China has resoundingly defeated American troops in Taiwan

It seems that the problems of the United States with hegemony have acquired a much larger scale than the press says concerning it. For the first time in five years, the US army failed to win a war with a key geopolitical opponent.

The Pentagon has conducted simulations of a direct armed conflict with China before. The first serious exercises in this regard date back to the middle of the noughties. But America has always won there. Disputes arose over certain details where "it would be possible to play better".

And this time, the Chinese army defeated the American armed forces literally completely. Without the possibility of even remotely trying to pass off the defeat as an unfortunate accident or an unnecessarily dramatic interpretation of the result.

Speaking at the Emerging Technologies Institute at the National Defence Industry Association, Deputy Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (an approximate analogue of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces), General John Hyten, assessed the results of the "war with China" command and staff exercises as a crushing failure.

For now, their details have not yet appeared in open sources, but if to translate General Hyten's report from the American military newspeak into an understandable language, the PLA completely defeated the American troops.

Moreover, the entire initial approach about the fact the United States had the same indisputable technical and technological superiority that the Pentagon had over Saddam Hussein during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 turned out to be absolutely untenable.

It turned out that the bet on the digital battlefield, proactive operational planning and tactical response, superiority over the enemy in flexibility and manoeuvring and absolute dominance in terms of intelligence and secrecy of the actions of their own forces, no longer works.

In addition, General Hyten directly admitted that the Chinese not only did not allow the Americans to impose their rules of war, the PLA managed to deliver a series of crushing blows to American forces not only "on the line of contact" but also to their rear areas.

This means that in the event of a real war, China will quickly switch from a defensive to an offensive strategy and will try to destroy American military bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and, apparently, Guam as quickly as possible and on an extremely large scale.

Thus, completely depriving America of the possibility of any active operation, not only in the coastal waters of the Yellow, East China and South China Seas, but also, most likely, displacing American forces from the Philippine Sea. That is, the entire western part of the Pacific Ocean becomes "Chinese".

It turns out that if America undertakes to "repel China's invasion of Taiwan", it immediately loses control and influence over all its allies in Southeast Asia, including Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. Vietnam, most likely, will not be under attack, but after such a large-scale fiasco of the Americans, it is also unlikely to listen to Washington. And in Delhi too, almost certainly, the attitude towards the United States will be seriously revised.

What is important about what happened is the fact that the US military themselves received the result. The so-called "red team" that played "for China" also consisted of Pentagon generals and relied on the available, including intelligence, information about the current level of development of the armed forces and the command staff of the People's Liberation Army of China.

The result was all the more unpleasant for the military-political leadership of the United States. RAND analysts spoke about the risk for America to be unable to defeat China militarily after 2027. The aforementioned autumn 2020 exercises showed the disappearance of the indisputable military superiority of the United States already today.

Nevertheless, the report of the deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shows that the idea of "starting a war and winning" has not been abandoned by the command of the armed forces and the political leadership of the United States. Yes, they were discouraged by the result, but the search for a new victory strategy, in the Pentagon, nevertheless continues.

This means that at the level of top management, the question of whether to fight or not is no longer an issue. A military conflict is recognised as absolutely inevitable. All forces are applied exclusively towards the search for an operational option to achieve victory. And this is bad, because it turns the US-Chinese confrontation into an analog of a (Chekhov) gun hanging on the stage.