A recently leaked Pentagon report has projected heavy US losses should it intervene in a Taiwan conflict, highlighting Washington’s growing anxiety over Beijing’s rapidly improving capabilities, according to defence experts.
In a classified assessment known as the Overmatch brief, the Pentagon has catalogued the People’s Liberation Army’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites and identified the US military’s supply chain choke points, according to a December 8 opinion article by The New York Times.
The brief is a comprehensive review of US military power prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and delivered most recently to top White House officials in the past year.
In war games described in the Overmatch brief, American warships such as the USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, were “often destroyed”, according to the article.
It added that China had amassed an arsenal of around 600 hypersonic weapons that were difficult to intercept and capable of travelling at five times the speed of sound.
“China now has enough missiles to potentially destroy many of America’s advanced weapons before they come near Taiwan,” the article states, citing information from the Congressional Research Service and the Pentagon.
The report did not disclose whether the US was able to fend off PLA attacks in the war games, but the assessment painted an unfavourable picture for American forces.
When a senior Biden national security official received the Overmatch brief in 2021, he turned pale as he realised that “every trick we had up our sleeve, the Chinese had redundancy after redundancy”, The New York Times said.
Former Taiwanese navy lieutenant commander Lu Li-shih said the war games featured in the Pentagon assessment appeared to be “reliable” and more accurate than similar ones conducted by US think tanks.
In 2023, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) developed a war game simulating a PLA amphibious invasion of Taiwan and ran it 24 times. In most scenarios, American, Taiwanese and Japanese forces defeated a conventional invasion and preserved Taiwan’s autonomy – though at a very high cost, according to CSIS.
“China is developing area-denial capabilities, and the PLA is not without means to counter external interference, including various so-called carrier-killer weapons,” Lu said. “In addition, its own aircraft carriers could help keep the United States beyond the second island chain.”
Fu Qianshao, a Chinese military analyst, said the assessment reflected long-standing anxiety among US scholars and strategic circles. He added that Washington had fallen short due to strategic miscalculations and declining defence production capacity.
“The anxiety is understandable because the facts are already clear,” Fu said. “If the US were to intervene militarily over Taiwan, it knows the likely outcome – fighting at China’s doorstep, where the PLA now holds the advantage after years of strengthening its A2/AD capabilities.”
A2/AD – short for anti-access/area denial – refers to a military strategy designed to deter external intervention by restricting an adversary’s access to, and freedom of movement within, a contested area.
On September 3, the PLA unveiled an array of weapons systems during a military parade in Beijing, including next-generation anti-ship missiles believed to offer greater speed and precision than earlier models, further reinforcing China’s A2/AD posture.
Chang Yen-ting, a retired Taiwanese air force lieutenant general, said the strategic value of aircraft carriers was steadily declining. If the US deployed Ford-class carriers within the first island chain, they would face multiple attack vectors, he said, adding that PLA weapons such as DF-26 anti-ship missiles were their “natural enemies”, according to a report by Taiwan’s China Times.
The New York Times article came out days after Washington unveiled a revised National Security Strategy (NSS) on December 4. The new strategy document, issued by the administration of US President Donald Trump, departs from Biden’s explicit framing of China as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge”.
Instead, the strategy adopts a more conciliatory tone, emphasising efforts to “rebalance America’s economic relationship with China”. It states that in the long term, maintaining American economic and technological pre-eminence is the surest way to deter and prevent a large-scale military conflict.
“Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority,” the document said, adding that the United States would maintain its long-standing declaratory policy opposing unilateral changes to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.
Diao Daming, a professor at the school of international studies at Renmin University, said the narrative of the war game was ultimately driven by calculations to maximise institutional interests.
“Against the backdrop of overall strategic retrenchment in the National Security Strategy, the military has a clear intention to safeguard its budgetary scale and levels of strategic resource investment,” Diao said.
In its approach to China, Diao added, this year’s NSS marked a shift from strategic rebalancing to economic rebalancing, and from a Cold War-style framing of existential confrontation to major power competition.
The strategy’s language on Taiwan, he said, reflected concern over – and responsiveness to – potential changes in the regional situation.