“You want to make sure that every single day President Xi wakes up and says today’s not that day, and that decision never comes,” Milley said.
“The faster we move [on military modernisation], the faster we can retain military superiority, then I believe … we are more likely than not to deter war … and if war does happen, we will prevail.”
US military and government officials have recently offered different time-frame assessments for Beijing’s Taiwan reunification plans, predictions that include military capability and actual attack intentions.
Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of US naval operations, said last year that the Pentagon should not rule out “a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window” for such a move by the PLA.
Weeks later, the head of the Air Mobility Command, General Mike Minihan, said: “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meanwhile, said in March he concurred with an assessment by CIA Director William Burns that China wants to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027.
However, Pentagon officials have been saying more recently that such an attack was not inevitable, as US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral John C. Aquilino said in May at an event organised by the National Committee on US-China Relations.
Milley on Friday paraphrased the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu to highlight the need to incorporate artificial intelligence and quantum computing into US military operations more quickly to provide the deterrence capability that would keep a PLA invasion of Taiwan at bay.
“Sun Tzu tells us, see yourself and see the enemy and you win 1,000 battles. Well, artificial intelligence and quantum computing are going to do exactly that,” he said.
“The combination of those two technologies alone would spell a tremendous change in the character of war,” Milley said.
“So our task … [is] to maintain our current decisive advantage, our lethality and readiness, our competence, by optimising these technologies for the conduct of war. And we do this not to conduct war, but to deter great-power war.”
Beijing claims sovereignty over and firmly opposes any form of official exchange with self-ruled Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province to be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary.
Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state. Washington, however, opposes any attempt to take the island by force and is legally bound to defend the island.
