Heritage Foundation researchers harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to argue in a new report that the U.S. is not prepared for a war with China.
“We believe a war is coming,” says Rob Greenway, Director of the Allison Center for National Security at the D.C. think tank. “We believe we are not prepared for it. We have proven we’re not prepared for it.”
This weakness actually “incentivizes the Chinese,” Greenway told The Daily Signal.
Greenway and his team at Heritage used artificial intelligence to simulate an extended conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific, in order to identify vulnerabilities for both the U.S. and China. The report also provides recommendations to the U.S. government.
Data collection and analysis for the 375-page report, titled “TIDALWAVE,” took about a year.
“No one has done this before because it’s such a heavy lift,” said Greenway, who also served on Trump’s National Security Council in the president’s first administration. “Without leveraging technology and figuring out how best to make it work for our purposes, it would have been impossible.”
The exercise uncovered previously unidentified vulnerabilities for both U.S. and China, he noted, and thus parts of the report were redacted for national security purposes.
The Heritage researchers who led the project have briefed government officials and members of Congress on the report.
“The People’s Republic of China poses the most significant threat that the U.S. has faced in decades, yet despite such a broadly accepted fact, we remain dangerously unprepared to counter this adversary,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said.
“Heritage is committed to applying the latest technology to undertake unprecedented challenges and provide solutions to the most pressing national security threats we face,” Roberts added.
Findings and Vulnerabilities
Through the research process, Greenway says he was surprised to uncover the extent to which the U.S. has not corrected “deficiencies.”
For example, in a conflict with China, critical U.S. munitions would begin to be unavailable after about a week and would be completely exhausted after 35-40 days in most cases, the exercise found.
But Greenway says he was also surprised to learn “the extent that China is vulnerable – far more so than I would have expected.”
It is also clear from the research that U.S. partners and allies need to play a larger role in preparing to guard against Chinese aggression, he said.
The “cost” of a U.S. conflict with China would be “massive enough to push the entire planet into a global recession,” Greenway said, adding that disincentivizing China from starting a war is critical.
Addressing Vulnerabilities
Shortly before the report’s release, Trump announced plans to ask for a $500 billion increase to the U.S. defense budget for 2027. If Congress approves that increase, Greenway expressed hope that the new Heritage report is “going to inform” decisions related to future defense spending.
The money needed to fix the U.S. vulnerabilities is “a fraction” of the sum Trump is calling on Congress to approve for defense spending, according to Anna Gustafson, a research assistant in the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation.
Solving the deficiencies would take an estimated three to five years and cost about $300 billion, Gustafson noted.
Greenway stated that the current goals are for Congress to approve the required defense spending, and for the Trump administration, more specifically the intelligence community and the Departments of War, Commerce, and Treasury, “to exploit the Chinese vulnerabilities that we identified.”
In short, the aim is for the U.S. to have “sufficient resources to engage in protracted conflict and win,” and for China to “have insufficient resources,” he said.
“We are confident that, as a result of doing this work,” Greenway says, “departments and agencies for our government and Congress are going to act.”
