Eyck Freymann

And there's only a few landing beaches that are plausible.

And Taiwan knows what those are.

And now they have spent the better part of a century fortifying them.

So if you want to get all of your men across the strait, you have to deliver them by sea or by air.

And air is difficult.

As Ukraine has shown, it's easy to shoot down helicopters and planes.

And so you need to take them in these amphibious ships, which can be sunk by mines or cheap drones or artillery.

And then you have to get them into the shores and then you potentially have to sustain them for a long period of time.

You need to give them.

vehicles and ammo and fuel and food and medicine.

And what happens if you successfully deliver 15,000 troops to the shores and then your logistics tail gets cut because a number of your amphibious ships end up on the bottom of the Taiwan Strait and then your men are massacred on the beaches?

So many things have to go right in a highly synchronized way for an amphibious invasion to work, such that D-Day, which is the great example in history where we had all these advantages that China

wouldn't have today, came very, very close to going completely off the rails, as I discuss in the book.

So Xi Jinping is systematically building the capabilities he would need.

He's building out this amphibious fleet.

He's building better anti-submarine warfare to force us back.

He's building longer-range ballistic missiles that can target ships to force our aircraft carriers to stay further back from the conflict zone.

He's building out his air force and drones, cyber tools, all these things to coerce Taiwan.

But if he rolled the dice on an invasion today...

I think, at least if you look at the public war games, it is possible that he would suffer a pretty catastrophic defeat.