Analysis: Taiwan and the Leaked Pentagon Overmatch Brief

TaiwanPlus News

TaiwanPlus speaks to defense expert Guermantes Lailari about his take on the leaked report citing the Pentagon's Overmatch Brief assessing US weaknesses in a conflict against China, and his thoughts on the evolving balance of power in East Asia.

Transcript

00:00The report highlights several vulnerabilities that U.S. forces would face if they were to

00:04fight China. Do you think there are any that are particularly pressing that the U.S. and Taiwan

00:09should be focused on? The real area that I believe needs attention is the area of Taiwan's

00:16reserve forces. Officially, Taiwan has 2 million reservists or people eligible for reserve call-up,

00:25but only about a hundred thousand are trained, which is a problem. And the training is only two

00:30weeks. So there's two things I would strongly recommend. So Taiwan, if Taiwan had its 2 million

00:36reservists trained, it would make a significant difference because China would have a major

00:42headache if every reservist was trained. Of these concerns raised in this report,

00:47are there any that you think Taiwan-U.S. collaboration would be particularly effective

00:51at answering or dealing with? The budget that President Lai suggests is a budget that will

00:59have a part of it that's integrated air defense, so-called T-Dome or Taiwan Dome, right? Which is

01:07a layered air and missile defense system. It's similar to what Israel has. Israel has a layered

01:14tiered missile defense system. So hopefully Taiwan, United States, and Israel will talk about

01:20how important it is to have this kind of a defense system that will protect Taiwan from ballistic

01:29missiles, cruise missiles, short-range missiles, because some of those rockets might be fired from

01:34ships at sea close to Taiwan's coast. What does the timing of the report's release indicate to you,

01:42given all the tensions ongoing in the region right now between China, Taiwan, the U.S., and even Japan?

01:48Assessments are good up to a point, and they're used to sort of energize the system in terms of getting

01:57aware and focused on the problem and trying to deal with it. So it's a good thing, but don't assume that

02:04the outcome is going to be predetermined should China assert itself in the kinetic domain. So

02:12that includes not only the U.S. and Taiwan, but Japan, the Philippines, Australia. Many countries are

02:19threatened by China's action. And the Chinese Navy is larger than the U.S. Navy. The Chinese Coast Guard

02:26is the largest in the world, et cetera, et cetera. So China is not building its maritime fleet to watch

02:35you know, whales jump out of the water. They're designing it for world domination, I'm sorry to say,

02:42but that's a fact. And so the nations of the Indo-Pacific need to deal with it.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended