Irregular Warfare Podcast - Deterrence through Asymmetry: Preparing for Conflict in the Taiwan Strait

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

Be sure to visit the Irregular Warfare Initiative's new website, www.irregularwarfare.org, to see all of the new articles, podcast episodes, and other content the IWI team is producing! What are the origins of America’s longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan? How effective has that strategy been and, more urgently, how effective is it likely to remain? How has the military balance of power in the Taiwan Strait shifted, and what coercive methods does Beijing have at its disposal to subjugate Taipei? In this episode, our guests explore these questions and more in a discussion that considers the prospect of a cross-strait conflict between China and Taiwan and the asymmetric defensive capabilities that Taipei needs to stave off an invasion by the People’s Liberation Army. Michael Brown is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and previously served as the director of the Defense Innovation Unit. And Professor Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he cochairs the programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

To really have strategic ambiguity, have tea, in other words, for China to believe that we could come to the aid of Taiwan in the event that China decides they're seizing it by force, there's not strong enough deterrence. Deterrence did not work in Ukraine. That's created a war that certainly is creating unbelievable human destruction and damage to the country of Ukraine, and we can't allow something like that to start in Taiwan. What would it mean to the credibility of American global leadership if we had stood by or failed successfully to intervene, to keep one of the most liberal,

vibrant democracies in the world, not to even mention Asia, from being just wiped off the face of the map. Nice little democracy you had there. Sorry it disappeared. Welcome to Episode 75 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Jebb, and I'll be joined by my co-host, Ben Works. Today's episode addresses the prospects of a cross-strait conflict between China and Taiwan, and looks at the asymmetric defensive capabilities that Taipei needs to stave off an amphibious invasion by the People's Liberation Army.

Taipei needs to stave off an amphibious invasion by the People's Liberation Army. Our guests begin by considering America's longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity towards the PRC and Taiwan. They then discuss the military balance of power in the Taiwan Strait, as well as the different coercive methods that Beijing has at its disposal to subjugate Taipei. Finally, the show concludes with a discussion about the policies that the U.S., Taiwan, and their allies can adopt to deter an invasion by China. Michael Brown served as the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the Pentagon from 2018 to 2022. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In January of this year, Mr. Brown published a foreign affairs article

entitled Taiwan's Urgent Task, a Radical New Strategy to Keep China Away, which serves as the anchor for today's conversation. Professor Larry Diamond is a world-renowned scholar of freedom and democracy. He currently serves as the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he co-chairs the programs on China's global sharp power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

Here's our conversation with Michael Brown and Professor Larry Diamond. Mike, Larry, it's a pleasure to have you on the show and thanks for joining us for Episode 75. Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Great to be with you. Mike, America's past policy towards Taiwan has often been characterized as strategic ambiguity. So to start us off, could you just expand on why Washington settled on this seemingly vague approach? Well, strategic ambiguity comes out of the Cold War when the adversary, at that time, the pacing adversary was the Soviet Union. So after the

famous visit where President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger went to China, that began a process of recognizing China as a country because we were previously not recognizing them after the communists had driven Chiang Kai-shek over to Taiwan back in the late 40s. So this began a different period of relations with China and the period of the one China policy recognizing China's statement that Taiwan was part of China. This was a way for us to have ambiguity as to whether we're really agreeing with that approach.

