Claims

The Trump administration's pattern of rapid military operations (Venezuela regime change in 12 hours, nuclear strikes last summer) has created a pattern of success that encouraged the president to initiate the current larger-scale conflict with Iran despite not fully understanding how difficult it is to control and end large-scale conflicts on favorable terms.

The military strategy of striking Iranian nuclear sites and air defenses only succeeds if it achieves regime change; without regime change, the same regime with the same goals and means can rebuild their programs quickly, as demonstrated by the rapid reconstitution of ballistic missiles after last summer's strikes.

The president lacks full understanding of how difficult it is to control events once a large-scale conflict begins and how difficult it can be to end such conflicts on one's own terms, despite recent success in limited military operations.

Stavridis believes that if he were in the position of commanding forces in the region, he would have recommended going ashore to strike Houthi maritime infrastructure months ago.

Underground weapons storage makes destroying Iran's drone weapons even more difficult than destroying exposed weapons, because bunkers protect weapons and add verification challenges.

The PRC is not willing to sacrifice Beijing or Shanghai just because the United States is erecting barriers to invading Taiwan, making nuclear escalation extremely unlikely over the Taiwan issue.

If the PLA attempts an air bridge invasion (using aircraft rather than naval transport), history from the Battle of Hostomel Airport at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows that defenders can sabotage runways, invalidating the entire strategy and allowing the country to survive without falling to invaders.

Taiwan will rain fire from the skies on incoming naval vessels, which is why the PRC has invested heavily in its ballistic missile program to target Taiwan's land-based anti-ship batteries so that PRC ships can reach shore safely, and corruption in the PRC's rocket force could undermine this critical capability.

For a decapitation operation against Taiwan's central government to work, the PRC would first need to penetrate into Taipei, but various mountain ranges make the number of plausible entries into the city very few, limiting this strategy's feasibility.

The PLA invasion force will remain more than 100 kilometers away across the Taiwan Strait's choppy waters, complicating supply lines and making logistics extraordinarily difficult, compared to Russia's invasion of Ukraine where supplies only need to cross a border.

The Three Gorges Dam holds back a ridiculous amount of water such that destroying it would be orders of magnitude worse than the Kakhovka Dam breach in Ukraine from 2023, but discussions of this often ignore how Taiwan would send missiles across all of that distance unmolested by mainland defenses and how gravity dams resist missile strikes.

Direct sabotage of semiconductor facilities is likely in war; destroying a valuable prize while retreating is a common practice (e.g., Iraq setting fire to Kuwait's oil wells in 1991), and Taiwan could easily sabotage fabs with minimal equipment, making captured fabs worthless.

Taiwan will mostly have to defend itself, with the United States playing a support role, as it is up to Taiwan to hold against invasion, making Taiwan self-sufficiency critical.

The United States has a more practical reason to intervene in Taiwan beyond chips: controlling the 'first island chain' containing Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, and South Korea allows the U.S. Navy to monitor and constrain PRC submarines, preventing Chinese naval expansion beyond the continental shelf.

This logic further suggests that Washington may not even be presented with an option of whether to fight; Beijing could preemptively attack U.S. assets in the region to cripple U.S. naval operations before a blockade can form, making the U.S. entry decision moot.

Just because two states have nuclear weapons does not mean they will use them when shooting starts; the U.S. Navy is preparing for a drawn-out conflict, not for war to be decided by quick nuclear exchange.

Nuclear weapons are best for limiting the scope of conflict; few doubt the U.S. would use nuclear weapons if opposing troops began marching on Washington Mall, at which point facing nuclear retaliation or international condemnation would not matter since the country would cease to exist anyway.

Taiwan's incoming naval vessels must navigate seaborne minefields running kilometers deep, which Taiwan will have months to lay given that the PRC may take more than a month to stage the invasion, allowing Taiwan time to prepare extensive defenses.

While Beijing could theoretically reroute oil through alternative straits along Indonesia or take a long path around Australia, Australia would likely patrol waters near its continent to support a blockade, and the longer journey still leaves China with the earlier problem in reverse—how to penetrate the first island chain.

Two critical operational problems Western militaries must solve to succeed in modern warfare are: (1) how to cross tactical or operational spaces to engage the enemy in a survivable way and achieve breakthrough, and (2) how to break through, map, and exploit an enemy's deep defensive zone with obstacles and mines while under constant sensor and fire pressure.

Russian strategic adaptation has successfully extended to misinformation and strategic influence campaigns, which have had significant impact on certain members of the US Congress, causing distress to NATO allies and Ukrainian leadership.

People must remain at the center of military systems despite technological advancement; investing in technology is important but must be balanced by investment in people—training, education, and capability to learn and adapt faster than adversaries are critical strategic advantages.

The West currently has a luxury regarding future adversaries: we know exactly who our adversaries are and will likely be—the 'authoritarian quad' of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—with approximately 99% certainty that the next major war will be with one of them.

Governing tempo (the ability to control the speed of operations and sometimes deliberately slow things down) is more important than simply maximizing speed, and humans cannot sustain high-tempo operations continuously because of inherent human capacity limits.

There is no historical evidence for the existence of a 'wonder weapon' or 'silver bullet' in warfare; relying on a single weapon system is both intellectually lazy and morally perilous, as success requires integration of multiple technologies, ideas, and organizations under well-led, well-trained, educated humans.

Both sides in Ukraine now face extreme difficulty in massing troops and creating meaningful tactical or operational breakthroughs because the enemy can detect concentrations of forces, making it almost impossible to generate battlefield surprise.

