Ukraine vs Taiwan

Do we have to pick one?

Defense analyst Loren Thompson devotes a recent Forbes column (“Ukraine, Taiwan Challenges Spur Efforts To Strengthen Munitions Industrial Base“) to America’s dwindling stockpiles:

The dual stresses of conflict in Ukraine and potential conflict in Taiwan have forced a wholesale reevaluation of how the U.S. government purchases munitions and other materiel, with an eye to accelerating every facet of the process.

The urgency of military needs has merged with the Biden administration’s efforts to craft a national industrial policy, and the bureaucratic result is akin to when frozen regions begin to thaw with the coming of spring.

This causes Dave Schuler to wonder,

At this point the U. S. isn’t able to supply arms to Ukraine at the pace at which the country needs them. Will we able to supply both Taiwan and Ukraine at the same time?

One presumes that’s rhetorical, since we’re barely keeping up with the demands in Ukraine. And, in a follow-up column (“Urgent Military Need For ‘Affordable Mass’ Can’t Wait For A New Generation Of Smart Munitions“), Thompson declares, “Some experts believe that the current stock of long-range, precision-guided munitions would run low within weeks after a war with China commenced.” So, we’re currently not able to do either at a sufficient pace, let alone both simultaneously.

After showing that the United States is devoting more aid to Ukraine than all of our European allies and partners combined, Dave concludes,

Here’s a question the significance of which shouldn’t be lost on any of the interested parties: given a choice between Ukraine and Taiwan, which is our higher priority? I think it’s Taiwan.

I agree but think it’s a false choice, at least at present.

Our National Defense Strategy, the unclassified summary of which was released last October, declared that we are “prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe,” followed by an array of “persistent threats” (Iran, North Korea, violent extremist organizations, global climate change, etc.). This is in line with the previous administration’s strategy and builds on the “Asia pivot” by the Obama administration a dozen years ago.

At the same time, while we see “the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department,” we also recognize that “Russia poses acute threats, as illustrated by its brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”

So, given that Russia has already invaded Ukraine while China has yet to give any indication that a Taiwan invasion is imminent, it stands to reason that the acute threat will get the temporal priority over the pacing challenge. All of our planning and acquisitions efforts for the future fight are based on China because they’re vastly wealthier and more capable than Russia. But there’s a fight right now in Ukraine and the Biden administration has, rightly in my view, judged that it’s in our moral and strategic interests to arm Ukraine and render Russia a less acute threat.

Now, of course, Dave’s implication that China could exploit the situation by pushing up the timeline of a Taiwan invasion is surely right. Presumably, the intelligence community has judged that risk low enough to justify our Ukraine policy but, hey, they’ve been wrong before.

Where Dave and I are very much in agreement, though, is that, if we’re going to be a global superpower prepared to project power around the world, we need to upgrade our industrial base and vastly increase our stockpiles. As the two Thompson columns linked above suggest, that’s one area in which there’s actually significant bipartisan consensus and momentum for action.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Michael Reynolds says:

    I don’t think an invasion of Taiwan would involve many HIMARS or Leopard II tanks or artillery tubes, Ukraine is a land war, but if Taiwan becomes a land war we’ve already lost. Ukraine is also a proxy war, I don’t think Taiwan will be, I think it will mean China taking on the US Navy. We should clearly expand and strengthen our weapons production, but this is not an either/or, it’s a both of the above.

    China is going to want to take a good, long look at the real world performance of its legacy Soviet/Russian systems. Do they still believe their Sukhoi-derived fighters are going to take on F-35s? And given that good old Patriot shot down some Russian hypersonic missiles that were un-shoot-downable, they might want to reconsider some of their own toys. Taking an untested military with unproven weapons systems into a war with the sole superpower, which happens to own all the best toys and also has infinitely more practical experience, would be a very stupid move. Doing it when your opponent can cut off your exports and your imports of oil, that would be something beyond stupid, even for an autocrat.

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  2. drj says:

    Schuler is looking for an argument to stop supporting Ukraine. And in order to make that argument, he’s comparing apples and oranges. Deliberately, I think.

    You can tell from his main question (as well as another remark later on*):

    Will we able to supply both Taiwan and Ukraine at the same time?

    Even if the answer is “no,” the US doesn’t need to because Taiwan isn’t being invaded right now. So what’s the point of this “dilemma?”

    Also:

    Giving up on Ukraine could only encourage China to try its hand at invading Taiwan.

    Furthermore, Biden has already said that the US would go to war to support Taiwan in case of China invading. Before Biden, US policy was ambiguous – at the very least, the US might do so – which was never the case with Ukraine.

    This, in turn, means that the question would not be about supplying Taiwan, it would be about supplying the US military in that conflict, which – naturally – would take precedent over supplying Ukraine if both conflicts were to occur simultaneously. Thus, the question “Could the US supply Taiwan and Ukraine simultaneously?” is immediately moot.

