The U.S. military should do more to deter China from invading Taiwan and to prepare for a war if deterrence fails, including expanding joint military exercises with Taiwan and hardening U.S. bases in the region, a House committee said in a bipartisan report released Wednesday.
The report, one of the first concrete products from a committee created this year to focus on U.S. competition with China, comes after the panel conducted a war game last month that acted out a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., during a committee meeting Wednesday to approve the report, asked the public to imagine 80,000 Chinese troops on Taiwan, U.S. military runways on Guam destroyed and other catastrophic fallout from a theoretical conflict.
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“Dozens of our F-35s vaporized. Our long-range munitions largely depleted in just six days. Financial markets tanking. Chinese banks kicked off the SWIFT [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication] system. Shipping insurance halted. Global trade frozen,” said Gallagher, the chairman of what is formally known as the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
“At the select committee's tabletop exercise, we saw the terrifying result of deterrence failure,” he continued. “Today is about doing what we can to…