We're acknowledging it, but we're not agreeing. And our policy since that time has evolved so that we don't want unilateral action to resolve the situation between Taiwan and China. So that's really what strategic ambiguity is all about. We reserve the right to come to Taiwan's defense, but we're not committing that we're doing that in advance. And that's an accommodation to relations with the People's Republic of China. So does it essentially solve this dual deterrence dilemma where we don't want to, I guess, provoke escalation on behalf of the PRC, but at the same time, we don't want to inspire

Taiwan to either declare independence or take actions that would, I guess, escalate things in the Taiwan Strait? Well, that's exactly the aim. So we want to have diplomatic relations with China, but we're also trying to maintain the status quo with respect to Taiwan. So we are pretty clear that we don't want Taiwan to declare independence, which would provoke the PRC to take some action. Likewise, we do not want China to unilaterally decide that they're going to take Taiwan by force. So we believe that any resolution of Taiwan status would need to be mutually agreed to by Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. And the point of the article that was just published in Foreign Affairs on this is that

to really have strategic ambiguity, have teeth, in other words, for China to believe that we could come to the aid of Taiwan in the event that China decides they're seizing it by force, there's not strong enough deterrence. Deterrence did not work in Ukraine. That's created a war that certainly is creating unbelievable human destruction and damage to the country of Ukraine. And we can't allow something like that to start in Taiwan. We absolutely need to make sure that the deterrence is as strong as possible so that Xi rethinks whether it would be possible or worth the cost of seizing Taiwan by force. There have been proposals, including by someone with as long and distinguished experience

in foreign affairs as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, who have proposed moving from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity. And I will just say, I certainly think we need to project in some kind of way much greater clarity and resolve. And I think we're going to talk about that in terms of what China could expect the United States to do, should it do what it seems to be preparing to do, which is use military force to conquer and swallow Taiwan. The real question is, should the formal policy that Mike Brown outlined of strategic ambiguity be abandoned with a declaration of commitment, of unambiguous commitment that if China uses force against Taiwan, the U.S. will respond militarily?

And then if we go that route, do we say we will just respond militarily or do we say it will mean war with the United States? And then if we do that and we lift strategic ambiguity and we say, if China attacks Taiwan, the U.S. will become involved militarily, that begins to sound like a treaty-like commitment. Do we then need congressional approval? Do we then need a national debate in the United States over this? I have to say, with very deep and almost alarmed regret, that I am not sure we would win a national debate about whether the United States should make a treaty-like commitment to defend Taiwan if China attacks it. And so my preference, and we'll talk about this, my very strong preference is not to

alter the formal policy rhetorically of strategic ambiguity, but to alter it in practice by what we do and deploy and prepare to do. I mean, just to amplify the point that Larry just made, we all know that the best way to ensure the peace is through strength. So it's one thing to talk about changing the policy. What words do we use? But it's our actions that really are going to be the deterrent to China, not the results of a debate and what words the president uses. This goes back to Teddy Roosevelt, right? Walk softly, but carry the big stick. Mike, your piece makes the case that America needs a new strategy towards China and Taiwan. What developments over the past few years convinced you that a new approach is necessary?

Rather than a completely new strategy, I would say that what we need to do is make the changes so that deterrence is really backed up by our actions. Can we carry through to really make China think twice that it's not going to be worth it? They may not even win if they were to undertake a war to try and conquer Taiwan. So that's really what it's about. But the events leading up to this have really been on an accelerating pace. I think in the mid-90s, there were several incidents that raised the tensions, one of which being the U.S. Navy protecting the seas sailed through the Taiwan Straits. The Chinese were powerless to take any action to do that.

In fact, one of our colleagues at Stanford, Admiral Jim Ellis, was in command at that time in the area. And China was taking notice. And they were deciding that they really wanted the military capability to be able to prevent the U.S. from doing something like that without any consequences. So they've been on the most rapid buildup of military capability of any country over the last several decades. So their defense spending has increased pretty dramatically, such that they have a force that's now 12 times the size of Taiwan's force and many more aircraft, missiles, etc. And they've been much more belligerent about Taiwan. As recently as the end of January, 34 aircraft took off from China, 20 crossing the line that would divide the strait into the area

that would be viewed as China versus Taiwan. After the visit of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, we saw a tremendous number of military forces assembled in what was called an exercise by China, but could also be viewed as a rehearsal. So China is increasingly taking a belligerent military stance, looking like they're preparing for what Larry just talked about, the day when Xi might be able to order the PLA to take Taiwan. There have been numerous statements recently, as recently as the 20th Party Congress, where Xi basically said that it's an inevitable destiny of the Chinese people that we resolve the situation and Taiwan gets reunified with China.

