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OPINION:
Last week in Singapore, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “The threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.” He also reiterated the U.S. concern that President Xi Jinping directed his forces to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027.
We are at this point largely because of China’s sustained investment in military capabilities and technologies over more than 30 years. As a direct result, Beijing has succeeded in eroding America’s ability to defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan. With America’s deterrence withering, the risk of a conflict is growing. Only a persistent and resourced American and allied effort can reverse this dangerous trend.
Complicating this response, the United States and Taiwan must simultaneously prepare for the most dangerous scenario — a cross-strait invasion or a full-scale blockade — and the most likely scenario: a comprehensive, cyber-enabled economic warfare campaign. The U.S. and Taiwan must work together to make Taiwan siege-proof and protect America’s ability to mobilize and project power.
Siege-proofing Taiwan requires enhancing its ability to defend itself. No country can do more to prepare Taiwan for this than Taiwan. To confront the most dangerous scenarios, Taiwan must properly resource its military forces, increasing defense spending to 3% of gross domestic product in 2025 and 5% by 2028. These resources should be used to build counterintervention ground forces to oppose a cross-strait invasion and to fund air and naval capabilities to oppose a blockade. Deterrence will work only if Taiwan credibly prepares for both scenarios.
Organizing and equipping Taiwan’s forces will also require the United States to be a more effective partner. The stories of egregious delays in the delivery of military sales to Taiwan are not anecdotal; they are persistent. Because the United States is the only country that sells weapons to Taiwan, these delays prevent Taiwan from fielding the right forces.
Alongside fixing its military sales program, Washington should maximize its military assistance programs to Taiwan. Taiwan is too small to handle the China challenge alone. U.S. assistance of $2 billion to $3 billion annually would be crucial for Taipei but pocket lint for the Pentagon.
The United States should also establish a stockpile program, similar to those the United States maintains in Israel and Korea, building and filling pre-positioned munition storage facilities in Taiwan. It is much easier to quickly deploy weapons already in theater than to move shipments from Texas to Taiwan.
Similarly, America should expand its training and exercise programs with Taiwan and start by doubling the size of the embedded joint training team. The objective of this training would be to rapidly elevate U.S.-Taiwan force interoperability.
Alongside these military-oriented preparations, Taiwan must prepare for that most likely scenario: a cyber and economic campaign to break Taiwan’s societal resilience and force Taipei to bend the knee.
To counter this, Taipei must increase the resilience of its energy, communications and finance sectors, improve cybersecurity readiness, and build counterinfluence operations capabilities to thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s attacks along multiple axes.
The second line of effort is about the United States: protecting America’s ability to respond to and win a war in the Western Pacific.
China is pre-positioning disruptive and destructive cyber capabilities in U.S. critical infrastructure and developing cruise, ballistic and hypersonic missiles that can impact the U.S. homeland. Beijing wants to disrupt America’s ability to fight. We must not let this happen.
The best way for China to defeat America is for Beijing to prevent the U.S. military from reaching the battlefield. We must be resilient against Chinese cyberattacks on rail lines, airspace systems and ports to ensure the Pentagon can reliably move forces from forts to ports.
America also must build its societal resilience against Chinese malign influence. Last year, Congress took a critical step by requiring the sale of TikTok. Any White House effort to “save” the platform must ensure that its owner, Chinese company ByteDance, is divested of its control over the algorithm and its ability to corrupt the information American citizens consume.
Washington must also defend the homeland from Chinese missiles. President Trump’s Golden Dome effort could be a significant first step if it invests in a long-term, space-based approach and hypersonic defense. Right now, the U.S. military has no answer to China’s capabilities.
The United States and Taiwan have been losing ground in their ability to deter and defeat CCP aggression, but it is not too late to reverse this trend. Building up Taiwan’s offensive and defensive warfighting capabilities and cyberdefense capacity will improve the nation’s societal resilience. If this is coupled with targeted investments in U.S. critical infrastructure security and cyber and missile defense, the two countries can and will strengthen their ability to fight and win against China.
• Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery (retired) is a senior fellow and a senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served for 32 years in the U.S. Navy, and his final assignment was as director of operations (J3) at U.S. Pacific Command.
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