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December 19, 2000 MEMORANDUM
TO: OPINION
LEADERS FROM:
TOM DONNELLY,
Deputy Director One of the prime tasks
for the incoming Bush Administration will be to oversee the conduct of
the second Quadrennial Defense Review, the document that outlines U.S.
military strategy and sets forth the plans and programs to execute that
strategy. To make the 2001 QDR a success, it is essential that the Pentagon
define the defense of Taiwan as its central scenario for potential major
theater conflicts. The Taiwan scenario is crucially important for two reasons. The first is that China now looms as the single most likely and most powerful “strategic competitor” - to use President-elect Bush’s term - to the United States in the coming decades. Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed Pentagon thinking on the issue last week when he described Beijing as a potential “21st-century Soviet Union,” driven by aggressive policies and embarked upon an ambitious program of military modernization. The Defense Department
must begin now to seriously contemplate the implications of a future conflict
over Taiwan. Indeed, this may be the best way to prevent such a conflict
from occurring. The second reason
is that defending Taiwan would require very different kinds of forces
than those needed for the large-war scenarios of past defense reviews:
a war on the Korean peninsula or another Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Although
both those scenarios remain valid measures of U.S. military capabilities,
a future Taiwan conflict would increase the importance of new kinds of
forces, notably those capable of long-range precision strikes and defense
against ballistic missile attack. Defending Taiwan will require a significant
transformation of current U.S. force structure. China’s recent defense
“white paper” makes it clear that the People’s Liberation
Army wishes to exploit new technologies to threaten Taiwan; the upcoming
QDR must take these developments into account.
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