The main operational problems militaries must solve to restore offensive capability in modern warfare are: (1) how to cross tactical/operational spaces to engage the enemy in a survivable way and achieve breakthrough, and (2) how to break through and exploit when the enemy has a deep defensive zone with obstacles and mines.

The coexistence of trench warfare and thousands of drones in Ukraine is not paradoxical because old ideas like trenches (used since medieval sieges) persist in warfare because they keep soldiers alive and remain effective, and militaries must constantly balance old and new ideas.

The difference between peacetime military innovation and wartime military innovation is that getting the mix of old and new wrong in peace wastes money, but getting it wrong in war wastes lives.

Russian tactical adaptation to Ukrainian innovations has been slower than Ukrainian tactical adaptation, but Russian strategic adaptation at the personnel, defense industry, and supply-chain levels has been significant, including successful adaptation to ensure fire superiority over Ukraine at the two-year mark of the war.

Despite humans being subject to huge uncertainty about future behavior even when known intimately for decades, attempting to predict future warfare through informed bets is valuable, particularly during long periods of peace when the next adversary may be unclear.

Information warfare is not new to the 21st century; it dates to antiquity with methods like espionage, whispering campaigns, and misinformation, but the novelty is in new technologies (social media, big data, AI, high-performance computing) that enable targeting populations, developing messages, testing, and assessing impacts at scales previously inconceivable.

Authoritarian regimes have structural advantage in information warfare because they can lie freely and research shows falsehoods spread faster on social media than truth, while democracies are constrained by norms against deception and must maintain legitimacy through truthfulness.

The fundamental advantage of democracies over autocracies is that democracies can theoretically listen to all voices and ideas from all elements of society, which is something autocracies like Putin's Russia or China cannot allow and survive.

The war in Ukraine is the most geostrategically consequential event in Europe since World War II, and nothing since 1945 has been more consequential for both European and global security.

If Russia wins the war in Ukraine, it will threaten other neighbors, and countries in the Baltics, Scandinavia, and Poland should be deeply concerned because Russian and Belarusian leadership have been explicitly stating their intentions to target these countries.

China is doing exactly the same as Russia—President Xi and Chinese leadership are explicitly telling the world what they intend to do regarding Taiwan and other countries, so future intentions need not be inferred.

Democracies are learning to respond harder and more decisively to authoritarian aggression, but Europe has been very slow to understand the profound threat it faces from Russia and is late but not too late to step up defense production, expand military capability, and flood support into Ukraine.

Richard Hackett's book (implied: 'The Third World War') and Mick Ryan's 'White Sun War' are similar in identifying potential future threats and are a call to military and government institutions to invest now in deterrence, with the goal that through reading these books, policy makers might increase military investment to prevent having to spend orders of magnitude more fighting the wars described.

China would prefer to incorporate Taiwan into the People's Republic without military invasion and prefers to win without fighting (in Chinese strategic terms), but an invasion remains a live military option that China's leadership has told the PLA to prepare for.

The critical question for deterrence is whether Western capacity can be built quickly enough to deter China from making a catastrophic strategic mistake regarding Taiwan, which would be catastrophic for China, the Taiwanese people, and many others throughout the Western Pacific.

A US-China war over Taiwan would require sustained mobilization of people and industry in both countries despite their size, and magazine depth (munitions stockpiles) would always be a constraint requiring expanded production capacity due to the huge expenditure of precision munitions in modern warfare.

In a large conflict between the PLA and US military, both sides would evolve and change from day one based on interactions, fighting, battles, and campaigns, illustrating that the army you start with is not the army you win with—same principle as in Ukraine.

Wars get out of control quickly as emotions rise, and there is no certainty in the trajectory of any war, particularly one of such magnitude between two nations with so much at stake, compounded by ideological clash.

Australia would side with Taiwan and the United States in a Taiwan war because it is in Australia's strategic interest to do so, as it is not in Australia's interest for a large authoritarian predator to take over another democracy.

Modern warfare currently favors defense due to sensor networks and difficulty in achieving force concentration, but this is not a permanent state—new organizational constructs and doctrinal innovations rather than new technology will shift advantage back to offense, just as organizational changes between 1914 and 1918 broke the WWI stalemate.

Western Pacific deterrence of China involves a mesh of frameworks including Japan's evolving and expanding military capacity with new counterstrike capability, Australia's defense investments (occurring too slowly according to Ryan), and American strategic coordination, but successive Indo-Pacific commanders have requested more funding, faster ship building, and quicker deployment of long-range missiles and bombers than Congress has provided.

The United States nearly lost in Vietnam because Americans sent military personnel to fight in an away game where they had no strategic advantage, whereas during the Cold War, the US strategy was to avoid direct confrontation with the Soviet Union and instead use allied continental powers (Germany in WWII, China in Cold War) to fight the main front while America focused on peripheral theaters and economic superiority.

We have entered a golden age of irregular warfare, with increased investment by US adversaries and increasing use of these strategies, particularly within the last 10 years as state-based competition has intensified, especially following the 2018 Trump administration national security strategy and Secretary Mattis's national defense strategy that focused on state-based threats (China, Russia, Iran).

During the Cold War, irregular warfare was a main focus of the KGB against the US, specifically through KGB Service A; more recently it has been conducted by the GRU, SVR (Foreign Intelligence Agency), elements of the FSB, and other Russian agencies, with the Russians characterized as generally competent, aggressive, and more willing to go kinetic than the Chinese.