School of War - Ep 144: Mark Montgomery on Defending Taiwan (Boiling Moat #2)

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at FDD and contributor to The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, joins the show to talk about Taiwan, tensions in the South China Sea, and more. ▪️ Times      •      01:27 Introduction      •      02:00 Why the Navy?     •      04:05 PACOM     •     06:53 Working with Senator McCain      •      10:51 Resource prioritization      •      15:19 Shortsighted decisions     •      19:56 Sink China’s Navy     •      25:30 Is Taiwan ready?     •      30:35 Imitate Estonia     •      33:31 Sensor complexes      •      37:26 Missile defense     •      43:30 Nuclear escalation Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Things look increasingly to be coming to a head with China in the Western Pacific, and I know of few people better able to discuss the looming threat from the tactical all the way up to the policy level than Mark Montgomery. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation. We shall fight on the beaches, which will fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am really delighted to welcome to the show today, Mark Montgomery, who serves as Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense democracies, amongst other important affiliations in projects. He's published analysis and commented and testified on any number of important national security defense issues. He was the policy director on the Senate Armed Services Committee under Senator McCain. Most importantly, he served 32 years in the United States Navy, retiring as a rear admiral. He was a nuclear

trained surface warfare officer. Mark, thank you so much for joining the show. Hey, thank you very much for having me, Aaron. So you are a contributor. to Matt Pottinger's boiling moat, which is a really, really interesting volume about the defense of Taiwan. What we need to do, what the Taiwanese need to do, really all of its dimensions, especially focused on the hard power of military dimensions. And I'd like to start with that substantively, but also with your career. You spent a lot of time in the Pacific. Tell us about, well, gosh, Mark, let you just start.

Tell us about why you joined the Navy. Like, how did that come about? You know, why did you go to sea? Thanks. Well, you know, so I was third generation Navy, career Navy, and in fact, my sons now and Ensign commissioned a couple weeks ago. Hopefully he'll wisen up and do five solid years for his country and then go someplace else. But, you know, so I lived out, my dad was in a career in the Navy, including tours out in where we lived in Japan and he was in Vietnam and all over the world. And I just enjoyed it. I would say I lived overseas half of my childhood and including a tour

My dad was the Naval attache and the defense attache in Moscow, so living in the Soviet Union for a little bit. So it was a really cool experience. I wanted to do so myself, helped pay for an expensive college. I went ROTC, Navy ROTC, and it got me in. And then I did a pretty good mix throughout my career of East Coast, West Coast deployments. And then for the senior part of my career, it was all West Coast as we started to realign our forces there and spend more and more time there. And so I commanded a ship out of San Diego, a destroyer, and a squadron of destroyers out of Japan,

and then eventually the Carrier Strike Group in Japan. And then my final tour, I did a tour as J-FIDG Deputy Director of Plans and Policy in U.S. European Command under Admiral Jim Sturredis when I was the first a flag officer. And after the Carrier Strike Group tour, I was the head of operations for Indo-Pacific Command. And so all the joint command of about 450,000 sailor soldiers, airmen, Marines out in the Pacific, about three years. So I definitely focused on the Pacific towards the latter end of my career. And so this period is about a decade ago.

How was the Navy thinking about the China threat? Or just let me broaden it and say that the Pacific security situation, because maybe that's an assumption that China was predominant on your mind. in your last role there for Paycom, I mean, how you were thinking about it is very important. You were the guy who was supposed to be thinking about it. Yeah, so, no, I would say the way I see it is somewhere around 2005 to 2008, the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence community started to really understand the threat

from China. In other words, up until then, I would say the military and the television community thought that China was something we could shape. But about then, maybe 2008 solidly, it was obvious to anyone reading the classic, material or working in our operational environment, that China was a growing and serious threat to U.S. national security interest in the Pacific. Now, that is a small percentage of the government. I mean, it seems like a big percentage of the military and intelligence community, but it was not a consensus position in national security, and it did not drive the national

security narrative for another decade. I would say somewhere around 2017-18, the State Department it started to swing over this way. And then by, and then eventually, I'm not sure Treasury's ever gotten there. And I think commerce has only slowly gotten there. So those are the kind of important, you know, agencies that drive our national security thinking, our real national security, the one that integrates our economic productivity and all the other elements of national power. So, but, you know, I really started to become a senior, you know, captain and admiral in the

timeframe where we were looking at them as the predominant thing. And what's really frustrating is when the military and the intelligence community are acting like China's the predominant threat, but the rest of the government's not a hundred percent with you. And we don't talk about this too much in public, but there was, there are significant amounts to three administrations of senior officials, from Obama to Trump to Biden, who failed, failed and maybe still do fail, to recognize that China, China is not debating whether or not we are their number one national security interest and we are the principal adversary. They've settled on that. They probably settled on it around 1996 for sure after the third Taiwan straits crisis. They couldn't do much about it

to 2008. And now they're on a very, you know, strong trajectory to, you know, reduce or eliminate our room for maneuver in East Asia. Well, you came. So you came from the Navy to the Senate. You worked for Senator McCain. Some listeners are in Washington and will appreciate the role of policy director on SASK. Other listeners, to include we have a lot of military officers who listen, may be less aware of what the work they're actually involved. So you got to see it from near the top in the Pacific itself to in Washington. How did your view of the issues change?

What was the conversation about China like? I assume working for Senator McCain. That specific conversation was pretty serious. but the conversation like in the Senate and Washington more broadly. So look, I think the Senate was a little bit like the executive branch, not 100% agreement. Let me tell you, Senator McCain got it. I mean, when we think we like, I hear the specific deterrence issues. I hear lots of four stars and senior, you know, political operatives say that was their idea.

