Skip to content
Opinion
Hal Brands

Ukraine War Shows the US Military Isn’t Ready for War With China

Providing Kyiv with weapons has depleted the Pentagon’s munitions alarmingly, and defending Taiwan would be far more costly.

Surprise.

Surprise.

Source: Keystone/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

By

“Fools learn by experience,” the very quotable German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once remarked. “Wise men learn from other people’s experience.” It is always better to glean hard lessons from someone else’s war than from one’s own.

Today, the US needs to take a vital lesson from the war in Ukraine — as well as from its own experience, generations ago, in World War II. If America wants to win a potential great-power war with China a few years from now, it had better start rearming far more seriously before the shooting starts.