And he's called for their military to modernize and be ready for significant action now by 2027, which is an acceleration of an earlier date he provided, 2035. which is an acceleration of an earlier date he provided, 2035. Mike, you bring up a lot of interesting points about, you know, the actions China has taken recently, especially with regards to Taiwan. So if China were to either coerce or attack Taiwan, I'd like to talk about what some of those scenarios might actually look like. Would it be something like China slowly accruing positions of advantage to maybe wear down Taipei psychologically and take Taiwan without fighting? Could it look like a blockade that saps Taiwan of resources? Or maybe it's an all-out amphibious invasion, right? So to summarize my question more succinctly, what do you think is the most likely and what do you think is the most dangerous scenario? And I'll direct that question to Larry first. I think you have outlined the principal debate about whether a Chinese

leadership decision to take Taiwan will take the form of an all-out, sudden, lightning, amphibious invasion across the strait, one of the most difficult military exercises, as you know, to achieve successfully, or whether they'll try and strangle Taiwan through a blockade or just gradually grind it down through relentless military and other forms of penetration and pressure. In a way, Ben, the latter is already happening. It's constant psychological warfare, disinformation, United Front penetration of Taiwan, penetration of the media, purchase of Taiwan media, and formation of alliances with actors in Taiwan, probably spies in Taiwan. I think it's nearly impossible to delineate the full range of ways that the People's Republic of China is trying to try and wear down Taiwan's pilots and planes and its resolve to defend itself.

My own expectation, and of course it's a fearful expectation, is that the PRC leadership will wait and see what happens in the Taiwan presidential election that's coming in January of 2024. If the Kuomintang, the one of the two Taiwan political parties now in opposition, has a presidential candidate who seems more accommodating, someone they can do business with, maybe they believe or hope they can kind of steer toward accommodating negotiations and that candidates to power, I think they will continue and accelerate their preparations for war. The best military and geopolitical experts on the region are divided on the likelihood of the other two strategies, blockade versus lightning invasion. blockade versus lightning invasion. My personal view is that they are preparing for an all-out invasion and that that is what we will confront if it comes to it. And the reason why I say that is that I don't think the People's Republic of China and Xi Jinping and the senior leadership want to give the United States time to come to the rescue of Taiwan, I think that

their strategic assessment will be lightning speed and total force and possibly a preemptive strike on American assets in the region in order to disable our ability to respond. in order to disable our ability to respond. I think Larry's outlined the wide variety of ways that the PRC is confronting Taiwan today. They're already using a lot of coercive force at their disposal. I think that he's right. I think the key perspective of Xi and the leadership

would be not to give the U.S. time. You have to give them credit for learning from Ukraine, just like we are too. And one of the lessons from Ukraine is that Putin did not give sufficient credence to the defensive capability of Ukraine, so didn't amass a large enough force, wasn't planning on that force having to take their time to get to Kiev. Then they were stuck with convoys strewn about that made them easy targets, running out of fuel and food and so forth. So Xi would not be planning on something to make that type of mistake. Now, to amass the kind of force to cross the Taiwan Straits, 100 miles for an amphibious invasion, as Larry pointed out, is no small feat for any military today. So we would see the amassing of forces just like we did see

the amassing of forces on the Ukrainian border. So the one thing that technology is allowing for today is you can't hide in this world. Sensors from space will be able to show us that amassing of forces as it happens, which will give everyone the time to prepare. So they may be able to assemble the force required, but they won't be able to do that with a surprise move. We'll know that that's coming. And we're counting on that here as a way to be able to see this coming. But you won't have time if you wait for that moment to create the kind of deterrence that we're talking about that needs to happen. You'll have to have a lot of what you would need to defend the island on the island. And that's not just the military gear, it's food and medicine

