U.S. Military Readiness and China

A new Heritage Foundation report, TIDALWAVE, modeling a U.S.–China war over Taiwan with an AI‑enabled war game, concludes that U.S. forces would reach operational culmination in less than half the time required for China, suffering catastrophic losses in aircraft, fuel throughput and sustainment infrastructure within the first 30–60 days and still failing to prevent an estimated $10 trillion global economic shock. The authors say the model uses only unclassified, open‑source government, academic, industry and commercial data but that senior Trump administration national‑security officials asked Heritage to black out some specifics before public release, arguing that adversaries could use the details either to plug their own vulnerabilities or exploit U.S. and allied weaknesses. An unredacted version has been provided to authorized U.S. government recipients, while the public report still emphasizes that rapid platform attrition, brittle logistics, concentrated basing and limited industrial surge capacity would likely force an early U.S. breaking point in a high‑intensity Indo‑Pacific conflict. A Department of War spokesperson declined to discuss the redaction talks, reiterated that the Pentagon does not endorse outside war‑game analyses, and stressed its broader concern about how aggregated unclassified information can threaten operational security. The episode highlights both the severity of independent assessments of U.S. readiness in a Taiwan scenario and the administration’s unease about publicly airing detailed vulnerability maps, a tension already fueling debate in defense circles and online over whether the redactions reflect legitimate OPSEC or a desire to bury uncomfortable warnings about force posture and industrial base limits.