The first installment featured critical lessons of the Ukraine war. The second focuses on possible kinetic conflict between the US and China, over Taiwan as many expect, and how US expeditionary forces in the North- and West Pacific might fare against a rapidly arming China.
“I’m not so worried about China militarily,” says Erik Prince. But he warns against blundering into “a dumb, unnecessary war over Taiwan” with a US Navy that’s not ready to fight. What’s required is a leaner, more lethal US military equipped by a reformed and innovative US industrial base.
Excerpts from a Prince speech at Hillsdale College, his alma mater, and an interview with Hillsdale President Larry Arnn follow:
China has an enormous industrial base – 40 to 50 times, by some estimates 200 times, the shipbuilding rate that we have; obviously in drones [production] and components, in a lot of those things that hollowed out 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.
But I’m not so worried about China militarily, I am worried if we blunder into a dumb, unnecessary war in Taiwan. The US Navy is not ready to fight tonight. They are plagued by bad leadership, a lot of misguided training policies, and we spent a lot of money and there’s not nearly the readiness that there should be.
Four and a half years ago, we lost the 40,000-ton amphibious assault ship, the Bonhomme Richard. A fire started while it was on pier side, in repair, at her home base in San Diego. It took the Navy and took the crew an hour and a half to get first water on that fire, on an active warship. The ship burned up at the dock because of incompetence of the crew and the responding fire services.
That’s the kind of nonsense, that’s a billion, billion-and-a-half-dollar write-off. And that’s a big ship, bigger than any aircraft carrier we used in World War II, for example.
Now, if the PLA [China’s People’s Liberation Army] would attack Taiwan, the way they would do it is they’d do a blockade, they’d surround it; they’ve been exercising that consistently, with no pushback from the US at all, not even any unconventional means to deter them.
And if they do that, so what is the Navy going to do? They’re going to respond with aircraft carriers. And they’d run a $12 billion aircraft carrier within range of thousands of precision missiles that the Chinese can fire, and that’s going to result in a very bad image of a US Navy aircraft carrier, with 5,000 of our citizens on board, smoking or worse.
And that ties directly into the geopolitical consequences that we would face then. 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.
And that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire. They lost territory, they lost the pound as a dominant currency, and you would see an unwind in that competition of governance.
Is it our system of Western capitalism, freedom? Look, democracy in a republic is a mess. It’s messy, it’s imperfect. It does not have the crispness of a dictatorship, of course. But I would take messy, and innovation, and bottoms-up approach to problem-solving versus top-down dictatorship any day.
But we cannot let ourselves blunder into the stupid things like that because history shows, that can be the beginning of the end.
So, can Taiwan be defended at all?
I think the best way to deter conflict over Taiwan is for them to build a home guard because – in an era of precision weapons where the Chinese, the PLA, can have pre-registered dozens of weapons at every known valuable location that Taiwan might have, meaning anti-aircraft, submarine bases, command bunkers – all those known locations are going to get erased in the opening moments of a conflict.
But what the PLA can’t compute for is national will. If you think about the American colonists in 1775, only 3% of them actually took up arms against, at that point, the most powerful military in the world, and they won. Because there was a will, they knew the terrain, they could figure out the basic means to defend themselves and they ended up buying or smuggling in arms from abroad to get their job done.
In the case of Taiwan, if you take 3% of the Taiwanese population, I think that’s like 720,000 people. That’s a lot. Their military is largely very weak. Let’s say a lot of soy boys, not all but enough.
But if you have people that can step out of their homes and gather weapons from a fire station, police station, civil defense shelter, the complexity and difficulty of trying to occupy a land where there’s armed people that know what they’re doing – that have maybe four to six weeks of partisan training – makes conquering the island exceedingly difficult because you have urban terrain and you also have massive jungle that they can hide out and operate in.
But what about a larger military conflict in the Northwest and West Pacific region, including multiple Asian mainland-based theaters of operation? We are not ready for that.
What really helped America, what really helped the allies win World War II was American industry. If you haven’t read the book, Freedom’s Forge, I highly encourage you to do it. A lot of you are from the Midwest, I’m from the Midwest, from an automotive manufacturing family background.
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 go all the way from Moscow to Berlin with 600,000 vehicles, trucks – to remember, the German army back then was only about half mechanized. We made it possible with tens of thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of vehicles for the Soviets to win.
Our industrial base now is nowhere near what it needs to be right now to be competitive. I think, as we’ve seen, our government manages to spend unlimited amounts of money doing stupid things, especially when it tries to go to war. And we have politicians that completely lose any idea of what something should cost.
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. Really, in fact, I remember Dr. Ebeling, who was my professor, and the day right before I graduated, he said, “Mr. Prince, you’ve just come to a school that accepts no federal funding and you’re going to join 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 rolled into officer candidate school, joined the Navy, spent a few years in the SEAL teams. In the family business it was policy that you don’t come and work in the family business, you have to go do something else first. I really had no interest in it anyway. And so, I was a SEAL, I enjoyed it, was pretty good at it. And then my father died and my wife got cancer, within a few months of each other. 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.
You know, as I built a private military contractor, I never really intended to be notorious. I started Blackwater as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams that I liked. I loved that job. But as I’m laying it out, and I just looked at what does the military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys and supports people to do a difficult job in a difficult place. 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’ constant answer to us was, “You’re doing something inherently governmental.” And I counter that by saying, “I was born in the summer of 1969, Woodstock and Apollo 11. If you said that 50 years later after Apollo 11, that the only way the US government gets to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket or on a contractor rocket, they would have laughed you out of Johnson Space Center.”
But that convergence of trying to bring some kind of market solutions into a military industrial complex that’s run wild, the amount of spending and waste that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you’re seeing now with a DOGE effort, God bless Elon Musk for cutting it down across the board. I hope we have the same opportunity to do something similar to the Pentagon. I have such respect for that guy. He looked at spacecraft and he said, “Look, we have to lower the cost of launch to get it to altitude by a thousand-fold.” And he’s well on his way to doing that.
And as we reach the era of AI, where that technical acceleration is really occurring on the leading and the bleeding edge of battle in theaters like Ukraine, in Israel, where you just saw it in Syria, the required level of innovation and speed is only going to come from the private sector. It’s not going to come from big government labs. It’s probably not even going to come from DARPA. It’s going to come from smart people in America operating from their garages with a dream.
I really hope that the Trump team is able to change procurement to allow for the purchase and innovation that the private sector can do. 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 comes down to individual leadership in the field, at the sergeant level, at the junior officer level. We have still the very, very finest of those kinds of soldiers in the world. And I see units and people from all kinds of places as part of my professional life.
We don’t have a monopoly in innovation, but we have a critical mass of it. And a lot of that still resides in 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.