and fuel, the things that a population needs to survive. One of our objectives would be to make sure that Taiwan can at least defend itself for some period of time, a week or several weeks, so that China would not be successful in an invasion attempt before allied forces could come to their aid. Mike, digging a little deeper into that, you mentioned, given the dramatic disparity between the PRC and ROC's conventional forces, what specific measures should Taipei adopt to enhance their lethality? You mentioned things like synthetic aperture radar, commercially available technology, cyber defenses, HIMARS, unmanned systems, etc. But how will these acquisitions help and why are they necessary?

So one of the things I just talked about was making sure that what Taiwan needs is on island to be able to defend itself for some period of time without the benefit of more supplies coming in. So that's the food, fuel, medicines part of it. So that all needs to be on the island. Today, as mentioned in the article, there's only about a week's worth of fuel on the island of Taiwan, all held in tanks above ground on the West Coast facing China. So you have to rethink your strategy about fuel and those other necessary items. Second, there's the military gear, and there's a quality and quantity aspect to this. So from a quantity standpoint, I think Taiwan is already taking steps to increase its military capability. That's a good thing. Just this last year, they've decided they're going to increase their spending on defense to a little more than 2%, I think 2.4% of their GDP,

which is up from 1 point something percent. So I think they need to continue to increase that and get up to about five percent of GDP. This is a serious threat, as serious as it gets. It's existential for Taiwan. And the window for when you need to be prepared, as Larry just pointed out, could be as small as three or four years from now. Then you get to the military equipment side, Ben, which you just referred to. So in the past, Taiwan has spent a lot of its defense dollars on the kind of gear that would be setting up for a head-to-head conflict with China. So buying F-16s from us, Abrams tanks, and pretty widely agreed in the U.S. military and now increasingly by Taiwan that they need these asymmetric capabilities.

You're not going to win a head-to-head conflict, even if you increase the spending to what I suggested at 5% of GDP. So you need more weapons that will basically create asymmetric defensive capability that will be able to thwart superior firepower. So those are some of the things that we're seeing used to great effect in Ukraine. Things like the HIMARS system, the javelins, the harpoons, anti-ship missiles. We need much more of that type of gear on island, pre-positioned, rather than having Taiwan buy more tanks and fighter jets. So that's the shift they need to be making in the quality of what they're buying. And then one thing that the U.S. needs to do is clear some of the supply bottlenecks to be able to supply these types of weapons and other munitions. Because we've not

been in a peer conflict in many, many years, fortunately, our munitions capability, which includes chemicals like energetics that are really the things that go boom, the propellants, the explosives, we've let that atrophy in our country. Single suppliers, many of these are government-owned facilities that are over 100 years old, where we need to both modernize them and expand the capacity so that we could supply many more of them more quickly. There needs to be the surge capability in munitions. So that's something I know the Congress and the Defense Department are thinking through right now. And I applaud those efforts. We're just not going fast enough in those areas. cost-benefit analysis? Is it as simple as a million-dollar cruise missile capable of sinking a multi-million-dollar amphibious landing craft or some sort of indigenous insurgency capability?

I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around what exactly asymmetric means to you. Yeah, it means I'm going to face a force of superior firepower, many more planes, ships, It means I'm going to face a force of superior firepower, many more planes, ships, men than I will be able to field. So what can I do to make sure that those forces don't have an easy time? And exactly right. It's how many more missiles, how many smart mines have I deployed? Smart mines can be turned on and off. All the harbors could be covered with these smart mines so that if the forces are coming, they get turned on. And we need these anti-ship, anti-aircraft capabilities, again, like HIMARS, like Harpoon, that is not just about the cost, but it's making sure that you can supply the quantity of those

