US Military Failed Miserably In Wargame Simulating Chinese Invasion On Taiwan
TAIWAN - Top US General has said that the United States military "failed miserably" during a wargame in October simulating a Chinese attack on Taiwan, leaving the military pondering the changes that need to be made to the US and Taiwan joint strategy.
During a speech on Monday in front of the Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI), Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman and US Air Force General John Hyten stated that the U.S. Army carried out a joint warfighting strategy during a wargame in October.
Hyten stated, "Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it."
Technologically, China has increased dramatically and their navy has been aggressively practicing an invasion on Taiwan as of late, as well as ramping up emboldened threats about an invasion on the island to 'reunify' it to mainland China.
Hyten stated that the advantage that the U.S. has is "shrinking fast, and China is running the race very quickly and we have to figure out how to stay ahead".
After the failed wargame in October, Hyten stated that the United States military has been reevaluating their strategy. The new strategy they have come up with "not quite a clean-sheet approach, because you can never take a clean sheet of paper if you want to get between now and 2030, you have to start with what you have".
Hyten stated that the new strategy addresses just how to "aggregate" military forces for a 'significant' effect" as well as then "disaggregate to survive in any kind of threat environment".
"We always aggregate to fight, and aggregate to survive", Hyten stated. "But in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you’re aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you’re vulnerable".
Hyten talked about ways to improve "functional battles", the first of which are "contested logistics" focused on delivering supplies and fuel to front line troops.
The second being "joint fires". "You have to aggregate to mass fires, but it doesn’t have to be a physical aggregation. It could be a virtual aggregation for multiple domains; acting at the same time under a single command structure allows the fires to come in on anybody. It allows you to disaggregate to survive".
The third "functional battle" he talked about is Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) which involves having centralized information, or access to information from domains covering the entire battlefield area, but disaggregated so that if the centralized information structure were targeted the whole fighting force would not lose access to the information.
"The goal is to be fully connected to a combat cloud that has all information that you can access at any time, anyplace." Hyten said. Fully connected, but without the ability for the enemy to compromise the data through an attack on a centralized location.
For the last "functional battle" Hyten spoke of "information advantage" which he stated is really just a sum of the first three "functional battles". Hyten said, "If we can do the things I just described, the United States and our allies will have an information advantage over anybody that we could possibly face".