    Finally, if the US military does get involved in a war over Taiwan, would its forces (and by extent Taiwan itself) be protected by the nuclear umbrella? Possibly. That possibility (even if remote) appears to me to constitute a far greater deterrence to China than diverting artillery shells from Ukraine to Taiwan right now.

    In short, Schuler’s initial question makes absolutely zero sense if his actual concern is the protection of Taiwan. I think it’s fair to say that Taiwan’s strategical position therefore isn’t his biggest concern.

    * Which brings me to my concluding point: Schuler (in a comment on his own blog post) is uncritically echoing Russian propaganda:

    It’s also telling that countries which do not have territorial ambitions and/or wish to expel or otherwise suppress their ethnic Russian citizens are lukewarm in their support.

    A statement, I should note, that is contradicted by his own graph depicting bilateral aid to Ukraine by various countries as a percentage of GDP.

    I wouldn’t trust a word this guy says.

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  3. steve says:

    At the risk of being a bit ghoulish, in a way the Russians invading Ukraine has been a real eye opener for us. It has shown us, eg, that the Javelins are very effective. However, it has also shown us that we would go through them pretty quickly. We have learned lots of other stuff about other weapons systems, but an overriding issue as you point out is that we need better stockpiles and need the ability to quickly manufacture more.

    On a side note the pro-Russian elements have been making claims about ethnic Russians being treated poorly in places like Latvia or Estonia as well as Ukraine so I finally got around to reading on the topic. I think people tend to forget how badly the Russians treated people in the countries they took over and formed into the USSR. In those small countries like Latvia they either killed or deported hundreds of thousands of people, then imported Russians to replace them. This went on into the 50s. They pretty much decimated, per the original meaning of the word, those places. Once those countries achieved independence 40 years later the people weren’t happy about being decimated so did they take the opportunity to deport or kill the Russians who occupied their country? No. By and large the only requirements they made was that to be a citizen the Russians had to learn the language and pass a history test, which many of them did. However, many of the occupying Russians have refused and Russia has used that as pretext to claim the ethnic Russians are being abused.

    Then you have the statues. In some places the Russians put up statues to their war heroes. Oddly enough the native Latvians, Estonians, etc dont seem to think the people who decimated their countries arent really heroes, so they have removed some of them. The ethnic Russians riot over it. This is also pretext for the Russians to claim abuse.

    Steve

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  4. drj says:

    @steve:

    Regarding ethnic Russians being treated poorly in the Baltics, here is a recent article about Russians in Latvia having to take a language test in order to avoid expulsion:

    The government now demands a language test from the 20,000 people who live in the country but took Russian passports after giving up Latvian-issued documents

    I’m not the biggest fan of language tests, but when people had the choice between being Latvian or Russian citizens, they took Russian nationality.

    Despite that, they could have let go of their imperial mindset and learn a bit of the local language at any time in the thirty years after 1991. But even that was too much trouble.

    Choices have consequences.

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  5. DK says:

    @drj:

    Taiwan isn’t being invaded right now. So what’s the point of this “dilemma?”

    Also:

    Giving up on Ukraine could only encourage China to try its hand at invading Taiwan.

    Seems obvious but some folks love complicated thought experiments.

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  6. @drj:

    A statement, I should note, that is contradicted by his own graph depicting bilateral aid to Ukraine by various countries as a percentage of GDP.

    This made me go look. I am not sure what point Dave is trying to make, but you are correct: the graph seems to substantially contradict his point.

    (and for bonus points, nice to see that Drew remains consistent).

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  7. steve says:

    drj- Thanks, I missed that. As you note, they have had over 30 years to adapt and this was only done after Russia started invading the neighbors. In my readings they often quote the Russians living in places like Latvia. They will say stuff like “my Russia”. I think its pretty clear that a lot of those people believe they are superior due to their Russian heritage and would likely have a primary allegiance to Russia. They like the benefits of living in a freer (and probably wealthier) country but dont want to give up Russian identity. Russia being the country that decimated the places they occupied.

    Steve

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  8. dazedandconfused says:

    There isn’t much in common between China and Russia. We seem to be conflating the two due to ingrained cold war thinking. There isn’t any obvious motivation for China to suddenly want to re-form the world, they’ve configured themselves very well to take advantage of it as it is.

    Could this be the tendency of people to conflate things they don’t understand? Like pyramids and UFOs? I suspect it may be.

    I would not be the least surprise if China is stunned by the accusations they are about to take Taiwan simply because the Russians invaded Ukraine, and constantly button-holing them on the topic could be highly counter productive.

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  9. James Joyner says:

    @dazedandconfused: I think most observers seem them as very different actors. But Beijing has made no bones that they consider reunion with Taiwan as an existential issue. They seem patient about it but have sent signals that they want it to happen within the next five years.