type of asymmetric capabilities that would be effective against the superior firepower that would be coming at you. And we've seen that be used to exactly that effect against the Russians in Ukraine. So it's easy to realize that's going to be an important component of the defense. Right now, we're not equipping Taiwan. They're not supplied with what they need on island for that invasion to come tomorrow. That's what we've got to change to make the deterrence have the teeth that it needs. Well, I agree with everything you said, Mike. I think we're very closely aligned on what needs to be done, what Taiwan needs to do, what the U.S. needs to do. And I think Taiwan is making progress, but it's not fast enough. And there is a continuing debate in Taiwan about the value of an asymmetric approach to defense, which has sometimes been called the porcupine strategy, making Taiwan an object that has so many painful needles coming out of it that it's impossible to attack and swallow, and a more traditional approach. And my colleagues

who've written, I think, very insightfully about this, Jim Ellis and Jim Timby at Hoover in an article a couple years ago, strongly endorsed the porcupine approach, the asymmetric approach that Mike Brown, I think, powerfully advances in his foreign affairs article. Of course, it should be complemented with a certain amount of more conventional weaponry, but there's no way Taiwan can keep up with the arms race and national security establishment is all in on this more promising military strategy. There's continuing debate about it in Taiwan. Of course, we know that each service and armed forces wants its advanced weapons. So the army wants tanks, the navy wants ships, the air force wants advanced planes, and it's natural for military service to want the most advanced and sophisticated weaponry that can be obtained internationally. I think the most important architect of this asymmetric

approach, what has sometimes been called in Taiwan, as it's been fully articulated, the overall defense concept. And that architect and advocate is the former Chief of General Staff, Admiral Li Shimin, has not succeeded, unfortunately, in mobilizing complete military or national consensus behind his view. You know, there's one dimension that I think we should add to the conversation, and that really is the vital U.S. national security interest in Taiwan is semiconductors. So any discussion about this needs to be recognizing the fact that 60 percent of the world's semiconductors, a product that is used in thousands of end products

today, from everything from automobiles, which we saw during the COVID crisis, to military gear, to almost everything we use. So 60% of the world's semiconductors are made, fabricated on the island of Taiwan, and 90% of the advanced semiconductors, those that are below around the seven nanometers, are made in Taiwan, many by one company, TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. So this is a vital interest for our economy there. So I believe we also need to be talking about semiconductor security the way we talk about energy security or food security. This is a vital resource that our economy depends on. There have been some estimates that have said that if we lose access to that, there would be an economic depression globally, maybe 50% bigger than what we saw with COVID,

and would be longer lasting because the time it takes to build these very sophisticated facilities will be measured in years, maybe a decade, as opposed to something that could come up quickly. The importance of the semiconductors is covered quite well in a book that has been out this past year called The Chip War by Chris Miller. I'd recommend it to everyone. And this would be devastating for the U.S., for our allies, the entire globe, even for China. China imports more in chips from a dollar value than it does in oil. China has historically been the manufacturer of 70% of the world's electronics, and those all require chips. Many of them imported.

China can't produce those chips on its own. So one interesting element of this, sometimes the folks on Taiwan refer to that fact as a silicon shield, meaning maybe we won't be attacked because that resource is so important that creates a shield. It could also be viewed as a magnet or attractant for China because they have a stated policy of wanting to have more independence in chips, meaning they make more of their chips that go into 70% of the world's electronics than they're importing those. Yeah, the economic dimension is honestly not something I've thought about too much. You know, I think on the eve of World War

