Erik Prince: I'm Not So Worried About China Militarily

2025-04-11 07:01:26

(MENAFN- Asia Times) The first installment featured critical lessons of the Ukraine war. The second focuses on possible kinetic conflict between the US and China, over Taiwan as many expect, and how US expeditionary forces in the North- and West Pacific might fare against a rapidly arming China.

“I'm not so worried about China militarily,” says Erik Prince. But he warns against blundering into“a dumb, unnecessary war over Taiwan” with a US Navy that's not ready to fight. What's required is a leaner, more lethal US military equipped by a reformed and innovative US industrial base.

Excerpts from a Prince speech at Hillsdale College, his alma mater, and an interview with Hillsdale President Larry Arnn follow:

China has an enormous industrial base – 40 to 50 times, by some estimates 200 times, the shipbuilding rate that we have; obviously in drones [production] and components, in a lot of those things that hollowed out the Midwest. Some misguided trade efforts over the last 30 years have moved all that manufacturing to China, and that has definitely accrued to their [China's] advantage.

But I'm not so worried about China militarily, I am worried if we blunder into a dumb, unnecessary war in Taiwan. The US Navy is not ready to fight tonight. They are plagued by bad leadership, a lot of misguided training policies, and we spent a lot of money and there's not nearly the readiness that there should be.

Four and a half years ago, we lost the 40,000-ton amphibious assault ship, the Bonhomme Richard. A fire started while it was on pier side, in repair, at her home base in San Diego. It took the Navy and took the crew an hour and a half to get first water on that fire, on an active warship. The ship burned up at the dock because of incompetence of the crew and the responding fire services.

That's the kind of nonsense, that's a billion, billion-and-a-half-dollar write-off. And that's a big ship, bigger than any aircraft carrier we used in World War II, for example.

Now, if the PLA [China's People's Liberation Army] would attack Taiwan, the way they would do it is they'd do a blockade, they'd surround it; they've been exercising that consistently, with no pushback from the US at all, not even any unconventional means to deter them.

And if they do that, so what is the Navy going to do? They're going to respond with aircraft carriers. And they'd run a $12 billion aircraft carrier within range of thousands of precision missiles that the Chinese can fire, and that's going to result in a very bad image of a US Navy aircraft carrier, with 5,000 of our citizens on board, smoking or worse.

And that ties directly into the geopolitical consequences that we would face then. Because remember the British Empire, after they defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar [in] 1804, ruled the waves for the next century and then they got spanked at the Battle of Jutland during World War I by the Imperial German Navy, just off the coast of Denmark.

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