  10. dazedandconfused says:

    @James Joyner:

    Debatable. If the signal you are referring to is the call for the Chinese military to acquire the ability, even Milley says those comments are about capability, not intent. We would certainly insist our military be capable of over-running an island close ashore that we viewed as something that could be used as a missile base against us someday.

    https://news.usni.org/2021/06/23/milley-china-wants-capability-to-take-taiwan-by-2027-sees-no-near-term-intent-to-invade

    Was there something else?

  11. Andy says:

    I think some commenters are missing the point, which is the issue of having the industrial capacity to sustain forces (ours or someone else’s) in a war.

    The fact is that the US has long assumed that wars would be fought and decisively won relatively quickly. To enable this, we keep warfighting stockpiles that will sustain full operations of a couple of months, and then have continuous low-level production to satisfy attrition, training use, turnover, and to build up stockpiles after a major conflict.

    The war in Ukraine breaks that model. When Dave Schuler says, “At this point the U. S. isn’t able to supply arms to Ukraine at the pace at which the country needs them.” he’s just stating a fact. We’ve been supplying Ukraine out of existing US, NATO, and allies stockpiles because we lack the production capacity to meet Ukraine’s needs.

    It seems to be lost on some, but the obvious consequence of that is it’s unsustainable. The war needs to end or have a ceasefire before our stockpiles run out, or we have to increase defense production massively. The former is very unlikely, and the latter takes a lot of time and money.

    Furthermore, I think Dave’s point about the US burden compared to allies just proves this point. Most of NATO has long underinvested in defense. Their stockpiles are, collectively, smaller, and their defense industry is anemic. While there has been some talk and promises to change this, the hill for Europe is an even bigger climb, and their domestic politics (excepting the Baltics, Poland, and a couple of other small countries) is not amenable to big increases in defense spending.

    One can want to support Ukraine and give them everything one thinks they need, but one still has to deal with the hard realities and limitations of actually doing that, which is going to require substantially more defense spending – and not just over the short term – along with some strategic risk while capacity builds up.

    Add in a potential conflict over Taiwan, and all these issues compound.

    And the thing is, the DoD and Congress knew this was all a problem. In the war in Libya in 2011, the US ran low on several types of munitions, which came out in after-action reports. That was a short and “easy” war…

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  12. Andy says:

    I think some commenters are missing the point, which is the issue of having the industrial capacity to sustain forces (ours or someone else’s) in a war.

    The fact is that the US has long assumed that wars would be fought and decisively won relatively quickly. To enable this, we keep warfighting stockpiles that will sustain full operations of a couple of months, and then have continuous low-level production to satisfy attrition, training use, turnover, and to build up stockpiles after a major conflict.

    The war in Ukraine breaks that model. When Dave Schuler says, “At this point the U. S. isn’t able to supply arms to Ukraine at the pace at which the country needs them.” he’s just stating a fact. We’ve been supplying Ukraine out of existing US, NATO, and allies stockpiles because we lack the production capacity to meet Ukraine’s needs.

    It seems to be lost on some, but the obvious consequence of that is it’s unsustainable. The war needs to end or have a ceasefire before our stockpiles run out, or we have to increase defense production massively. The former is very unlikely, and the latter takes a lot of time and money.

    Furthermore, I think Dave’s point about the US burden compared to allies just proves this point. Most of NATO has long underinvested in defense. Their stockpiles are, collectively, smaller, and their defense industry is anemic. While there has been some talk and promises to change this, the hill for Europe is an even bigger climb, and their domestic politics (excepting the Baltics, Poland, and a couple of other small countries) is not amenable to big increases in defense spending. So it’s likely to remain the case that the US will carry the vast majority of the burden.

    One can want to support Ukraine and give them everything one thinks they need, but one still has to deal with the hard realities and limitations of actually doing that, which is going to require substantially more defense spending – and not just over the short term – along with some strategic risk while capacity builds up.

    Add in a potential conflict over Taiwan, and all these issues compound.

    And the thing is, the DoD and Congress knew this was a problem. In the war in Libya in 2011, the US ran low on several types of munitions, which came out in after-action reports. That was a short and “easy” war…

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  13. JohnSF says:

    If you are fighting China on land in Taiwan, you are doing it wrong.
    If you are not, the systems required are totally different to those required re. Ukraine.
    Except perhaps for Patriot systems.

    The claim that the US is the overwhelming supporter of Ukraine is debateable.
    It has supplied most military assistance, as it has much larger stockpiles.
    (Though I might note it has still not supplied one single battle tank)
    However, Europe has supplied more financial aid; which is nearly as vital as weapons to sustaining Ukraine.
    As was also the massive, but little reported, European effort over the winter to ship the electrical and rail components needed to repair electrical and transport grids.

