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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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Translation: Give us more money or we will lose.
China is the major challenge and even NATO knows it but dare not speak openly because of all the business Europe does with China.
Instead, its dump on Russia rage to justify the military buildup demanded by the US in the first place.
Missile swarms.
"I can run wild for six months... after that, I have no expectation of success" - Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on his prospects against the industrial giant of his day, the U.S. He was correct almost down to the day.
A hyper sonic missile would do the job.
434 days old
Created on 2024-10-03
Expires on 2026-10-03
Updated on 2025-10-04
We really need one more patriotic freedom loving MAGA supporting site to give their opinion a Telegraph article of a NYT article.
This is the same China which has not been a significant participant in any major conflict since the end of the Third Indo-China war in the 1990s, which for China was more of a loss than a win. China can attack and blockade Taiwan and make a big mess, using an untested navy. The last time the Chinese navy harassed a Philippines patrol ship, a Chinese destroyed wrecked the bow of a Chinese Coast Guard vessel and likely killed several crew on the bow of the Chinese Coast Guard ship. Not exactly a strong showing for China, outnumbering the Philippines 2:1 with a real warship and scoring own goals on themselves.
Any study the mirror images US strengths onto a potential adversary while ignoring that adversaries strengths and weaknesses is marketing for increased defense spending, not giving up and withdrawing from a potential conflict. There is a lot out there on the problems the Chinese military has, like real power projection. China simply does not have the sea or air transport necessary to invade Taiwan.
Put water between an inner and outer shell.
Laser melts outer shell.
Steam comes out and blocks laser.
Hypersonic missiles will do the trick.
Would have been interesting to see how history would have unfolded had Truman said “Yeah sure, go ahead” when MacArthur requested to use nuclear weapons against Chinese troops entering Korea.
Shoot off a shrapnel shell with fragile iron balls holding phosphorus that will ignite explosive in missile warhead hundreds of feet away from ship.
It would appear that he was a brilliant man.
He wasn't on board with the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he felt that if Japan waited for the Americans to attack when they came to full strength, the shoot-out in Japanese waters that his colleagues envisioned would never take place.
He prophesied (quite correctly) that the Americans would simply get close enough to launch heavy bombers at Japan, and then commence to burn his country to the ground.
We can’t even build cheap drones. We’ve got a contractor problem.
One could put on a silvered metallic warhead cover with a small fin that would spin.
The laser would have to melt much of the cover.
Buy consumer stuff and upgrade it for combat.
Let’s not be too cocky with our HELIOS System. More work needs to be done.
HELIOS is a step toward directed‑energy defenses, but it’s not yet a credible counter to Chinese hypersonic missiles. The technology needs far higher power levels, better tracking, and integration with other missile defense systems before it can realistically neutralize hypersonics.
In 2024, HELIOS successfully engaged a threat‑representative cruise missile, marking progress in directed‑energy weapon development.
But Hypersonic missiles are different. Hypersonic missiles travel at Mach 5+ (over 3,800 mph), far faster than drones or cruise missiles. They can change trajectory mid‑flight, making them harder to track and intercept.
Hypersonics use special coatings to withstand extreme heat. Lasers must deliver immense sustained energy to penetrate these defenses.
For now, HELIOS is more of a proof‑of‑concept and layered defense tool than a silver bullet. Current HELIOS power levels (60 kW) are insufficient to reliably disable hypersonics at operational ranges. Analysts suggest lasers would need to scale into the megawatt class. More work needs to be done.
It’s hard to imagine any professional Naval officer imagining that you can bring carriers into the range of our modern short legged strike aircraft like F-18s or especially F-35s, and that in that range that they are somehow immune.
Subs and large missiles are a serious threat.
I’m not in the retard camp that pretends carriers are obsolete, but in a war against a place like China....we can expect one to be hit. A supercarrier would be damned hard to sink. The ones today are like sinking a hunk of Styrofoam. Not impossible, but very hard. But a devastated one could be taken out of the fight.
“China simply does not have the sea or air transport necessary to invade Taiwan.”
The PRC is the greatest industrial power on Earth.
I suspect it outproduces all the rest of the planet.
This was posted recently:
“In 2024 alone, one Chinese shipbuilder constructed more commercial vessels by tonnage than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II”
My first thought is that we would just send another.
Then I thought better of it. Instead we would just destroy their dams, flood their country, and eliminate their ability to wage war.
China doesn’t want to get into all that. Not over a heaping pile of rubble that was the Taiwanese chip industry.
Edit to add: The U.S. is working aggressively on hypersonic missile defense, with space‑based sensors, new interceptors, and directed‑energy systems under development. But as of late 2025, these are not yet fully operational, meaning hypersonics remain a serious challenge for U.S. defenses.
Lockheed Martin Hypersonic Lab (Huntsville, AL): Opened in 2025 to accelerate hypersonic weapon and defense development. That is part of Trump’s much touted “ Golden Dome “ missile defense system.
Not knowing the power capabilities of 60 kW I assumed the HELIOS System was the solution. With your information, I agree, there is more work needed in the technology.
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