I want to be clear the kind of the real focus on China, the legitimate one, not like a rhetorical one. The one that says we need to apply resources to this problem with Senator McCain and his team before I got there when I was at Indopacom. I felt this. We even brought an Indo Paycom staff, a SaaS staffer on, Eric Sayers, onto the Indo Paycom staff to help us. You know, he generated a white paper in 2016 that really laid it out and push for the resources. I think his, you know, illness and then passing, you know, really hurt our ability to focus because he understood it was a rhetorical problem that required significant resources to solve. You know, in other words, it wasn't just something you can say, well, I pivoted the Pacific,

like the Obama administration said in 2012, with no actual change. You know, and even that, you know, through both Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, we literally gave no extra money to the Pacific. We had OCO, overseas contingency operations fundings for the Middle East and for Central Command, and they paid for a lot more than Iraq and Afghanistan. And I'll tell you that, they paid for enormous staffs to do lots of complex thinking. I'm sure it was well used, but it was, you know, 50, 60 more billion dollars a year. We then put about $5 billion a year for five years in the late Trump and Obama administration,

excuse me, the late Obama and Trump administrations against the European deterrence initiative after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and an illegal annexation of Crimea. So we were putting all this money into any theater but the Pacific. and it was driving McCain nuts. I remember very specifically at Indo-Pacombeckon begging for OCO funding and being told by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Indo-Pa-com is explicitly disallowed from Oco funding. I mean, it's just a crazy scenario where the U.S. government

said the Pacific was the most important thing and did nothing to prove it. I want to zoom in to Taiwan and the specific threat and potential concepts of operations there, but actually one last high-level question prompted by what you, just said, I think there's general consensus. I don't meet too many people who disagree with the assertion that we should prioritize the Pacific and should prioritize China. Of course, there's then wildly varying levels of seriousness about that, as you just pointed out,

about what that actually requires us to do. And then I think legitimate disagreement about amongst serious people, about how to balance the priorities of the China threat versus security challenges in the Middle East versus what's going on in Ukraine, et cetera. How do you think about that? You have been working the China problem for what, the second half of your career, it sounds like, and counting. So I think you get all the points for seriousness. Where do you weigh in on this discussion on theater prioritization?

Just to give you one form of the argument, we've been playing defense in the Red Seas against the Houthis expensively knocking down their attacks on shipping without really going after the source of the problem. And I think you and I agree that that's foolish. But setting aside that decision, we're expending resources. We're expending significant resources. And there are those who would suggest that those kinds of resources, the kinds of resources that were supplying to Ukraine, they're a little bit more cautious about criticizing the resources we're supplying to Israel, but, you know, logically it would fit. That's all kind of a mistake because it's a it's going to harm our ability to deter over Taiwan or other potential threats in the Pacific.

How do you think about that? That's tough. You're absolutely right. This is an issue of prioritization because I don't think anyone, like if you came to me and said, boy, should we defend the Red Sea to allow freedom of transit? Of course, that's a Navy mission. We care. You know, we benefit when world trade happens.

We're the one country in the world that probably benefits no matter when a trade happens anywhere in the world. Somehow America makes a little money. That's fantastic. And if you ask me, you know, should we push back against Russian authority, you know, Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine? Absolutely. But, you know, if you tell me, I have X amount of resources and I have to prioritize it down,

the one I'm going to tell you is the most important is dealing with China and making sure you create the deterrent conditions to prevent China for being able to execute either a non-kinetic and economic and cyber coercion campaign that changes, forces Taiwan to come into line with a one, you know, one country, two systems thought process of the Chinese Communist Party, or actually does it kinetically through a blockade or a cross-straight invasion. And so that prioritization is really important. And we don't do this well. And part of it is that we want to do everything.

And look, I still, I do fully support Ukraine, but I fully support Ukraine because for like, 2.4% of our budget over the last 26 months, that's our defense budget, 2.4% of our defense by over the last 26 months, we have seen our second major adversary significantly degraded, a significant loss of main battle tanks. This is Russia I'm talking about, obviously. I say, you know, 300 plus fixed wing and helicopter aircraft, 300,000 plus troops. I mean, these are significant losses for the Russians for a very small investment. So I, in my mind, I can justify that. It's hard to justify expending a significant percentage of our standard missiles in a very expensive standard. SM6s, SM2, block threes in the in the Red Sea, you know,

when the obvious answer is to strike the weapons supply point in Iran. You can't, you know, play this defensive game. I question, you know, putting our munition numbers at risk. And I'll tell you, So when you get to prioritization, we did a crap job of prioritization from 2010 on. The number one proof of that is munitions. We allowed the services to completely ignore combat and commander requests for munitions for over a decade, probably 15 years. As a result, our munition stockpiles are at, still remain at ludicrously low levels. Now, thank God for Ukraine happening, because the Indo-Pacific munitions are getting healthy based on Ukraine in the perverse logic of Washington.

You know, everyone was like, there's gambling in the casino. Holy crap. You mean we're supposed to, so perfect. Long-range anti-ship cruise missile. We've been arguing for a number that in a classified war games is 1,000 to 1,200, probably not a bad number. You know, since 2017. And the services are like, we're on it.

Don't worry, Indo-Paycom. The Air Force are by 18 a year. The Navy will buy 20 a year. We'll say 40 a year. We'll get to your number in 30 years. I mean, that's an insane. policy. And of course, they told them, says, don't worry, if there's a crisis breaks out, we can always ramp up munitions immediately. Of course, what we found is, no, you can't wrap up munitions.

If a factory tells you they can build 200, but you order 40 a year, for four or five years, turns out the new numbers, 40 a year. They repurpose personnel, repurpose equipment, factory, floor space, and they can't do it. So you actually have to put resources against your priorities. And I would say that, you know, the services do not do a good job of that and as a result the services being the army navy air force marines as a result you see you're exposed during these kind of crises and munitions was exposed both in the european theater but also in the pacific theater you see a little bit more about service on seriousness i think most people are familiar with political insuriousness and how politicians would rather focus on what's what's

popular and easy in the short term than invest resources and capital and problems for the long term that maybe not a lot of people are thinking about. That's a known factor. But why would the Army? Why would the Navy? Why would the Air Force? God forbid the Marines make short-sighted decisions in ways that will harm their people on the battlefield. Help us understand what's going on there. Yeah. I'm not sure they draw the conclusion or it'll harm their people because they just stopped thinking at some point. But the end result is exactly what you said. So my theory on this is that the services become committed to a program of record. And so when a co-com, you know, when we start to steer the ship of state to say, you know, our number one theater is no longer the Middle

East. It's the Pacific. The services are working their hardest to prove that whatever their program records were for the Middle East, it's okay for the Pacific. So I ran up a war plan at Indo-Pacon for the China threat. I go to the Navy and they're like, oh, Mark, I see all your requirements here. You know, given our resources, you are so fortunate. We actually perfectly, you know, we're resource like yourself. We don't need to make any changes to do your plan. If I ever to go, oh my gosh, I flipped it upside down. It's 180 degrees out. They'd be like, well, let's take a look. And they'd go, oh, Mark, you wouldn't believe this. Thank God. The program of record is exactly what you needed, you know, to do this. We're not changing anything. The services have their

program record. They are graded by their performance to it. By the way, this is a program of record that we can talk about procurement. So you may talk with other people about it, but I'll just say, our biggest problem of procurement is nothing fails. You know, unlike almost any of their investment group where you expect the 30% or higher failure rate, you know, our weapon systems are near 100% success. Just I might have to double triple or quadruple of the budget, extend that number of years by 2468, but I will have 100% selection. So we have a program record that doesn't fail no matter how much it costs and is not flexible to your changes and needs.

You know, we had a threat emerge in China that really heavily relied on weapon systems that were not compliant with the intermediate range nuclear forces. These are the long-range carrier and land strike, intermediate-range ballistic missiles. We didn't have them. Russia didn't have them. We didn't really plan for them because we had a treaty that applies us not to build them and our principal adversary at the time. So in comes to a new adversary, not a signatory of the treaty, they develop a weapon system. what we're going to need a new, you know, we're going to need a change in the programmer record. But you would think that, you know, this is like cracking the Rosetta Stone for the services.

Let me give you one other example on this hypersonic missile defense. We've been talking about hypersonic missiles for about five or six years now, really aggressively. And boy, we're pouring money into our offensive systems, four, five, six billion a year. And you're like, oh, great, you know, we're going to catch China Russia. And we probably will on offense. And you know how it is, too. We don't have like one or two systems going. We have six or seven because,

The Army, Navy, Air Force, everyone has to have, I'm surprised the Coast Guard is not like, hey, would have been a high-uponry. You know, the narco-trafficantees are pretty serious. I can see why hypersonics become useful. But then you turn and go, well, what are you spending on hypersonic effects? They're like, well, you know, about $200 million a year. You're like, okay, so $4 billion versus $200 million a year. Let me tell you how deterrence works. Deterance. You know, you need to have deterrence by denial as well as deterrence by punishment. You know, you can't just say you have an office system, my have an offensive system when you're working with an authoritarian state. because they're going to have first mover privilege. And when they strike all your systems on the first night with their offensive systems,

you better have a defense again. And we are not spending money on hypersonic defense. We passed a law, the Congress did, saying you will have something in glide phase by 2029. And the DOD's response was to actually lower their R&D the next year, the next year's budget. They like actively don't give a damn about hypersonic missile defense. And it strikes me as insane. Anyways, my point on this is the services do what the services want to do and, you know, co-combe-dammed. And if they argued separately, it's a malicious piece of disinformation.

So let's talk about Taiwan for a bit. The chapter you contributed and co-authored in Pottinger's book, it's called Sink China's Navy, which I appreciate the directness of that. And that title and the argument of the chapter stems from the assertion that the PLA Navy and China's maritime capacity more broadly is the Chinese center of gravity in this fight. Say a bit about what that means. Maybe there are some people listening who are not familiar with the term center of gravity. Why the focus on China's maritime capacity? When there are, as we were just discussing, there's a missile threat, there's a sensor component to China's threat. There's all sorts of important things that China has that are going to help them potentially win an invasion scenario. Why the Navy?

Great. That's a great question. And so, and I want to be clear, it is a center of gravity for the cross-straight invasion, and the cross-straight invasion is the most dangerous plan. So in your military planner, you have a most dangerous plan or most likely plan. I actually think the most likely plan is an extended economic and cyber coercion campaign for which we need to be prepared. So there's lots of other investments needed. They're talked about in other parts of the book, although this book more than most focuses on the kinetic aspects of it, as does Dmiti Aparovych's recent book as well. So there's a book to be written if someone's interested on the economic and cyber coercion campaign elements. But I don't think G.

