and strangle Taiwan’s economy are generally described as a “blockade,” but that’s a term that can encompass many different actions. Ian Easton, a defense analyst who studies Chinese military planning documents and doctrine, suggested that China could pursue a “protracted blockade that varies in intensity. The point would be to try to coerce the Taiwanese government to come to the negotiating table on conditions set by Beijing.”
This should be the bigger concern.
And the one U.S. and allied leaders should be preparing to counter or already be countering.
As Easton told Grid, this hybrid ‘blockade’ campaign is “already starting at a very low level, and it’s gradually becoming more intensive over time.”
The war for Taiwan has really already started, and too many of our leaders haven’t even noticed.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Imagine that – China using strategies straight from the Democrat’s play book!
They will attack (by methods of their choosing) before SloJoe leaves office. Our next president may not be bought and paid for. 10%…