Many of the US ships, submarines, fighter jets, bomber aircraft, additional munitions, and other systems that are needed to fight would not be near the war when it started but would be thousands of miles away in the United States. They would come under immediate attack once they began their multiweek mobilization across the planet.
One of the last conversations I ever had with John McCain in person was in the winter of 2017, shortly before he left Washington for the last time. We talked about how the United States could lose a war with China—not in the distant future, but now.
For most of the prior decade, I had been McCain’s principal advisor on national security and military issues. During the last four years of his life, when he was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I was his staff director. That meant I led a team of defense policy experts who supported McCain and his colleagues in authorizing and overseeing the entire US defense program—every policy and activity of the Department of Defense, every weapon it developed and bought, every dollar of the roughly $700 billion that it spent each year. McCain and I had access to the Pentagon’s most highly classified secrets and programs, and we regularly met with our nation’s top defense officials and highest-ranking military officers.
That is what we had just finished doing on that winter day in 2017. McCain had directed me to set up a briefing for all one hundred US senators about the problem that had haunted us and motivated our work together for the past several years: the accelerating erosion of the US military’s technological advantage over other great powers, primarily China, which was rapidly building up arsenals of advanced weapons with the explicit purpose of being able to fight and win a war against the United States. McCain wanted his fellow senators to know that America was falling behind and at risk of losing a race that most of them did not even know was being run.
For years, McCain and I had been pleading with Pentagon leaders to be clearer and more forthcoming with Congress and the American people about how bad things really were. They did not want to encourage our competitors by sounding defeatist, which was an apt concern. But it was a concern we had to overcome because it is impossible to solve a problem that no one knows exists. As it stood, the Chinese Communist Party knew far more about the US military and its vulnerabilities than the American people and their elected representatives did.
That year, things seemed like they were starting to change. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, had testified to McCain’s committee in June. “In just a few years,” he said, “if we do not change our trajectory, we will lose our qualitative and quantitative competitive advantage.”1 In other words, the US military would no longer be the best.
A few months later, the RAND Corporation, a renowned nonpartisan research institute whose military analysis McCain and I consumed regularly, concluded in a major report that “U.S. forces could, under plausible assumptions, lose the next war they are called upon to fight.”2
That assessment was echoed by a bipartisan commission of military experts that McCain had established through legislation that year to provide an independent examination of US defense strategy. They rendered their judgment to Congress shortly after McCain’s death in 2018. “America’s military superiority… has eroded to a dangerous degree,” they wrote. “The U.S. military could suffer unacceptably high casualties and loss of major capital assets in its next conflict. It might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia.”3
McCain wanted the briefing that day to be a wake-up call to his colleagues—to provide many of the details behind these startling public pronouncements and to build greater support for the new technologies, ideas, reforms, and resources that McCain and I had been trying for years to champion. All ninety-nine of McCain’s Senate colleagues were invited. About a dozen showed up.
For those senators who were there, it was a depressing dose of reality. The person who provided the briefing that day was a former Pentagon official in the Obama administration named David Ochmanek. A year later, he spoke publicly about the many war games—what are essentially simulations of future wars—that he has conducted for the Department of Defense upon leaving government. The US military uses them to model actual campaigns against rival powers in which each side fights with the military forces that it realistically expects to have in the near future. The opponent is always the red team, and the US military is always the blue team, and this is how Ochmanek described what has happened in those war games for years now:
When we fight China or Russia, blue gets its ass handed to it. We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary.… Everyone assumes based on 25 years of experience that we have a dominant military establishment—that when we go to war, we always win, we win big, and there isn’t any question about this. And when you say to people, “not so fast,” they are shocked, because they have not had this experience.4
The truth is even worse than Ochmanek describes. Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: we have lost almost every single time. The American people do not know this. Most members of Congress do not know this—even though they should. But in the Department of Defense, this is a well-known fact.
As McCain and I sat together at the end of the day, a pale winter twilight fading through the tall windows of his office in the Russell Building, he was clearly dejected. He slumped in his favorite antique chair and stared at the floor, his hands clasped together in front of his mouth.
“How do you think it would go?” McCain asked. “A war against China, I mean.”
“Badly,” I said.
“No, really, how would it actually unfold?”