starts the economic and cyber coercion campaign because of escalation and he knows he may escalate to war. He won't start that campaign. He knows he can win the kinetic campaign if it escalates to that, right? He wouldn't start a conflict that if he knows the U.S. escalates it, he loses. So from my perspective, we actually, our resource demand has to go against the, we have to set the resource bar to sufficiently win the cross-straight invasion, the most demanding war plan. So again, not the most likely. And you got to invest in all the other branch plans of how to counter a blockade, how to counter the economic and cyber, but the principal resource investment is going to be against this

cross-strait invasion. And that's where the Navy comes, the PLA Navy comes in as the Center of Gravity, And what I think will happen in this kind of war is they'll establish significant PLA presence east of Taiwan. And they're doing that to rent the United States Air Force and Navy for being able to impose U.S. air power over Taiwan. That's our strength in a military conflict that's been our strength for, you know, since 1944, you know, is our ability to establish air power in proximity to our land and naval forces so that we can impose our will. And to be able to do that, you know, to bring up to. prevent that from happening, that Chinese will have to come out with their advanced destroyers,

with aircraft, and push us away from Taiwan itself. So we're going to need to sink the PLA Navy that's east of Taiwan. And then, of course, there's a significant amount of maritime forces, naval, Coast Guard, and, you know, commercial that will be ferrying goods across, you know, supplies and troops across the Taiwan Strait that we also have to sink. So that's a significant amount of combat capability. By the way, two very different missions. One of them was going to acquire high-ed weapon systems. That's to sink those exquisite, you know, those ships that are east of Taiwan, you know,

fifth generation, you know, air defense destroyers, you know, that are east there. You have to be able to engage their Air Force that's east of Taiwan. And then, and the whole idea is we're going to push them back so that we can reestablish U.S. air power over Taiwan. And there's a time frame to this. And it's, you know, weeks, not months. You know, it's one, two weeks. How long can the Taiwan, the center of gravity for the American side, for the allies,

is the Taiwan ground forces. How long can they maintain cohesiveness under a Chinese, under, you know, with Chinese having air control? And that's a, that's weeks, not months. And so we're going to have to rapidly roll back their maritime presence east of Taiwan, get roll back their air power after that and establish our own air power over the island. In my mind, that's how you do this. And so you're going to need to sink those ships. And we make a pretty coherent argument in there for Mark 48 torpedoes and Virginia-class submarines as good ship sinkers for the long-range landing ship cruise missiles launched from B-1's F-18s.

And we argue very, I think, persuasially, that you better get those on more reliable aircraft. What I mean by reliable is the B-1 itself is not a reliable aircraft. We have fewer and fewer of them. I think that around the least reliable aircraft in the Air Force right now with a very low readiness rate because of their age and the expense that it takes to maintain them. And so we're arguing to put these LRAZ missiles on B-52, something in the Air Force for unknown purposes, despite being asked by Senator McCain to study the issue in 2017, they came back and said, you're right, we could do it. And then they haven't done it. And then the Navy's on their own, put them on the P8, which is a fantastic idea because you can't rely on a carrier always. being present. So we need those long-range strike aircraft. And then we're going to need a ton of

less expensive, less exquisite, still kind of longer-range-ish anti-ship weapon systems to sink everything that's in the straits. Now, some of it can be on Taiwan, and some of it's going to need to come from U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy strike aircraft delivering them. And I'm excited that, you know, that we're really thinking about these issues. I'm a little frustrated that we're not putting enough money against them. So there's a lot there to unpack. Let me start with Taiwan and Taiwan ground forces. If I heard you correctly, you suggested that the Taiwanese ground forces are the center of gravity of the problem as the Chinese look at it. In particular, their ability to, as were manned the ramparts,

while under sustained air attack. You spent a lot of time in Taiwan. There's been a fair amount of criticism about the readiness of the Taiwanese in their capacity to fight and defend themselves. It's obviously the case that American sympathy for a place like Israel, American sympathy, you know, a little bit more contested but still there for Ukraine, is heavily a function of the fact that these countries both fight for themselves. So we're supporting them, but they are, in fact, defending themselves bravely in both cases. What's your assessment of the situation in Taiwan? So, yeah, that's a good question.

I just got back a day or two ago from a trip there. I did speak with a lot of their, you know, they're a senior military national security. So I look at it this way. So they have some successes. They've gotten their defense spending up to 2.5% over the last five years. That's a good number. That might be 2.6 this year. And they're on a track, I think, to 3%.

I just want to point out that right now, you know, sitting where they sit, there are very few democracies that spend more than them. There's Israel at about 5.5%. That number is going to have to go up because of their number of adversaries. The United States at about 3.1, 3.2. Korea somewhere just under three. Poland is usually in the high threes. And that's because they're doing a lot of procurement of F-16s and the Patriots.

And the Baltic states are starting to creep up above 2.5%, particularly Estonia. And I think Greece hits 3%. But that's really about Turkey. I just wanted to say, you know, not exactly what I was thinking of there. But that's a small number. That's five, right? They kind of spend at this level. So Taiwan is there.

They need to do more. But they're starting, they recognize this. They have the awful other problem of their GDP growing. so fast that they're perspective we measure it as a defense as spending a GDP and sometimes they thought they're going to hit 2.7 this year and I think they hit like I said 2.62 or something because the GDP grew faster. So they're doing that. They do have some other systemic problems. What they buy, we've been steering them towards things that are that are less glamorous and more functional. People like to say countervention versus not. You got to be careful of that. They have a peacetime requirement or a pre-war

requirement for air force for fighters to intercept the Chinese so that they can maintain the start point of the Chinese not like in a combat air patrol over Taiwan at problem start right you know you so they do need the F-16s it was it was probably wise of us not to have them by F-35s and we pushed you know we we I think influenced that McCain certainly did you know get the F-16s and they and they and they have F-16 vipers probably not necessarily to have M1A-1 tanks that was probably a mistake and the submarines is a kind of a coin flip. They're too expensive, but submarines have value, you know, during that cross-strait invasion, if you're willing to put them out in the straight, and they have 20, you know, Mark 48 ad caps each. That's a lot of sunk Chinese shipping. So that's a coin flip there. But, you know, we've been