One, most people throughout Europe thought that war between England and Germany was impossible just because they were each other's largest trading partners and the financial devastation would be too great a burden for either society to deal with. But clearly, even the specter of economic catastrophe couldn't stave off great power politics. So, Larry, are there other U.S. interests here at stake, kind of wider questions of liberty that maybe the Taiwan PRC dilemma are somewhat emblematic of? There's no question that Mike is right about the economic and technological security dimension that has become so much more palpable and indeed overwhelming in the last decade in particular. But I think we should not

lose sight of the following. Let's imagine that we were to establish, as we are beginning to seek to do, much greater security of our supply chains for semiconductors, not only in the finished products, but in every dimension of the production of semiconductors, from the inputs that are necessary and the tools that are necessary to produce them, to the assembly and packaging. And then let's do the mental experiment and say that China then still wants Taiwan for strategic reasons, for global power reasons, for national pride reasons, perhaps because Xi Jinping needs to do something to justify the fourth term as paramount leader of China that he will surely seek in roughly five years. And imagine the world that would exist if China had simply succeeded, had done what Russia has so far

failed to do, and in a lightning strike, swallowed and extinguished a neighboring democracy. swallowed and extinguished a neighboring democracy. Now, I think two other things would happen, Ben. One is Taiwan would very rapidly be militarized the way that the islands in the South China Sea that the People's Republic of China has been dredging and creating out of sandbars have been militarized for power projection. I think Japan could kiss goodbye to the Senkaku Islands, which China claims. I think that China's military force projection would have the goal of achieving its stated aim of pushing the United States out of Asia de facto militarily. The second island chain of the Pacific Islands would be consolidated as Chinese de facto zone of domination, if not a territory formally, certainly with military bases there as well. And you'd have this island militarized as a dagger point northward to Japan, southward to the Philippines and the South China Sea, and southeast to the second island chain. And China would consolidate the dominance it is seeking of the entire Asia-Pacific region as a hegemon. Beyond that, what would it mean to the credibility of American

global leadership if we had stood by or failed successfully to intervene to keep one of the most liberal, vibrant democracies in the world, not to even mention Asia, from being just wiped off the face of the map. Nice little democracy you had there. Sorry it disappeared. So I think we need to learn the lesson of the 1930s. I'm not comparing Xi Jinping's China to Hitler's Germany, but I think when authoritarian power aggrandizing countries with larger global ambitions and intrinsic hostility to democratic and human rights norms fix their sights on democracies and swallow them, we learned in Europe it doesn't stop with one democracy. It rolls on. I think the defense of Taiwan as a democracy that can determine its own fate is existential for the balance of power in Asia, the future of freedom in Asia and the world, the way that the future of freedom in Ukraine is existential, and the way that the future of democracy and freedom in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s was existential, but the European democracies failed to realize it.

Larry, that ties in very nicely to my next question, talking about these existential battles between underlying philosophies and governance systems. The Taiwan PRC confrontation is clearly not restricted to just military hardware. It's also a contest of wills and governance systems. So Larry, from your perspective, is Taiwanese society capable of withstanding pressure from the PRC? And how can civil society gird itself against the PRC's political warfare? Well, I think Taiwan is making some interesting progress that we can learn from. Taiwan was one of the first countries to appoint a cabinet-level minister of digital affairs, quite a globally

admired innovator in this regard, Audrey Tang. And it has been mobilizing some quite impressive detection and countermeasures against digital disinformation and penetration efforts. I think it needs further scaling and help, but it's an innovator in this regard in which we can learn. I think civil society in Taiwan has its own quite serious and polarizing divisions, not unlike the United States in the extent of polarization. But I think there is in civil society a lot of growing resolve to meet this challenge and to try to mobilize greater readiness and will to fight. A very major Taiwanese industrialist who had huge investments in the mainland, at least at one point, Robert Sao, has sunk part of his fortune into a civil defense training program. President Tsai Ing-wen, who I think has been really one of the most impressive democratically elected leaders of any democracy

in the last decade, has announced that mandatory military service in Taiwan for draft-age men, I will say something that I think is new that is taking shape. There is a narrative that is apparently beginning to gain traction in Taiwan, that the United States is just using Taiwan for its own purposes, that we're creating a war hysteria that doesn't need to be there. In its crudest and I think most irresponsible forms, this narrative suggests that we just want to make profits for our military arms sales and our private corporations by selling advanced weaponry to Taiwan, or all we care about is Taiwan's semiconductors. And, you know, if we can secure that, we don't otherwise really have much sentiment for what happens to Taiwan. I don't know that all these narratives purely emanate from Beijing, but they certainly align pretty well with Beijing

propaganda. We need to push back on these in very patient and logical ways. And the reason why I think it's so important that we stress the normative dimensions of defending freedom in Taiwan and how inextricably the future of freedom and autonomy and societal self-determination in Taiwan is wrapped up with the global struggle for freedom is not only that it's the right thing to do and it's true and it's existential. But if all we're talking about is semiconductors, it feeds the narrative that we view Taiwan in purely instrumental terms. And I am very worried about the debate within Taiwan and the growing sophistication of PRC disinformation. So we've touched on what Taipei and Washington should be doing, you know, enhancing Taiwan's asymmetric defensive capabilities, adopting doctrinal

changes and new weapon systems, and leveraging civil resistance in a way that's somewhat analogous to what Britain did during World War II when they were preparing for a German invasion. But what obstacles are hindering Washington and Taipei from actually being able to push through these reforms to help defend and deter against a PRC attack? Well, I think our democracy moves slowly. So the biggest enemy we have is time elapsing without taking the proper action. So I see that we need a bigger sense of urgency to accomplish these things. So if we just grind along at our natural pace, you know, it takes 30 months to program $1 of spending at the Department of Defense. That's the time we've allowed to take to put plans

together and have Congress debate them and give approval through appropriation. That kind of timeframe is not consistent with the window that we outlined earlier where we may need to be prepared. So we need to find a way to move faster and certainly from a budget standpoint, be more agile in terms of where our resources are being deployed, because there's different kind of weapons that we need. We've talked about the need for training. We've talked about the need to reform some of the ways that we go about buying things

like munitions in the U.S. So we've got to be ready to make the changes required and on a timescale that is going to make a difference here. I think that Mike is absolutely right that we need to completely reorganize and press the pedal to the metal on acquisitions and procurement. We need to think about speed and much greater standing infrastructural capacity to meet the multiple security challenges that we face in the world. And let me expand the aperture on this in two ways. And let me expand the aperture on this in two ways. First of all, I think the war in Ukraine really has brought home to us how much the new world we've entered may look like the old world we thought we'd left in terms of the possibility of protracted military conflicts where our stock of weapons, ammunitions, and as Mike said earlier, things that go bang and our ability to continue to feed that into a conflict without interruption could be decisive in terms of who prevails. So we've got to reorganize that. The other thing that I think we should look at, both Mike and I have referred to this in things that we've written,

Mike in his foreign affairs article, and then something that I'll have out before too long. I think we should think seriously about licensing the production of some of our weapons systems that Taiwan needs to effectively deploy in asymmetric defense. Licensing these things to Taiwan's quite capable defense production industry for production and amassing right there on the island, and maybe licensing some of this to Japan as well, so we can have more production and stores of some of these weapons systems right in the region. So we've talked about Russia, Ukraine a little bit, and that Beijing, Taipei, and Washington are all learning from what's going on in Eastern Europe kind of in real time. And one thing that strikes me is that authoritarian militaries always seem strong until they don't. But is the situation in Eastern Europe applicable to the Indo-Pacific generally and to the Taiwan Straits in particular? Or are the situations between the first island chain in Eastern Europe so different that it doesn't really make sense

to compare and contrast? Well, I would say that we need to be very cognizant of the lessons we can learn from Ukraine. So rather than, you know, being a slave to the analogy, there are some differences and there are some similarities. But one of the things that I think it has driven home is that, yes, this can happen. An authoritarian regime can overestimate its capabilities and create destruction on an epic scale. Another lesson would be that deterrence failed in stopping Putin from marching into Ukraine. And we saw it

happening before our eyes. The intelligence community was able to share with the world and with the press that this is going to happen. Yet we were not able to muster what was required from a deterrence standpoint to prevent Putin from marching across. So those are lessons we have to learn. And that was the point of the article. It can happen. We only need to look at Xi's comments to say he's thinking about it. He's preparing his military for that option.

