The initial installment provided important lessons about the Ukraine war. The second focuses on possible dynamic fight between the US and China, over Taiwan as some expect, and how US military causes in the North- and West Pacific may suffer against a fast arming China.
Erik Prince says,” I don’t care about China’s military situation.” However, he warns against putting a US Navy’s not ready to fight foot in the door by going into” a stupid, unwanted conflict over Taiwan.” What’s required is a leaner, more destructive US military equipped by a secular and modern US industrial center.
Following are excerpts from Prince’s remarks at Hillsdale College, his old school, and an appointment with Hillsdale President Larry Arnn:
China has a sizable industrial base, 40 to 50 times, according to some, 200 times, the rate of shipbuilding that we have, certainly in terms of drone production and components, in many of those things that destroyed 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.
However, I’m not so concerned about China’s military; I’m worried about Taiwan’s stupid, pointless battle. The US Navy isn’t ready to fight tomorrow. They are plagued by bad management, a lot of misplaced training plans, and we spent a lot of money and there’s no almost the eagerness that there should be.
The Bonhomme Richard, a 40, 000-ton amphibious assault ship, was lost four and a half decades earlier. At her San Diego home base, a fireplace started while it was in maintenance and on the jetty area. It took the Navy and took the team an afternoon and a half to get initial water on that blaze, on an energetic ship. Due to the stupidity of the team and the responding fireplace service, the ship burned up at the port.
That’s nonsense, and it’s a write-off of$ 1 billion,$ 1 billion, and a half. And that’s a great ship, bigger than any plane ship we used in World War II, for example.
Now, the PLA [ Chinese People’s Liberation Army ] would block Taiwan and surround it; they have been doing that consistently, with no reaction from the US at all, not even using any innovative means to deter them.
What will the Navy do if they do that, exactly? They’re going to react with airplane operators. And they would operate a$ 12 billion aircraft carrier with the aid of tens of thousands of precise missiles launched by the Chinese, which would create a terrible image of a US Navy aircraft carrier, with 5, 000 of our citizens aboard, smoking or worse.
And that directly relates to the political repercussions that would arise in the future. 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.
The British Empire was about to come to an end, and that was that. You would see an sleep in that competitors of governance because they lost place and the pound as a strong currency.
Is it our method of American socialism, liberty? Look, politics in a nation is a disaster. It’s inadequate, untidy, and imperfect. It does not have the freshness of a tyranny, of training. However, I would prefer a top-down dictatorship to a unkempt, innovative, and bottom-up approach to solving problems.
Because story demonstrates that this can be the beginning of the end, we can’t allow ourselves fall into such foolish behavior.
But, you Taiwan become defended at all?
In my opinion, building a home guard is the best way to stop a discord over Taiwan if, in the era of precision weapons, the Chinese, the PLA, may include pre-registered dozens of weapons at every known-value location that Taiwan may have, such as anti-aircraft, underwater bases, command bunkers, all those known locations are going to be wiped out in the first few minutes of a conflict.
However, the Army doesn’t account for national can. If you think about the British colonies in 1775, only 3 % of them really took up arms against, at that point, the most powerful military in the world, and they won. Because they had a will, they were aware of the ground, had the means to protect themselves, and they ended up purchasing or smuggling arms to finish their jobs.
If you take 3 % of the Chinese community, that’s roughly 720 000 people, in my opinion. That’s a bit. Their government is mainly unreliable. State a lot of soy boys, but not enough.
But if you have people that can step out of their homes and gather weapons from a fire station, police station, legal defense shelter, the complexity and difficulty of trying to occupy a land where there’s trained people that know what they’re doing – that have even four to six weeks of political training – makes conquering the island highly challenging because you have urban terrain and you also have massive jungle that they can hide away and operate in.
What about a larger military conflict involving multiple Asian mainland-based operations in the Northwest and West Pacific region? We are not prepared for that.
What really helped America, what really helped the allies win World War II was American industry. I highly advise you to read Freedom’s Forge if you haven’t already read it. Many of you are from the Midwest, and I come from a family that works in automotive manufacturing.
And it makes me really proud to realize all those factories really cranked out and delivered that kind of capability. It made it possible for Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union to travel from Moscow to Berlin in 600, 000 vehicles and trucks – remember that the German army was only about half mechanized at the time. The Soviets could win thanks to the thousands of aircraft and vehicles we provided.
Our industrial base now is nowhere near what it needs to be right now to be competitive. As we’ve seen, I believe our government is able to spend inordinate amounts of money on stupid things, especially when it tries to start a war. And we have politicians who completely disregard what should be the price of something.
And I guess maybe that’s why Dr. Arnn wanted me back here, because I’m at least having come here as an Austrian economics major. Actually, I can remember Dr. Ebeling, who was my professor, saying,” Mr. Ebeling,” just before I graduated. You just arrived at a school that doesn’t receive any federal funding, Prince, and you’ll soon be a part of the largest socialist organization in the world. I said,” Yes, sir, but it’s the only thing that’s provided, it’s the only part of the military that’s actually specified in the Constitution”, Congress shall raise a Navy.”
After Hillsdale, I enlisted in the Navy and spent a few years with SEAL teams before going to officer candidate school. It was a policy in the family business that you must go do something else first before starting the work there. I really had no interest in it anyway. And so, I was a SEAL, I liked it, and I did pretty well. Within a few months of each other, my father passed away and my wife developed cancer. So, I got out and to kind of help sort out the family business and that’s what led me to start Blackwater, which was a private military training facility.
I built a private military contractor, but I never really intended to be notorious, you see. I created Blackwater as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams I liked. I loved that job. But as I’m laying it out and I just looked at what the military does, what does it do? It trains, deploys, vets, equips, trains, deploys, and supports people to perform a challenging task in a challenging environment. And we understood it, like the Toyota production system, how to manage our costs in a way that big government never was able to do so.
And of course, the politicians ‘ resolute response to us was, “You’re doing something that’s inherently governmental,” ” And I counter that by saying”, I was born in the summer of 1969, Woodstock and Apollo 11. They would have laughed you out of Johnson Space Center if you had stated that the only way the US government could reach the International Space Station was a Russian rocket or a contractor rocket 50 years later.
But God bless Elon Musk for bringing some sort of market solutions to a military industrial complex that is wild, the amount of spending and waste that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you can see now with a DOGE effort, and that convergence. I hope we have the same opportunity to do something similar to the Pentagon. That guy has such a high regard for me. He looked at the spacecraft and said,” Look, we need to lower the launch price to increase the altitude by a thousandfold.” ” And he’s well on his way to doing that.
And as we enter the AI era, where the technological advance is actually on the leading and most rapid of battle in theaters like Ukraine and Israel, as you can only see it in Syria, the private sector will be the only one who will be required to innovate and move quickly. It won’t be produced by large government labs. It’s probably not even going to come from DARPA. It will be from smart Americans who are working from their garages and have a dream.
I sincerely hope the Trump administration can alter their approach to procurement to allow for private sector purchases and innovations. I don’t really fear – as much as people get super hyperventilated about China with AI – China with this many missiles, all the rest. It still depends on the individual’s leadership on the ground, whether it is at the sergeant’s level or the junior officer’s. The world’s finest soldiers are still present, in fact, at the very highest level. And I see units and people from all kinds of places as part of my professional life.
We have a critical mass of innovation, but we don’t have one. And a significant portion of that still goes to the military. And – if the innovation that the private sector can provide, that I know it can provide, and as long as DOD opens just a little bit, opens the tap of money, redirecting from the nonsense, hyper, overpriced programs that they like to spend money on – we can certainly not just catch up but surpass any capability that we have to worry about with China.