In part, Senator Cotton said:

 “The Chinese Communists don’t simply want to control Taiwan out of a sense of national pride, but because the island is central to their greater ambitions. With Taiwan, the communists would break through the First Island Chain, gain control over what Douglas McArthur famously called an unsinkable aircraft carrier. China would acquire an unrivaled strategic advantage in both the South and East China Seas. It would also secure China’s eastern flank and free the communists to pursue their interests on their border with India and press their interests elsewhere around the world.”

Senator Cotton’s full speech may be found here and below.

 Thank you, Miles, for the kind introduction. It’s a privilege to be back at the Hudson Institute to discuss the most profound foreign policy challenge facing our nation. The People’s Republic of China under the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest single threat to the United States in our modern history.

Few men understand this better than your first speaker, Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Hudson’s own, Miles Yu. Thank you both for your leadership on the issue. I’d also like to thank the Hudson Institute and your president John Walters for hosting this important event today.

Let us face the candid facts. Since the year 2000, Communist China has increased its military spending by one thousand percent.

As a result, Beijing now commands the largest Army, Navy, Coast Guard, and maritime militia in the world. China also possesses the second most advanced air force and is building its nuclear arsenal at a rate that two commanders of our nuclear forces have called “breathtaking.”

It has the largest stock of sea mines, the biggest submarine fleet, and an unrivaled arsenal of ballistic missiles.

What’s more, China’s wartime productive capacity is greater than any other nation in the world. It produces 70 percent of the world’s drones, more cars and steel than any other nation, and a single Chinese shipyard can produce more ships than every American shipyard combined. And China has thirteen of those shipyards.

Our nation has never faced an enemy with the combined military and economic capabilities of communist China. China’s military is now comparable in size to Nazi Germany’s before World War II and is more advanced than the Soviet Union’s military in the Cold War.

All of these facts point to one unmistakable conclusion: Communist China is preparing for war.

Perhaps there will not be a war. Perhaps, Communist China, like Soviet Russia according to Winston Churchill, does not want war, but rather, the fruits of war. However, war is a distinct possibility, and we don’t know where it might start because China’s ambitions are so vast. China claims dominion over more than one million square miles of ocean and islands in the South China Sea, as well as hundreds of thousands of miles of the East China Sea and vast swaths of territory in the Himalayan mountains.

Beijing is pressing its claims in all of these theatres. In 2020, Chinese troops brutally murdered 20 Indian soldiers in the Himalayan mountains in the deadliest border clash with India in 50 years. With growing frequency, Chinese communists are sailing naval, Coast Guard, and merchant militia vessels into disputed waters and flying warplanes into foreign airspaces.

Yet nowhere is more dangerous than the island of Taiwan, home to nearly 24 million free men and women. As stated in China’s Anti-Secession Law, Beijing is fully prepared to use QUOTE “non-peaceful means and other necessary measures” to unify the island with the mainland. Put bluntly, war.

The Chinese Communists don’t simply want to control Taiwan out of a sense of national pride, but because the island is central to their greater ambitions. With Taiwan, the communists would break through the First Island Chain, gain control over what Douglas McArthur famously called an unsinkable aircraft carrier. China would acquire an unrivaled strategic advantage in both the South and East China Seas. It would also secure China’s eastern flank and free the communists to pursue their interests on their border with India and press their interests elsewhere around the world.

That’s why China’s communist rulers have pledged to take control of the island ever since they took power and reiterated those aspirations in the 2005 Anti-Secession Law. And in his New Year’s address this year, Xi Jinping declared that “the reunification of the motherland is a historical inevitability.”

These are far from empty words. For over a decade, Xi has built up the Chinese military in preparation of a Taiwan invasion, including tripling the size of the Chinese marine corps. Xi is also conducting increasingly aggressive, frequent, and massive military exercises around the island. In 2022 alone, China violated Taiwanese airspace more than 1,700 times, more times than the previous three years combined—and it maintained this hyper aggressive pace through last year.

This makes Taiwan both the likeliest and the most dangerous flashpoint in the world, and especially for a conflict between the United States and China, putting us into conflict with the second most powerful nation in the world only 100 miles from its borders.

While China has prepared, unfortunately, our government has dithered and allowed our military to atrophy. Our Army is now the smallest since the start of World War II, our Navy is the smallest since World War I, and our Air Force is smaller, older, and less prepared than it’s ever been. One study found that our military only has enough long-range precision guided munitions for one week of war over Taiwan.

Yet, our inflation-adjusted defense budget has shrunk every year that Joe Biden has been President.

Time is running short to prepare for the gathering storm over Taiwan.

The Congress and the President should immediately increase the Pentagon budget and initiate a strategy of rearmament to deter—and if necessary, defeat—a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Many here in Washington seem to have forgotten that military budgets do not, and indeed cannot, shape military requirements. Rather, military requirements have to shape military budgets. We are facing dangers greater than any time of my generation. We need a military budget fit for the challenges we face.   

We should invest in the expansion and modernization of our Navy and Air Force, harden our bases in the Pacific, and surge missiles, mines, and anti-aircraft weapons to the region.

But above all, we need to expand America’s defense industrial base, with particular focus on increasing production of long range and anti-ship munitions as well as torpedoes.

One way to achieve these things is the Defense Production Act. The Defense Production Act is an indispensable tool. But to effectively wield it, we need to fundamentally reform the Pentagon office in charge of its implementation. The obscure DPA Investment Office is understaffed, underfunded, and underused. Today, it appears there are fewer than five staff members—five—in the whole vast Pentagon, tasked with implementing the DPA, which explains why that office has repeatedly failed to spend even half of its congressionally approved budget on its vital tasks in a timely manner. We need to expand that office, and its staff, and its budget—and give it clear instructions to prioritize above all the production of munitions for a potential conflict over Taiwan.

Winston Churchill summarized Europe’s grave errors before the Second World War when he wrote that, “the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”

We have too long reinforced the malice of communist China with our own weakness in the West. Now, only American strength can prepare us for this gathering storm.

Thank you all for the invitation to speak to you on this important topic and what you are doing to help restore American strength.