Chinese military forces in the Western Pacific are rehearsing for a campaign to force the unification of Taiwan with mainland China.
That is the conclusion of the top US military officer in the region, who spoke at the Honolulu Defense Forum in Hawaii on 13 February.
“It’s no longer training, it’s rehearsal,” said Admiral Samuel Paparo.
A fighter pilot by training, Paparo now heads the Honolulu-based US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) that overseas Washington’s military operations from India to California.
While Chinese military exercises in and around the Taiwan Strait are nothing new, Paparo says the scope and frequency of those drills indicate a fundamental change in their intent.
“Their aggressive manoeuvres around Taiwan right now are not exercises as they call them,” Paparo says. “They are rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.”
Beijing has steadily increased its military activity around the self-governing island in recent years. Last year Taiwan’s defence ministry said it tracked 153 Chinese military aircraft operating in the airspace around the island over a 24h period in October – a figure believed to be a single-day record.
More recently, a Chinese fighter aggressively intercepted an Australian Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol jet operating in international airspace over the South China Sea on 11 February, prompting a protest from Australia. Such incidents had died down following the summit between former US President Joe Biden and Chinese ruler Xi Jinping in 2022, but prior to this there were a string of similar incidents.
Chinese activity has also pushed farther east toward American territory. In October, US and Canadian air patrols intercepted a joint flight of Chinese and Russian bombers operating off the coast of Alaska – the first publicly confirmed instance of the two air forces operating together so close to North America.
The deepening cooperation between China and Russia, alongside North Korea, has been alternatively dubbed the “Axis of Autocracy” or “Triangle of Troublemakers” by American security officials and observers.
Paparo says the “increasingly complex” manoeuvres involving coordinated actions by China’s air, naval, missile and land forces demonstrate Beijing’s “clear intent and improving capability” in the military domain.
“I think we’re very close to where, on a daily basis, the fig leaf of an exercise could very well hide operational warning,” he cautions.
Paparo notes Russia used the veil of training exercises to explain its troop build-up ahead of the 2022 full-scale invasion into Ukraine, and suggests analysis tools like artificial intelligence could help peer through attempts at deception.
In contrast to Beijing’s growing readiness, the naval aviator with more than 1,100 carrier landings says Washington and its regional allies are struggling to field enough aircraft, ships and long-range precision munitions in the region to effectively counter that threat.
“Our magazines run low [and] our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month,” Paparo says.
Critical aircraft are ageing “faster than we can replace them”, he adds, with platforms increasingly operating beyond their planned service life.
“Maintenance delays impact operational availability across all domains, and our precision-guided munition stockpiles sit well below our required levels,” Paparo notes.
While he does not specify specific platforms, the Pentagon has experienced particular readiness challenges with its Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters. An annual report on equipment performance released in January revealed F-35 availability rates that fall well below programme targets, despite some improvement in recent years.
“The trends suggest that the most impactful near-term option for improving aircraft availability is to increase the pool of available spares – either by purchasing more or by maximising depot capacity to repair broken parts and return them to the spares pool,” the report noted.
Lawmakers in the US Congress have moved to trim US F-35 acquisition numbers for 2025, pushing the Pentagon and Lockheed to improve reliability and sustainment capacity for the existing fleet.
The shortcomings represent a security challenge not just for Taiwan, but for Washington’s partners in the Indo-Pacific and even the USA itself, according to Paparo.
“Our opponents see these gaps and are moving aggressively to exploit them,” he says.
With a sceptical administration in Washington questioning the value of traditional US-backed security guarantees, and an American electorate increasingly favouring an isolationist approach, Paparo and others are publicly making the case that a forward leaning defence posture will benefit Americans at home.
Taiwan is a critical supplier of all-important semiconductors to Western economies, and Paparo says disruptions from a conflict in the Western Pacific would cause a surge in unemployment and so-called “deaths of despair” in the USA, as affected communities absorb the fallout.
A 2022 study from the Rhodium Group concluded a blockade of Taiwan would produce $2 trillion in global economic losses from disruption to the semiconductor supply chain, with second-order impacts costing additional trillions.
It was a message echoed by other officials attending the Honolulu Defense Forum, who spoke publicly under the Chatham House rules of non-attribution. The event was attended by numerous current and former diplomats, military officers and scholars from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Paparo did not offer any specific insight as to when Beijing’s activity may shift from rehearsing to operations.
However, his INDOPACOM predecessor Admiral Phillip Davidson in 2021 warned that Beijing was setting the conditions to seize Taiwan by 2027 – a mark now widely known as the Davidson Window. That assessment was later confirmed by the US Central Intelligence Agency.
In the interim, Paparo says policy makers in Washington should focus on a few key reforms to meet the challenge posed by China. These include fielding large numbers of unmanned systems, deploying additive manufacturing to improve sustainment, streamlining the Pentagon’s acquisition bureaucracy and deepening industrial partnerships with Indo-Pacific allies.
“Japan, South Korea and Australia possess tremendous manufacturing capability,” Paparo notes. “By coordinating our efforts, we can achieve the surge production that the environment demands.”
He suggests semiconductor production, rare earth minerals processing and shipbuilding as specific areas where the three US allies boast industrial advantages.
Regional adversaries are already engaged in that type of industrial cooperation, Paparo says, noting 90% of semiconductors and 70% of machine tools supporting Russia’s wartime economy are coming from China.
In return, Beijing is receiving Russian military technology developed under the Soviet Union, including expertise in submarine and aerospace manufacturing.
Nearly 5,000 miles east of Honolulu, that assessment was confirmed by a top US Air Force (USAF) official speaking the same day in Washington.
“Their transfer of weapons, military technology and basing access is a cause for significant concern,” USAF General Gregory Guillot told members of Congress on 13 February.
Guillot is the top officer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command that monitors and patrols the airspace surrounding the USA and Canada.
When it comes to the deployment of unmanned systems, the Pentagon has multiple efforts underway to develop uncrewed capabilities able to fill a variety of combat functions.
The USAF is developing its first generation of autonomous fighter jets, while the US Marine Corps is exploring options for autonomous ship-to-shore resupply aircraft and the US Army is already fielding its next generation of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Paparo envisions a constellation of lethally armed unmanned systems, including UAVs, loitering munitions, naval vessels and even balloons, that can be used to deny seas and airspace to an adversary force.
In contrast to traditional military doctrine of achieving positive air or maritime superiority in a given area, the four-star admiral says the deployment of massed autonomy can passively deny that territory to a foe.
“At low cost, I want to deny that space to our would-be enemies,” Paparo says.
Just what constitutes a low cost remains somewhat nebulous. Paparo notes Raytheon’s low-observable Tomahawk cruise missile, which he says can autonomously navigate more than 950nm (1,770km) to deliver a 453kg (1,000lb) warhead, costs roughly $1.4 million per unit.
“It’s not a no-regret weapon,” he says, noting that price and limited stockpiles will force commanders to be more sparing in their use of Tomahawk and other precision missiles.
“If it costs $30,000, it’s a less of a regret weapon,” he notes.
By contrast, the manned Lockheed F-16 – considered an affordable option for a modern fourth-generation fighter – costs roughly $60 million per aircraft. Lockheed’s stealthy F-35 runs to at least $80 million per unit.
The USAF has emphasised cost control in its autonomous fighter programme, but credible doubts exist as to whether the service can field a design that delivers useful capability at a price low enough to be considered disposable.
John Clark, who was recently promoted to vice-president of strategic innovation at fighter manufacturer Lockheed, told FlightGlobal in 2024 that the service faces a challenge in balancing cost with combat effectiveness.
“If you’re not going to have high levels of survivability, and you know it’s likely going to get shot, then it probably means that you need to drive your cost way, way down,” said Clark, who formerly headed Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works advanced projects unit.
The alternative is a more-capable platform that needs to be survivable enough for reuse, which will drive the price up.
A focus on survivability and performance over low cost led Lockheed to lose out on the first round of contracts for the USAF’s so-called Collaborative Combat Aircraft, with General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Anduril Industries prevailing.
With the 2027 Davidson Window rapidly closing, the pressure is on at the Pentagon and its industrial suppliers to deliver such systems more rapidly than perhaps any other procurement effort in modern history.
“I need them now,” Paparo says.
