Posted on 12/11/2025 3:59:00 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Military strategists have long compared warfare to chess, where grand masters plot moves and countermoves across a global board. But what happens when you discover you’ve been studying chess while your opponent has been perfecting an entirely different game? For decades, America’s military might has stood unchallenged, our aircraft carriers projecting power across every ocean, our technology the envy of the world. Yet behind the Pentagon’s classified doors, a disturbing pattern has emerged in recent years.
The rise of China as a military power has transformed from a distant concern to an immediate challenge. While American forces remain spread across the globe, Beijing has focused its resources on one objective: dominating the Pacific. Taiwan, that small island democracy just 100 miles from China’s coast, has become the potential flashpoint that could determine the balance of power for the next century. Our military planners have run countless simulations of a Taiwan conflict, testing strategies, weapons, and resolve.
What they’ve discovered should make every American sit up and pay attention—though I’m betting you haven’t heard about it from the mainstream media. The Pentagon’s most sophisticated war games, designed to test our readiness for a Pacific conflict, have been yielding results that challenge our assumptions about American military superiority. These aren’t peacenik think tanks or academic exercises—these are the military’s own assessments, run by officers who’ve dedicated their lives to defending this nation.
According to a highly classified Pentagon document called the “Overmatch Brief,” recently reported by The Telegraph, the United States military would face catastrophic losses in a war over Taiwan. The assessment was so stark that a national security official under Joe Biden reportedly turned pale upon reviewing it.
From ‘The Telegraph’:
A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”. US reliance on costly, sophisticated weapons leaves it exposed to China’s ability to mass-produce cheaper systems in overwhelming numbers, the highly classified “Overmatch Brief” warns.
Let that sink in for a moment. “Redundancy after redundancy.” We’re essentially bringing a knife to a gunfight—a very expensive, high-tech knife.
The specifics are sobering. Our crown jewel, the USS Gerald R. Ford—a $13 billion aircraft carrier that entered service in 2022—is “often destroyed” in these war game scenarios. China’s arsenal of 600 hypersonic missiles, capable of traveling at five to eight times the speed of sound, would overwhelm our defenses. Meanwhile, the United States has yet to deploy a single hypersonic missile of our own. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Defense Secretary pick, didn’t mince words last year when he said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China.
Yet incredibly, despite these dire assessments, the Pentagon plans to build nine additional Ford-class carriers. The military-industrial complex, now dominated by just five major contractors (down from 50 in the 1990s), continues selling the same expensive, complex weapons systems that these war games show would be sitting ducks in an actual conflict. While China masses cheap drones and missiles, we’re still fighting the last war with billion-dollar behemoths. Does this sound like winning strategy to you?
Now, let me be clear—and maybe a bit cynical here—classified reports have a funny way of surfacing when budgets are being debated and strategies questioned. This leak could be the Pentagon’s way of pushing for the massive modernization funding it wants. Our military has cried wolf before, and somehow America always finds a way to innovate when truly challenged. Remember, this is the same military establishment that spent the Obama and Biden years focusing on pronoun policies and diversity quotas while China was building hypersonic weapons. Perhaps their war game losses say more about leadership priorities than actual capabilities.
But here’s where I get genuinely worried: we can’t dismiss this entirely. The Ukraine conflict has shown how cheap drones can destroy million-dollar tanks, how quantity has a quality all its own. If China can mass-produce weapons that overwhelm our defensive systems, our technological edge means nothing. Thankfully, President Trump seems to understand this, appointing Dan Driscoll as his “drone guy” to modernize our approach. If Pete Hegseth is taking notes—and I hope to God he is—he has the opportunity to break the Pentagon’s addiction to legacy weapons and embrace the future of warfare.
You want to know what I think? The truth is probably somewhere between panic and complacency. Our servicemen and women remain the finest in the world, and American innovation, when properly unleashed, has no equal. But we’ve allowed bureaucratic inertia and contractor interests to guide strategy for too long. This report, whether fully accurate or partly propaganda, should serve as a wake-up call. Not to abandon our strength, but to reimagine it. America didn’t become the arsenal of democracy by fighting yesterday’s wars. If China wants to challenge us, let’s make sure we’re playing the right game—and for God’s sake, let’s make sure we’re winning it.
Sources: The Telegraph, Mail Online
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Shanghai is about 600 miles from Nagasaki.
Hong Kong is about 500 miles from The Philippines.
Taiwan is 130 miles from Fujian.
There’s land upon which aircraft can be based.
I agree, China can build a lot of tonnage of warships. China cannot man those ships and if Xi ordered men onto those ships, the families who depend on those men for their livelihoods would revolt. Maybe not a bloody revolt like we imagine, but a whole lot of people would do the Bai Lan.
And China doesn’t have much flexibility in it’s economy for that.