We don't know if he's going to take that option. We have to change his calculus so that that doesn't look like a good move for him. And we need to recognize that the things need to be in place in advance for deterrence to work. So that's not only the preparedness that we've talked about on island, the military gear, but also working with nations around the world to demonstrate the consequences. We need to be talking about the semiconductor security issue so that Xi would recognize there's huge implications to his own economy, which frankly might be more concerning to him than even the military capability that we're preparing. And he needs to know there's going to be a united front of allies that would include Japan, Australia, and others. I was pleased to see NATO, with its comments coming out of the Madrid summit

last year, talking about China as a threat that NATO needs to worry about. So he needs to see there's going to be a united front that could really damage the significant trading relationships that China has with the rest of the world. So if he knew that there was going to be a global depression, a war he might lose, his trading partners are going to go away, it's those kind of consequences that we have to make front and center in his calculus for deterrence to work. So some similarities and some differences here, but we have to make sure deterrence has a much bigger weight in his mind as he thinks about Taiwan. Mike, you bring up some fascinating points regarding deterrence and the need to alter China's internal calculus about invading Taiwan.

But to wrap up here and based on today's conversation, what are the implications for policymakers, academics, and practitioners who are concerned with the mounting tensions over the Taiwan Strait? Well, to summarize, the policy implications are, I think, that in practical terms, there is no more plausible in the next five to eight years or so, maybe in the next two years, as Mike said, risk to international security outside of Europe than the risk that Beijing poses to Taiwan. And we need to accelerate our preparations. And we need to accelerate our preparations. And I will repeat the quote that Mike articulated, speak softly and carry a big stick. And we need to deploy a much bigger, more, the intelligent, effective, potent, mobile, lethal mix of weapons, not only that Taiwan will acquire and deploy, but also that the United States Armed Forces will acquire and deploy. And maybe Mike could expand on this, some serious rethinking and reorganization of the United States Armed Forces as well. So I think as Larry and I both said, the key here is not changing the

policy. Strategic ambiguity serves us well going forward, and we'd be ill-served by changing that to strategic clarity. So the policy can stay as is. But to back up that policy, there's a lot of action that we need to take, some of which have multi-year lead times. So if you're going to change the production, both capacity and create some surge capacity in an area like munitions, you're talking about multiple year changes. So we've got to begin on those kind of things now. Same thing with negotiating what would the economic consequences be with our allies. Same thing with what do the Taiwanese people need to do to strengthen a civil defense. So we've outlined the actions here. Maybe we

haven't underscored the fact that there's multi-year timeframes. You don't just make a decision like that and you get a different result overnight. The time is now, the time is precious that we have now to change Xi's calculus. So we need to be taking all of those steps with a sense of urgency so that he sees in time to change his thinking that seizing Taiwan is not a good decision for him. Well, Professor Larry Diamond, Michael Brown, that was a fascinating conversation on the prospect of conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Thanks again for joining us on Episode 75 of the Irregular Warfare podcast today. Thank you both for having me.

It's been an honor to be with you and in particular to join Mike Brown, who is, I think, in particular, to join Mike Brown, who is, I think, a treasured national resource on these issues and whose foreign affairs article I recommend to all your listeners. Ben, thanks so much for having me and Larry as well. It's really important that we highlight the criticality of this conversation, so appreciate your doing that with this broadcast. Thank you again for joining us for Episode 75 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Next episode, Jeff and Adam discuss the internal organization of terrorist groups and how they organize themselves to accomplish their objectives. Following that, we interview former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper

to discuss civil-military relations and the future of irregular warfare. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all-volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of Irregular Warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter

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