moving them to the right stuff. We're getting their spending up. Here's the problem they have. They have an army, though, that we were training the hell out of them. We were training the hell out of them from 1947 to to 1979. And then we put them cold turkey. And they are kind of stuck. And their army particularly was stuck in the Army, the Field Manual of 1979. You know, I mean, not where you want to be. And so they do have 17 brigades, but they look at them like, you know, a fighting unit that goes from brigade to division to corps. They need to figure out how to disaggregate things better. Command by negation, kind of more of a more of a. disaggregated fighting pitch, and then they've got to develop their reserves. They claim to have

two million people in the reserves, but they only train about $100,000 a year. That math doesn't work. If you're only getting training every 10 or 15 years, you're not really in the reserves, right? So they need to shrink their reserves down to about $200,000, $300,000, get them into an annual training program. They need to take some of their active duty army combat brigades and break them up and spread them into reserve training and implementation. And that'll kill them. them and it'll hurt them. Their army's going to be, oh, that's, you know, I'm losing capability, but you're not. You're gaining capacity. And, you know, they just have to look at the Finnish model, the Estonian model for territorial defense forces or the Israeli model for reservists.

All three of them use a percentage of their army to keep their reserves and their territorial defense forces more effective. So from my perspective, they're doing well on the money. They're They're pending it back to the right number. They're getting to a number that, you know, president, you know, future President Trump or Harris should be comfortable with 3%. And then, but now we have to like get them to more, you know, more carefully focus on the development of the reserves so that they have the capacity.

And the one country measuring this very closely is China. So if we can get the Taiwan's in the right spot, I think we can we can strengthen their center of gravity. Yeah. I think it was Demir Marusik, who's a, this brilliant guy as an editor at the Washington Post who commented after a trip to Taiwan that you get off the plane, if you don't sort of followed the issue, you get off the plane there expecting to be in something like the Israel of East Asia, given the security threats,

you know, Israel, a whole nation, which I mean, we could we could nitpick elements of the Israeli military culture and obviously it hasn't succeeded in every respect. Nevertheless, it is a serious culture. It is one that is currently successfully defending this country against what, seven threats and counting, have I missed one, something like that. And you just don't see that in Taiwan. So everything that you're suggesting needs to happen like yesterday. It needs to move, right? No, you're right. And so I get the same feeling. I will say this. They're an island, right? And Israel, not an island, you know, they have to worry about tunneling, not just the tunneling between

Gaza and Egypt, which is absolutely disgraceful and, and created the trauma, you know, contributed the trauma on October 7. But they had to worry about tunneling between Gaza and Israel, between Lebanon on Israel, between the Golan and Israel, you know, probably not the Golan, but certainly in the north and in Gaza. And, you know, these are serious, you know, they have to worry about terrorists who come across from the West Bank. I mean, they have serious threats. They have mortar rounds, all that kind of stuff. Things Taiwan doesn't have to worry about it. And as a result, Taiwan is not in the same position. And the Chinese, you know, for whatever, for, you know, logical deterrence reasons, don't actually launch missiles that impact Taiwan just, you know,

on a recurring daily basis as Israel experiences from their two or three. So I understand why it's not Israel, but it probably ought to be a little bit more Estonia. In other words, when you get off to play in Estonia, I think you get a feeling that's in between Taiwan and Israel, and Taiwan needs to move more towards that. An idea that I have a persistent adversary that I have to be constantly thinking about. I do think I see some of the required economic actions,

which is starting, you know, they're starting their own version of decoupling, of trying to get critical technologies out of China and kind of like leverage positions out of China. Those things where if a crisis started, China could heavily leverage the Taiwan economy by cutting something off. They are very aggressively altering that balance. They're not doing quite the same way the Japanese are who put a fund against it. And maybe at some point Taiwan will have to do that as well. But they are definitely working it. And, you know, whereas we talk about, you know, we have rhetoric about decoupling or doing something about those, you know, hedge fund managers who are like funding things that actually hurt us, you know, in China that hurt us.

They actually are doing more. So we got to be careful in our country. Sometimes we want countries to do what we say, not what we do. And I wish we would kind of do some of it as well. But China's, I mean, Taiwan's changing. A couple more questions about the invasion scenario. The reason why it's so difficult for us to operate around Taiwan near the Chinese coasts because the Chinese have learned how to play our game.

They've built this reconnaissance strike or sensor strike complex, whatever you want to call it. They have a pretty good picture of what's going to be happening in the Western Pacific and they're going to be able to hit targets rapidly, which is a trick we kind of invented and monopolized for a portion of the late 20th century. Now they can do it too. How do you think about the fight over the sensors, the fight regarding China's sensors, the fight in space that's going to be part of this, help listeners think about that aspect of things.

If the main effort, as it were, is going after the Chinese Navy, their sensor complex is obviously relevant to that in some way. How do you think about it? So this is going to be interesting because it's going to come down. I think there's two ways to get at these. One is a non-penetic way with cyber tools. It's very hard for an outside, someone who's outside a very high-level classification

to assess our capability and capacity there. I'm guessing it's better than most of us know and lesser than most of us think we need. So there's something in there, but not enough. So then you get to your ability to kinetically impact the sensors and striking things in space right now, not U.S. policy not to do it.

Rhetorically, I believe shared by China and Russia and reality, not a belief shared by China and Russia. And I think that's an important thing. We're going to have to understand, we're going to have to make a hard decision about the weaponization of space. Our two adversaries have. But they'll gladly join us in a UN convention to condemn it while they continue to work and develop those tools.

And then, of course, you could strike ground stations and over the horizon radars and other things in China. But A, that's a hard thing to do. They have good air defense systems. And B, I'm not sure where we're going to sit on mainland strikes against China, you know, early in the war, early in a conflict. And, of course, that's when you want to hit the sensor networks. You know, this isn't like hitting Iraq or, you know, something, you know, we didn't really have anything to hit Afghanistan like this. But it's certainly not hitting Saddam Hussein's target set.

This is much more serious. And so people who write war plans have to write war plans with mainland strikes and without mainland strikes. And the without one is slightly more depressing. And so that's, you know, you have to get at, you have to get very good at cyber or maybe some form of electronic warfare jamming, something we are absolutely not good at. Or you have to really press forward on the kinetic strikes and then assume you're going to have the ability to do it. And that you're ready to defend your mainland against reprisals, which is, you know, something you should expect. And I revert back to my kivetching earlier about hyperboatshing. hypersonic missile defense to say there are elements, I think particularly in the Obama and Biden administrations,

that find missile defense destabilizing, and strategically destabilizing. And therefore, you know, in addition to resource constraints, apply policy constraints as well. Well, at the risk of leading this down a rabbit hole, because you and I have discussed this before, but it's an interesting rabbit hole. So here we go. It's kind of that that whole dimension of the debate is endlessly aggravating to me. And part of that debate, of course, as you, as you know, is that one of the reasons not to invest a lot of money in missile defense is because it just doesn't work. You can't really make it work. You try to hit a bullet with another bullet like good luck. And of late, we've seen repeated powerful demonstrations of its efficacy, not least the Iranian strike

on Israel, the last one, I think we're all anticipating another one, more or less literally as we speak. But the last one, which was in, was that April, was a significant strike from Iran on Israel. Hundreds if, I don't know the actual number, hundreds if not over a thousand projectiles, a lot. Comprehensively defeated, you know, a few got through here and there, but broadly speaking, it was not a tie. The United States Navy, the United States military, the Israeli defense force shot these things down. That was really incredible demonstration of the capability. And yet, and yet these arguments persist. And it's like a one-two punch, or it may not be the right metaphor.

It's like a shell game. The argument is it doesn't work. And if you start to show that it works, it's like, well, it's escalatory. You know, and you kind of take whichever argument works best for them in the moment. How are you thinking about this issue right now? Well, you pointed out, and I give the U.S. Air Force a lot of credit for fitting the herd. Air Force. Yes, that's right.

And allies, too. Jordanians. I mean, it was like an incredible, there were diplomatic dimensions to it that are important, but yes, forgive me. I shouldn't have left the Air Force out. Look, yeah, and the Navy in the Red Sea is proving you can hit a bullet with a bullet about every third day. And so, yes, you can hit a bullet with a bullet. So that was bullshit. And the second thing was, it's escalatory. Actually, what's escalatory, you know, what's happening is is not escalatory. Defense deterrence by denial is is not escalatory. It is in fact, The problem is we're not doing the deterrence by cost of position or punishment that we need to be doing, which could be escalatory, but is much more cost effective. It would be much more cost effective to sink the ships bringing parts to the Houthis than in the Dow's and everything else doing it, then it would be to, you know, that it is to like shoot them down with SM6s, SM2s, ESSMs, all that different million dollar plus weapons, up to $3, $4 million a copy, depending which one. the Navy ships. We're more than a billion dollars into that munitions expenditure. And what pisses me off is it isn't just that it's like, well, it won't work. It's escalatory. Then the third thing is too expensive. Well, certainly if you buy it in low numbers, it's too expensive. And by doing the first

two things, you guarantee it's a low number by. But, you know, the perfect example is hypersonics. Hypersonic cruise missile defense. No one should think for a moment that China is going to be deterred by the idea that if you use hypersonic cruise missile offense against our patriots and everything and all our defensive systems in Guam and Japan, that you believe will strike back with a nuclear strike because you killed three, 400 American soldiers, we're going to put 300 million Americans at risk with a nuclear. That's a complete horse dung, right? And so it pisses me off to hear this. And Congress got tired of that bullshit. And they said, you've got to produce a glass of slide phase intercept system, an initial operating capability in 2020, which could have been done.

That was in last year's NDAA. They could have done it if they'd stepped up the funding to four, 500 million a year. And by the way, Congress year over year had doubled the funding and they just got tired of doing it because they had to go find their own offsets in the budget. And so for one year only, they didn't do it last year. And then this year, DUDE came back with even less. They dropped from 210 million to 180 million. It's as if they're actively saying we don't want to do this. And there's a, there's a glide phase intercept solution on the shelf. I work at a think that takes no foreign money and no corporate money like that. But so I'm saying this because I believe it, not because I'm a show.

But there's a company that has a system. You know, they Frankenstein together a bunch of ones that work, and it will work in the glide face. And we need to thin the herd out there as they're coming in, you know, six, 800 miles away or whatever it is. You know, and the idea that we're not building it, it pisses me off. I piss me off because my son's going to ship out there. But it pisses me off because you've got to win. China knows what you're doing. Anyway, so the answer is on a number of levels,

if we don't get our act together on hypersonic missile defense, we're going to be at significant risk against China and even against Russia after they restocked themselves. Yeah. I mean, it's obviously not my son, but I taught at the Academy from 11 to 14. So a lot of my students then, you know, I'll catch up with them and they'll come by my house when they're in D.C.

You know, for a cup of coffee or something. And when they're heading off to the Pacific, I think to myself. Well, I worry. I worry. So, okay, so let's stick with this and keep it focused on the Western Pacific. So we have this dilemma then, or at least I'm going to pose a dilemma. You feel free to challenge the premise. It's like kind of a mirror image of the, there's a similar Chinese dilemma.

The Chinese have a dilemma where on D-Day and this most aggressive, not necessarily most likely, but most aggressive scenario, they have to choose whether or not to go after U.S. forces in places like Japan and Guam, you know, at H hour, which militarily is the right thing to do. I mean, it's kind of crazy to conduct a cross-straight invasion when you're leaving all these capabilities sitting on the ground in places like Okinawa.

That said, diplomatically, you know, grand strategically, maybe it's a mistake. I mean, it's like, it's a dilemma. It's a dilemma. Can you delay America's entry in the war? Can you delay Japan's entry in the war? What risks you running? Like, that's a hard problem.

to think through, and there's a strategic mindset that leads you to one conclusion, and then there's a different mindset that might lead you to different conclusions. Our dilemma in reverse, it seems to me, is once the balloon is up and we are in it, if in fact we don't strike targets in space, and if in fact we don't strike targets on the Chinese mainland, as you point out, I think the way you put it was the scenarios are a little more depressing. I mean, it seems like it's going to be a lot harder to win, to include in the short run, even before we get into protraction scenarios.

But of course, if we make the militarily sensible decision to hit, I mean, let's say we could keep it to the Chinese coast, you know, targets on the Chinese coast, obvious like launch points for stuff or targets in space. How do we then think about escalation? I mean, it's worth, we should, we should talk, you, you've already brought up the nuclear aspect of things. You know, we haven't seen a direct great power conflict really since 1945. Obviously, we fought the Chinese in Korea, but that was kind of bearded. It was a different sort of thing. The China then wasn't the China now, obviously, in terms of capabilities. You know, if we are sending missiles, if we're firing long range missiles of any kind,

you know, from the other side, or if they are, for that matter, on either side as you're watching these things, you don't know what they're tipped with until they hit. There is a real risk of escalation here. Presumably both sides would want to keep the war from going nuclear. I know we would. How we message that and how we broadcast that obviously is incredibly important. It's a kettle of fish, Mark Montgomery. How do you think about it? You explain a lot of it. I'll tell you. So you're right. First of all, it's fantastic that we could introduce some strategic dilemmas to Chinese thinking. And you talked about right up front.

To me, that's the biggest strategic dilemma for them is do they attack Japan? I would be, if I was back in the J3 thing, I would be writing my war plans and pushing F-35, squadrons into Japan because I want the world's largest aircraft carrier, the Japanese, and I'd be sprinting them out over not just our three or four airfields, but all 20-plus jazzed Japanese air self-defense forces and the other 20 that they operate from, you know, civilian airfields operating routinely. I'd be spreading them out through all of those. By the way, thank God the Air Force, seven years after they said they would, they finally said we're putting F-35s, gave like a date certain for putting F-35s into Masawa. By the way, four years

after they did Europe. So again, what? The services priority was what? When the whole government's priority was something else? I mean, they put the F-35s pre-the-Russia invasion of Ukraine into England and delayed doing it into Japan. It's nonsensical. But there you go. So anyway, we've got the F-35s. I'd make a strategic dilemma. And what you're saying to the Chinese is, I'm going to use Japan where they'll give us access, I think, in a crisis. I think Japanese more and more understand a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is an existential threat to Japan. That doesn't mean they'll fight alongside us. It means they'll give us access to fly out of there, to operate out of there.

So we're flying out of there, operating out of there. Now you're trying to have a strategic dilemma. The United States is pounding you in the straits with these Air Force and Navy and Marine Corps aircraft operating out of Japan. Do I strike Japan? If you do in a lower our capability capacity, we'll be spread out. Hopefully, if we do it right, it's something called agile combat employment and Air Force concept. or you spread. We don't practice it like we talk about it, but if we do that, you know, we're spread out, we'll be in good shape. We can take these hits. And most importantly, you just invited the

Japanese Maritime South Defense Force and the Japanese Air Self Defense Force to the party. And the JMSDF, their Navy, is another seven fleet, even more. And their Air Force is much bigger than the U.S. Fifth Air Force, but it'd probably be of the size of what we put onto the under the islands at that point. So that's a problem for the Chinese. They lose either way, like you implied in your question. So I love that strategic dilemma. Guam's a different strategic dilemma. That is, what's the degree do they understand that to be U.S. homeland? We say it's U.S. homeland. We're missing money on it on the defense of Guam like it's the U.S. homeland. But, you know, the question is, will they see it that way?

If they do, then that gives us another great strategic dilemma for them. We can put a lot of equipment on there, fly out of their, create problems for the Chinese. And if they strike it, then I think we probably have to communicate to them. If you strike that, we strike your Hanon Island. You know, Hanan's an island slightly off the coast of China. We're going to hit with a lot of military capability and capacity on it. We're going to hammer that. We will extract a proportionate amount of pain.

out of you if you do this to us. So these are strategic dilemmas we can give them and preventing it from going to nuclear escalation. But obviously, if two superpowers fight who both have hundreds, if not a thousand at that point of nuclear weapons, you have a risk of an escalation to the unthinkable. So obviously not the intended goal. And I do think it will prescribe U.S. kinetic efforts. Unless China does something first, and we're trying to be proportionate and response. I don't think we're the one that's going to escalate up the nuclear chain. I think you'll find us at best proportionate in our responses. Yeah, there's this sort of ridiculous book by a woman named Annie Jacobson called, I think it's nuclear war scenario where you have a single missile

launched from North Korea at the United States. And we launch on warning in return, which means, you know, the missiles pointed at Washington and in the in the book's fictional scenario, the president is basically bum rushed by his joint chiefs of staff into launching. on warning and nuking North Korea before the missile actually strikes the United States, which seems preposterous to me because, again, you don't actually know what's on the tip of the missile until it hits. So we're going to potentially start a nuclear war without being newt first seems kind of crazy. And you would see, I mean, there are escalatory scenarios here that are still not nuclear, where we do have targets on the American mainland struck.

