Gallagher Outlines Vision to Deter CCP Invasion of Taiwan

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Armed Services Committee, today delivered remarks at the Heritage Foundation following the release of its 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength, a report that annually gauges the U.S. Military's ability to perform its mission in the modern threat landscape. The 2023 Index finds that the United States military is "rated as weak relative to the force needed to defend national interests on a global stage," the first such rating in the Index's nine-year history. In response to these findings, Rep. Gallagher delivered a speech that warned the U.S. military is entering into a "window of maximum danger" with respect to Taiwan and that to protect U.S. interests, Pentagon leadership needs to focus on creatively using the resources it has today to build a force deter a CCP invasion of Taiwan. In his remarks, Rep. Gallagher acknowledged that while "long-term investments to rebuild American military superiority in general—and maritime superiority in particular—are critical, the reality is that we will not be able to build the Navy the nation needs within the next five years. What we can do, however, is build an anti-navy." In his speech, Rep. Gallagher laid out his plan to do so, which including: Surging long-range conventional precision fires in three concentric rings across the Pacific: (1) the First Island Chain; (2) the Second Island Chain plus the Central Pacific islands, and (3) the outer edges of the theater including Alaska, Hawaii, and Australia, Maxing out the capacity of active weapons production lines through multi-year procurement contracts, as well as modernizing the Defense Production Act so it can provide direct project financing, automatic fast-tracking of permits, and investments in defense workforce training, and Moving Taiwan to the front of the Foreign Military Sales line and clear the backlog of $14 billion dollars worth of foreign military sales (FMS) items that have been approved but not delivered, providing direct financial assistance to Taiwan, and giving the Pentagon drawdown authority to directly provide defense articles to Taiwan. Rep. Gallagher concluded that, "we don’t lack options, we lack leadership. We lack leadership in the Pentagon capable of bending the bureaucracy to their will, in service of a defense strategy that prioritizes hard power. And we lack leadership in the White House that understands the paradox of deterrence: that to avoid war, you must convince your adversary that you are both capable and willing to wage war. If we ignore hard lessons about hard power, if we continue down the utopian path of disarmament, and if we allow the fear of escalation to dominate our decisions, we will feed Xi’s appetite for conquest and invite war itself. By choosing instead to put an anti-navy in Xi’s path, we can deter war in the short term and buy time to build a Navy that defeats communism over the long term." // Subscribe to Rep. Gallagher's Channel!    / @mikegallagher3103   Subscribe to Rep. Gallagher's Newsletter! https://gallagher.house.gov/contact/n... Congressman Mike Gallagher has represented Wisconsin’s 8th District in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2017. Mike was born and raised in Green Bay, where he now lives with his wife Anne and two daughters. Mike served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, including two deployments to Iraq. Mike also served as the lead Republican staffer for the Middle East and Counterterrorism on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and worked in the private sector at an energy and supply chain management company in Green Bay. Mike currently serves as Chairman of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, as Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation, and on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From 2019-2021 he served as Co-Chairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. For more information visit: https://gallagher.house.gov Follow Rep. Gallagher on Twitter:   / repgallagher   Follow Rep. Gallagher on Facebook:   / repmikegallagher   Follow Rep. Gallagher on Instagram:   / repgallagher