In ths book "One Hundred Days", Admiral Sandy Woodward, the commander of the Royal Navy fleet that sailed south to retake the Falklands, stated that if Britain had lost jusy one of the two carriers, the operation would have been forced to come to a close.
To me, its seems like this kind of leak is wayyyyyy too convenient. Almost like we wanted it to happen.
The “Kill Chain” for hypersonic weapons is where the war will be fought. Anti-satellite warfare will get messy. I hope George Clooney is servicing a satellite with it happens.
https://cimsec.org/breaking-anti-ship-missile-kill-chain/
“destroy their dams, flood their country”
Someone wrote today that those dams are going to be tough to destroy.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-incredible-story-of-the-dambusters-raid
https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-dambusters-barnes-wallis-and-the-bouncing-bomb/
Did the secret report keep our superior sub force secret? Well at least we have more lady commanders than the CCP.
“China cannot man those ships and if Xi ordered men onto those ships, the families who depend on those men for their livelihoods would revolt.”
~200,000 dead Russians - no revolt
“And China doesn’t have much flexibility in it’s economy for that.”
China has the most flexible economy in the world.
Just curious:
If Commiefornia seceded, would it be Ok for chyna to get involved militarily in their defense? /s
Since I was a teen, I never believed that Taiwan was doing enough for their own defense. Likewise for the others (Japan and Korea).
Quite the test of time, HALF A CENTURY of non-preparation for invasion... /s/s
Has this been deployed?
[Secret Report Reveals]
Leaks, secret reports revealed...
There are traitors within the ranks. Hopefully they will be found out, tried, and punished.
Commercial ships come in later, after a beachhead is secured, sea lanes are protected and ship to shore transfer is established. Chinese planners are dreaming if they think the US will let that happen uncontested.
As I stated, this sounds like mirroring the U.S. onto China, ignoring all the problems the Chinese military has.
Commercial ships are not naval landing craft. China has only 20 landing ships of all types, with a few more building.
Did you see the SinkEx of a conventional US carrier USS America? Despite 4 weeks of above and under sea explosions, a specialized crew had to go onboard and scuttle it. It’s water tight compartments and construction made sinking it damn near impossible. Yes, this was done in 2005, but the ship was built in the 60s.
So, not terribly worried about China. Be alert, of course. Have counter measures, you bet. But don’t count on China sinking a carrier.
Which is why, many do not know— the UK built a fully operational large airport on the island of St. Helena (where they sent Napoleon to die, or be poisoned to death).
The construction was on the order of a Wonder of the World.
Scottish firm Basel Read, constructed a massive project, 12 years ago. Commercial airlines have a devil of a time landing and taking off, phenomenal crosswinds. But not British military.
If you’re interested here’s a video on the details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Udrazvj88c
I am pretty sure a few tomahawks would fare much better than the dam busters in 1944.
Aircraft carriers are particularly hard to sink. Be it with missiles, bombs or torpedoes. And modern damage control makes it even harder. The icing on the cake is that they can be all torn up, but if they can cripple back to a repair port, they can be returned to a serviceable state in just months.
In the meantime, there is a whole lot of ships and boats seeking revenge.
It is true that the stupidest thing a military analysis can do is to underestimate an enemy.
The second stupidest thing a military analysis can do is to overestimate an enemy.
This shouldn’t be a big surprise. Carriers, like every piece of military equipment out there, are ultimately chips to be bet and sacrificed in order to secure a favorable military outcome.
The US lost 13 carriers and hundreds of other naval vessels in WW2. It made up for the losses with a ramp in military spending from 1% to 40% of GDP that saw the construction of new naval yards, the massive expansion of existing ones, and the creation of new methods for building ships in wartime. The shift to a militarized economy, the equivalent today of spending $12T a year on the military, paid for over 6,000 new naval vessels, including 150 new carriers.
That all-out US war effort wasn’t just about ruthlessness in the conduct of war. It was also about enlisting 18m adult males into the armed services, requisitioning the resources to arm, feed and supply them out of the hide of the civilian economy and social spending. Civilian car production ended, rationing was introduced, and 6m housewives entered the workforce in roles made famous by Rosie the Riveter.
While ruthlessness was needed to burn entire districts in German and Japanese cities to the ground, including one day in which 100K Tokyo residents were incinerated (Operation Meetinghouse), it wasn’t sufficient. A US with a 1% military budget couldn’t even defend itself, let alone take the fight to the Axis. A 4% budget would have seen the Axis prevail. Ultimately, the seemingly over-the-top hysteria apparent in the rhetoric of the era served one purpose - to ensure that the American public would accept the great sacrifices to follow, a mustering of 40 cents out of every dollar produced by the economy, and the drafting of almost 1 out of every 2 able-bodied adult males, to ensure that the US could defeat its enemies in Europe and Asia, in that order.
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