And presumably we would not be, we would not be launching a nuclear response on warning. Like there would be, there would have to be some, some very serious thinking about how to, how to manage all this, which I pray has already occurred. Or is occurring as we speak. I hope so. I will say one of the many, you know, a lot of things were frittered away after the fall of the Soviet Union, including our submarine force like first and foremost. But set that aside for a moment and just say, the other one was our nuclear strategic thought. You know, basically the Air Force and Navy used to have scores of officers that went. through nuclear strategic, not the how do you launch a weapon. And we still got that going.

This is the how do you think about it? You know, we had, you know, a group at the Naval War College that just thought about this and was really dedicated to it. And we almost had to shrink and then repurpose them. You know, Rand, I think, existed at least 50 percent just to think about this, you know, the Rand Corporation. But, you know, less and less was invested in that. And so I think we have fewer and fewer nuclear strategic thinkers. And certainly in uniform, very few. And the person who runs our strategic programs office, like in the Navy, is not based on anything to do with your ability to think about nuclear war. It's about your ability to procure a Trident D5 missile. You know, so we have, I would not, I would not feel encouraged in this area.

And I don't, if you read like proceedings are very good naval strategic magazine for thinking, you'll find very, very, very few articles about nuclear strategy and that and escalation management. In fact, if there's one a year, I'd be shocked. There's not, and there's not a lot of appreciation, I think, amongst the general public or the policy community, even that nuclear strategy is even much of a thing. That is to say, I was recently in a conversation with some pretty serious people about Israel and Iran and, you know, what is Israel going to do if Iran actually one day, launches a nuclear weapon at Israel. And I was struck by the premise of the way the question was posed was that what the Iranians will do in this nightmare apocalypse scenario,

if they have the capabilities, they're just going to nuke Tel Aviv. They're going to nuke Tel Aviv and hope for the best. And that's not, I mean, they are a bunch of crazy jihadists at the top of the Iranian regime, so never say never. But let's be real. Like, that's not in this crazy scenario, obviously things are pretty crazy if we've gotten here.

That's not actually what you would do. You, first of all, you wouldn't just wait until you had one, nuke and use it, you would need at least a few, and you would try to destroy Israel's ability to strike Iran with nuclear weapons. That would be the purpose of your nuclear weapons, and you would have an actual nuclear war, and it would be a terrible thing. But there's no, there's, I think, no, very little, much less popular appreciation or even appreciation among serious people who are sort of strategy adjacent, that there is a logic to nuclear use, that there is a strategy there, as awful as it is to contemplate, perhaps because it is so awful

And the moment you start thinking about it, you know, strategic studies, academics start accusing you of wanting to fight a nuclear war and you become very unpopular at parties. There's certainly no Herman Khan drifting around the Pentagon right now, I'll say that. Right. All right. Last question for you on this subject. I want to be respectful of your time. We've been talking about these sort of short run iterations of the war.

What happens? Let's say we defeat an invasion in the first few weeks, but the Chinese decide they're not done. They're not giving up. They're going to keep fighting. They'll maybe try again at some other. point. They're going to keep hitting targets. There is no armistice. What does that world look like? That's a great question. I'll tell you, I used to not think about this much. All my, you know, that's very tactical is a captain and a one-star. When I started to sit at Indo-Pacom, a guy came in to

be Pack Fleet named Scott Swift, now retired Navy four-star. And he actually is a first guy. I remember one time we did have a war game and he kind of just offhandedly said, well, we're going to need a lot more body bags and a lot more chaplains. You know, that's, I need to go. as the Pact Fleet Commander, make sure that we have them. You know, I certainly think about there is a continuity to this war, right? We have to maintain the mental stability of our fleet, our sailors. We have to better, you know, take care of casualties. We need to, we need to be able to, you know, rearm our systems and repair our systems.

And that is a whole other layer of unfunded. You know, our shipyard, we have, we are no, we are no, we're the, we're the, Whatever FedEx and DHS, DHS, DHS, we're the opposite of that when it comes to ship repair. We are, if you need it tomorrow, you should have put it in 13 months ago. You know, we're not able to repair our systems rapidly. Our dry docks are at best for most part on the west coast. I'm really worried our ability to rearm, like, we can't rearm ships at sea, you know, with weapon systems so that it takes three or four weeks to rearm instead of three or four days. you know, our torpedo rearming is very limited. You know, we've got to think about having

expeditionary torpedo reload teams put together and ready to go. You know, there's all kinds of unique things we have to think about and fund that we're not funding and that we're not thinking. And I think as a result, we don't think about things we can't fund that well. So there's this whole idea that if there's an engagement and you break and we've, you know, we've prevented the successful cross-strait Bayesian or maybe it was just a blockade. and then it breaks or something else, and we have to repair our force and rearm our force, I don't think we're in a position to do it.

One last thing I add on that is, I don't know if the American people are ready for the high-level casualties that would come from the most dangerous scenario. It's reasonable to think that the casualties will be between 7 and 30,000, depending on how successful we are, how proactive we are,

what kind of munitions we have, and do we have our allies on our side? If all is all true, it's the 7,000 number. If any of them are not true, you start to build up to the 30,000 number. And this is over a period of like two months maybe. I mean, so more casualties, potentially more casualties we had in 20 years in the Middle East, in two months, for a country that a lot of Americans could not place on a map. And maybe more Americans would think it's Thailand, not Taiwan. I mean, you know, it's literally that kind of lack of understanding.

They understand China's probably not looking out for our best interest, but I'm not sure they understand that Taiwan's the center of gravity in our relationship. Mark Montgomery, contributor to the boiling moat, senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, all-around, really smart guy. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.