Leaders from both political parties in the United States agree that the country is locked in a strategic competition with China. The Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy, released in 2022, bluntly stated that China represents “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security.” Not to be outdone, Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on China, a special panel established in January, described U.S.-Chinese competition as “an existential struggle over what life will look like in the twenty-first century.” Now more than ever, it is easy to imagine today’s competition with China turning into a protracted regional conflict, such as a war in the Taiwan Strait.
War is always scary, but it is even scarier when your side is not sufficiently prepared. And indeed, the U.S. defense industrial base is inadequate if the United States and China were to go to war. In 2022, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where I serve as senior vice president, conducted a war game involving a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in 2026. The exercises revealed how quickly the United States would run through its current supply of weapons in the first few weeks of a major war. Certain critical munitions—such as long-range, precision-guided munitions—would likely run out in less than one week. To avoid these shortfalls, the United States would need to scale up its production of weapons, but doing so quickly would be extremely difficult.