    It’s true that rebuilding munitions production will take time. But I still suspect less than some people think.
    It’s also true that Europe has long played not so much second as third or fourth fiddle to the US in defence power.
    Though it spends rather more than a lot of Americans tend to guess.
    2021: US $714 bn; Euro-NATO $310 bn; China c.$250bn; Russia c.$80bn
    Difference form the US is spending: Europeans do not maintain a full nuclear triad, intercontinental bombers, multiple carrier battle-groups and amphibious expeditionary fleets, or global air/sea logistics.
    And the difference in spending effect per unit spent: 30 separate national establishments, procurement systems etc etc.
    Imagine if the US depended on combining separate armed forces and ministries of defence for each state!

    As I repeatedly say to Americans on this topic: do you really, really want a separate European full-spectrum superpower with a single procurement and command structure?
    Be careful what you wish for.
    The interests of a hypothetical “European Superpower” might not necessarily always align with those of the US.

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  14. DK says:

    @JohnSF:

    As I repeatedly say to Americans on this topic: do you really, really want a separate European full-spectrum superpower with a single procurement and command structure?

    Um, yes? Do not the pros outweigh the cons? I do think it’s in US interests for Europe to take the lead in securing its own defense. What’s the counter?

    I don’t buy that China is a bigger threat than Russia, because Xi is more rational than Putin, who increasingly seems out to lunch. And at any rate, a hot war with China seems less sustainable than a proxy war with Russia that deters China. If we don’t have the firepower — and the will — to help Europe defend itself by proxy, what on earth makes anyone think we could directly confront China over a much less capable Taiwan?

    Nor do I think our allies would be as quick to defend Taiwan as they have Ukraine. As pointed out, much of Europe is all-in on Ukraine, financially and otherwise. They wouldn’t send as much help to Ukraine. And the footdraggers like Germany? Pfft. Good luck with them.

  15. JohnSF says:

    @DK:
    Consider:
    “EuroSuperpower” sends expeditionary force to “defend” Arabia. Insists that to stabilise international currency exchange, all oil transactions must henceforth be conducted in Euros.
    “EuroSuperpower” says that Israel must surrender nuclear weapons, on pain of pain.
    “EuroSuperpower” has cosy chat with China, on basis it don’t give a tuppenny damn on a Tuesday about Taiwan.
    “EuroSuperpower” has friendly alliancey talks with Brazil or Mexico or Canada or whoever.
    Iterate.

    It’s really good to be the solitary superpower, and a real PITA when you’re not, any more.
    See UK history post-1814 to date.

  16. DK says:

    @JohnSF:

    It’s really good to be the solitary superpower

    Is it? US history post-2001 to date begs to differ.

    I understand the UK’s ego might be bruised over the lost of their colonialist empire, but so what. It might be nice to be a sole superpower so the old men in your country can thump their chests and feel masculine about their greatness, but no one flew a plane into Buckingham Palace. The UK will just have to grow up and find a sense of identity not predicated on subjugating brown people.

  17. JohnSF says:

    @DK:
    LOL
    Perhaps I should have been clearer.
    My point was that the UK was *NOT* the sole Great Power; perhaps I should have referred to the entire, first European, then global, dynamics.
    They were not stable; for World War megadeath values of not stable.
    And it was not just a “wicked European” thing either.
    Both the US and Japan when they entered the arena were every bit as prone to periodic belligerent in their localities as European countries had been.

    In my opinion, the UK is better off as a post-imperial country in a European context; hence my regret about Brexit.

  18. drj says:

    @DK:

    I think you’re being a bit insular. There is more to being a superpower than to be able to bomb the Middle East.

    There are also softer forms of power, such always supplying the president of the World Bank, the first deputy director of the IMF, and generally getting your way in General Assembly of the UN.

    In addition, other powerful nations (the Euros, Japan, South Korea) are largely discouraged from military adventurism because their militaries are pretty much subservient to US military commanders (through NATO and other treaties). Naturally, this is good for the international order and for trade.

    Then, there’s the fact that the dollar is the world’s premier reserve currency. That’s pretty much the only thing that keeps the national debt serviceable (at 129% of GDP) and what prevents the international trade deficit (currently ~ 9%) from being a real problem.

    (For comparison sake: debt to GDP ratio is 84% for the EU. It currently also has a ~ 9% trade surplus rather than deficit.)

    The moment the US stops being the West’s military sugar daddy and other developed countries might start questioning the dominance of the dollar, that’s when the economic chickens will come home to roost.

    Naturally, there will also be certain advantages when the US won’t need to carry the rest of the developed world, but it’s certainly not going to be free.

    Although I’m not an economist, looking at some of these top-line numbers doesn’t exactly fill me with a lot of confidence in that regard.

    ETA: Another way to put this is that previous administrations more or less knew what they were doing (and what they were buying).

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