Pentagon War Games Show US Would Lose Aircraft Carriers in Potential China-Taiwan Conflict, Secret Report Reveals

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.

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.

That was Millennium Challenge 2002.

The real story wasn't the outcome f the war game and what was made of it. The real story was about the leadership and management failures going on behind the scenes. One side of the story, the common one in public, is that after Riper cleaned everyone's clocks the game was rigged so badly Riper quit.

The other side of the story, is Riper had a huge chip on his shoulder and exploited the rules so much he was undermining the entire purpose of the exercise. Riper went so far outside the constraints to run the exercise he was shutting it down. In video game terms, he was using "cheat codes" so OPFORs could win so lopsidedly it was over before BLUFOR could get started on any objectives or training at all. Then Riper wanted "game over, go home" on what was a a month long test and evaluation exercise, not a one side wins, game over except for debriefings.

So just how did Riper take out a carrier group?

When the simulation had his command and control taken out, he ignored it and acted like he had it anyway. He said he was using couriers on motorcycles, which acted exactly the same as radio, Including going across water and to aircraft in flight. Ground observers with binoculars wrre as good as radar and computerized command and control, with the advantage of avoiding BLUFOR's SIGINT.

In the computer simulation, he moved the US fleet from where it actually was to somewhere else, and had speed boats, Cessna's and fishing vessels carrying missiles bigger anything the could carry attack and kamikaze into the US ships, all hitting the US fleet simultaneously the US fleet so hard they lost 19 ships in ten minutes. The navy had no idea this was going on until they were told they lost. The small boats were all simulated, the USN crews did not face or see any in real life.

That isn't stretching the rules a little or taking advantage a loophole or two. He was flat out cheating. The people running the game were letting OPFOR run wild in coding the game and had to put the brakes on that to avoid wasting a month and a quarter billion dollars.

Previous thread on this:, 8/16/2002, https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/734530/posts?page=14#14, by Gunrunner2:

"There is more to this than the article states.
"The article is championing a maverick general that is trashing a wargame that he lost. Fine. . .but. . .the rest of the story is just as important.
...
"Bottom line: This exercises was not a bunch of guys running around in miles gear or aircraft outfitted with ACMI pods. . .no, it was an exercise to test command and control at a national/theater level. Van Riper better calm down. He may be a great tactician, but he is a lousy national/joint/theater planner/fighter.
"Some “free play” is more than other free play, and when Van Riper was limited as to WMD, he threw a snit fit. Face it, if someone throws WMD our way it is a whole new ball game, with the US going for quick and dirty win—nuke. Van Riper wanted WMD options that would have ended the game. Not good, and if he had that option, then why exercise at all?"

My later comment:

"This wasn't just a war game. It was also a lab for command and control and war-fighting concepts that needed testing. Testing requires controlled environments, and Ripper didn't like the controls. If the game is over on day one, then several years of work gets wasted. That is not realistic either."

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