What John McCain and I then proceeded to do deep into that darkening evening was imagine what would happen if the US military was called upon to fight China in the next few years. We agreed that the United States would not start the war unprovoked, but that a war could start, nonetheless, for any number of reasons. It might start with an incident at sea between Chinese and American warships that kills sailors on both sides and then quickly escalates. It could start with a Chinese attack on a US ally to which Washington feels obligated to respond. But no matter why a war might start, McCain and I saw it unfolding from there in much the same way.
Many of the US ships, submarines, fighter jets, bomber aircraft, additional munitions, and other systems that are needed to fight would not be near the war when it started but would be thousands of miles away in the United States. They would come under immediate attack once they began their multiweek mobilization across the planet. Cyberattacks would grind down the logistical movement of US forces into combat. The defenseless cargo ships and aircraft that would ferry much of that force across the Pacific would be attacked every step of the way. Satellites on which US forces depend for intelligence, communications, and global positioning would be blinded by lasers, shut down by high-energy jammers, or shot out of orbit altogether by antisatellite missiles. The command and control networks that manage the flow of critical information to US forces in combat would be broken apart and shattered by electronic attacks, cyberattacks, and missiles. Many US forces would be rendered deaf, dumb, and blind.
While these attacks were under way, America’s forward bases in places like Japan and Guam would be inundated with waves of precise ballistic and cruise missiles. The few defenses those bases have would quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of weapons coming at them, with many leaking through. Those bases would have no defense against China’s hypersonic weapons, which can maneuver unpredictably, fly at five times the speed of sound, and strike their targets within minutes of being launched. As all of these missiles slammed into US bases, they would destroy fighter jets and other aircraft on the ground before US pilots could even get them airborne. They would crater runways, blow up operations centers and fuel storage tanks, and render those US forward bases inoperable. If any aircraft did manage to escape the Chinese missiles, it would be forced to relocate to another base in the region, which itself would come under attack. It would look like a US evacuation.
In the early days of a war with China, many of the forces located at these forward bases would not even be in the fight. Older, non-stealthy fighter jets, such as F-15s and F-16s, would not play an offensive role, because they could not survive against China’s advanced fighters and surface-to-air missile systems. The same is true of the Navy’s F-18s. The limited numbers of stealthy, fifth-generation fighter jets that could be brought to bear, such as F-22s and F-35s, can fly only several hundred miles on a single tank of fuel, so they would depend heavily on aerial refueling tankers to be able to reach their targets. But because those tankers are neither stealthy nor equipped with any self-defense capabilities, they would be shot down in large numbers. With those aircraft lost—which the Air Force never assumed could happen when they were developed—there would be no backups to keep America’s short-range fighter jets in the fight.
A similar dynamic would play out with America’s sea bases. Once the war started, US aircraft carriers in the region would immediately turn east and sail away from China, intent on getting more than a thousand miles away from the opponent’s long-range anti-ship missiles. But from that far away, none of the aircraft on the flight deck would be capable of reaching their targets without aerial refueling, so the Navy would find itself on the horns of the same dilemma the Air Force faced: its stealthy fighter jets would be pushed so far back that they could only get to their targets with the help of non-stealthy, defenseless refueling aircraft that would be shot down in large numbers.
All the while, Chinese satellites and radars would be hunting for those aircraft carriers as well as additional carriers meant to provide reinforcement that would begin their long journey across the Pacific Ocean from wherever they were in the continental United States. If found, those ships would face large salvos of Chinese missiles, especially the DF-21 and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles, better known in US defense circles as “carrier killers.” The carriers and their escort ships might shoot down some of the missiles, but there would be so many that some could get through and knock the carriers out of the fight by cratering their flight decks, damaging their control towers, or destroying their aircraft before they even got airborne. It is also possible that a hit could be fatal, sending five thousand Americans and a $13 billion ship to the bottom of the ocean—all at the cost to China of around $10 million per missile.
The Marine Corps would struggle even more than the Navy but for the same reasons. Billions of dollars’ worth of amphibious assault capability, built to deliver US troops onto enemy beaches as they had done for the D-Day landings in 1944 or the forced entry at Inchon at the start of the Korean War, would play no such role. No US commander would order a multi-billion-dollar amphibious ship a few miles off the coast of Chinese-defended territory to begin an assault while US aircraft carriers were steaming in the opposite direction to get out of range of China’s missiles. Marine forces would instead aim to disperse around the Pacific and fight an expeditionary war, but they would lack many of the weapons and logistical forces to do so.
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