Four-Star General on What’s Missing in U.S. Taiwan Strategy | Gen. Charles Flynn (Ret.)
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So when I look at the map, I see people, I see terrain, I see borders, and I see sovereignty.
When I look at, when others look at the map, and traditionally, I think this has been part of our challenge in the United States, we look at the map and we see blue.
We see an ocean and we see air, and we say, well, we can solve this problem with, you know, more ships, more subs, more airplanes, more jets, more precision-guided munitions, more satellites.
Look, I'm not against a large U.S. Navy and a large U.S. Air Force and all the other capabilities that have to come with things, platforms.
In fact, we need them.
Why?
Because they do only what the United States can do, which is keep the global commons open.
What I'm saying is that region is a joint and it's a multinational problem.
It's a joint and multinational theater, and it can only be solved by joint and multinational applications in all domains.
That includes the land forces.
The predominant force in Asia is its armies.
I'll go through a couple of facts.
India, 80% of its military is its army.
Indonesia, 75%.
Thailand, 75%.
Vietnam, 80%.
Heck, the Philippines, 70% of its military is its army, has more divisions than the U.S. Army does.
And I could go on and on.
The point I'm making is there's a natural partnering and a persistent state of connection between land forces in the region.
And we cannot discount, we cannot discount those forces in the region that are land-based, that what do they do?
They protect their territorial integrity and they defend their national sovereignty.
And some of those forces are beginning to step up in ways that we never saw before.
And that's one of the things I'm very proud of of my time over the last 10 years out in the region is really trying to tie together a strategic land power network as a counterweight to what the Chinese are doing.
I'll go on a little bit here and also say that some experts, and I'll leave that open, is they often refer to the Chinese Navy as its center of gravity.
And I say, no, it's not its center of gravity.
Why?
Because the military definition is that which you need in order to achieve your objective.
My view is you can't invade Taiwan with the Chinese Navy and the Chinese Air Force.
You actually have to deliver an invasion force, and that is its Chinese army.
That's the PLAA, of which there are many of them.
And my point is that we have a way of increasing the indications and warnings to our national command authority by watching the army.
Why?
Because the army, it actually has to mobilize, move, combat configure, combat load, and then get across the Taiwan Strait in order to seize, hold, and subjugate the people of Taiwan.
Now, the last time we did something like that successfully was the Incheon Landing.
It is a highly, highly complex operation.
And the point I'm making here is the naval incursions and the air incursions are happening every day at alarming rates.
And that keeps the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy really engaged every day, not to mention Japanese, Korean, and of course Taiwan and others.
But my point here is that if we get command and control, we get intelligence collection forward along with sustainment, along with protection, and we tie together, tie together the synergy between the forces in the region on the land, then we can impose dilemmas on the Chinese that heretofore we've not put on them.
If you want to understand if they're going to mobilize that PLA army, then you've got to watch the PLA army because it will take time for them to actually move from their garrisons to the coast, load those vessels and get across.
You're not going to see and have that kind of time with air power and naval power from the Chinese.
There'll be some indicators, but when they start moving that army, then there's a problem.
Things need to stop very quickly.
So what keeps me up at night, what keeps me up at night is their ability to actually pull that off in 96 hours.
That's what keeps me up at night.
So anything that we can do to slow down that timeline, feed doubt, sow paranoia, and introduce new dilemmas to the Chinese leadership,