Taiwan Strait wargame data disclosed in July 2026 by the small US think tank Defense Priorities aggregates the shifting assessments of RAND Corporation, CSIS and other institutions between 2015 and 2025, tracing a sustained downward curve in US expectations of intervening in a forcible-unification scenario. This is not difficulty in any single domain but a synchronized deterioration across several dimensions at once — force projection, logistics and sustainment, missile offense and defense, submarine warfare, and amphibious assault. Over the decade, wargame outcomes have kept moving in the same direction, and the direction they point to is the unaffordability of intervention.
Anatomy of Eleven Conclusions
The core finding of this wargame compilation is a systemic pessimism — not difficulty in one area, but synchronized deterioration across force projection, logistics and sustainment, missile offense and defense, submarine warfare, and amphibious assault. What follows is reorganized along a logical chain rather than listed by the original numbering:
Airborne Means Annihilation
The wargame sets up a critical scenario: after a forcible-unification operation begins, the US military attempts to air-drop a brigade into Taiwan as reinforcement. The result: two of the brigade's three battalions — roughly 2,000 soldiers — are shot down and destroyed in mid-air. Simultaneously, "Osprey" tiltrotor aircraft carrying thousands of Marines fly from the Ryukyus toward Taiwan, and follow-on C-17 transport convoys escorted by fighters attempt to resupply US forces on the island — they too are shot down, after which "no further resupply attempts were made." This is the most visceral image of intervention failure: it is not that the exchange ratio looks bad, but that units are destroyed as organized forces before ever reaching the battlefield.
The Surface Fleet Ends in Two Turns
Any US surface vessel that approaches Taiwan "will be destroyed." In the wargame's judgment, China's long-range and dense missile strikes "can almost always penetrate US Navy defenses," and "the United States loses two forward-deployed aircraft carriers within one or two turns." Sea-based missile defense is judged to have an insufficient intercept rate against high-density saturation attacks. In the final wargame outcome, the US conclusion is to "sink the entire Chinese Navy" — but only after paying the price of two aircraft carriers.
The Impossible Triangle of a Counter-Invasion
The wargame deliberately models a scenario in which, after China completes unification, the US military attempts to retake Taiwan — an operation judged "almost certainly costly, high-risk, and daunting." Three structural problems make the mission nearly infeasible: Taiwan's mountainous eastern coastline makes an amphibious landing extremely difficult; there are almost no US military bases near Taiwan; and the logistics supply lines stretch for thousands of miles, highly vulnerable to attack. Together these three conditions form a military impossible triangle — any one of them could be overcome on its own, but when all three hold simultaneously, no breakthrough solution exists.
The Reversal to a 10:1 Fighter Ratio
A 2015 RAND Corporation report estimated that 72 US fighters flying 1.5 sorties per day each could shoot down up to 216 Chinese fighters per day. The 2025 judgment is different: in the Taiwan Strait theater, the fighter force ratio between China and the United States approaches 10:1, and it is "reasonable to assume" a US kill ratio of roughly 3:1. The reversal in the force ratio comes from two directions: the rapid growth in the number of Chinese fighters, and the vulnerability of US forward bases in the Western Pacific — the wargame notes that 90% of US aircraft losses occur on the ground.
The Time Window of Missile Offense and Defense
The wargame acknowledges the importance of missile offense and defense in the early phase, and its time constraint: China's missile attack-and-defense capability is very powerful in the first few weeks, US bases would remain paralyzed, and air offensive operations would fail. But the wargame also holds that this advantage has a time window — "one can only wait a few weeks until China's missiles run out." US bombers, as an alternative, are judged the most effective option, yet Chinese fighters, by pushing their interception range out past the First Island Chain, can now intercept US bombers at ranges far enough to engage them before they release their long-range anti-ship missiles.
The High Attrition Rate of Submarine Warfare
The wargame assumes that US Navy nuclear submarines operating in the Taiwan Strait suffer an attrition rate of 20% every 3.5 days. That figure implies submarine warfare cannot be sustained in the short term — after two weeks, the number of available submarines would fall by nearly half. More critically, facing an invasion fleet of "more than 5,000" vessels — 56 times RAND's 2015 estimate of 89 — the number of nuclear submarines that can sortie and their sustainable operating time are extremely limited, unable to form any substantive anti-landing interdiction.
Three Drivers of a Decade-Long Downward Curve
From 2015 to 2025, US think tanks' expectations for intervention in the Taiwan Strait underwent three systematic downward revisions, each driven by factors of a different nature:
The reversal of the stock balance. The 2015 wargames were still built on the foundation of US numerical advantage — 72 fighters shooting down 216 Chinese fighters. The assessment a decade later revises the force ratio to 10:1, for reasons that include not only China's incremental growth but also US stock problems: the F-35 fleet's mission-capable rate has long remained below expectations, and a gap persists between the retirement of aging airframes and the deployment of new ones.
The closing of the technology gap. The maturation of China's anti-ship ballistic missiles, long-range air-defense systems, hypersonic weapons, and satellite reconnaissance networks has fundamentally altered the geometric conditions of intervention operations. The 2015 report's optimistic assumption that "repairing a runway takes only four to eight hours" is replaced, in the 2025 wargames, by CSIS's image of "runways piled with aircraft wreckage and makeshift graves."
The rigid constraint of logistics geography. Taiwan's mountainous eastern coastline, the lack of nearby bases, and the long-distance supply lines — these three geographic conditions have not changed over the decade, but China's anti-access capability has, in those ten years, turned them from "difficult" into "infeasible." When China can intercept US bombers beyond the First Island Chain, the problem of distance is no longer merely a question of cost, but a boundary of feasibility.
These wargame figures are being used by small think tanks like Defense Priorities to build an anti-intervention case — what this reflects is not hawks in Washington searching for options, but anti-war voices searching for arguments.
From Wargames to Policy Signals
This compilation does not necessarily represent the official US war plan, but it delivers several meaningful signals: the baseline of US think-tank assessments of a forcible-unification scenario has already shifted from the earlier question of "when will intervention arrive" to "is intervention feasible at all." The recurring phrasings in the wargames — "no further resupply attempts were made," "none was attempted thereafter" — reveal that in the rigorous simulation of wargaming, failure has been built in as the default outcome of most branches.
The limitations of wargaming must also be noted: it cannot assess political will and strategic resolve; the loss rates in the wargames are symmetric — China's missile stockpiles and invasion fleet would also suffer enormous attrition; and the publicly released data may involve selective disclosure. But these caveats do not change one core trend: over the decade, wargame outcomes have kept moving in the same direction, and the direction they point to is the unaffordability of intervention.