Name: Former US Army Pacific Chief Reveals What’s Missing in US Taiwan Strategy | Gen. Charles Flynn (Ret.)
Uploaded: 2026-01-06T18:54:08.000Z
Description: How might a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan unfold? China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy—a combination of missiles, submarines, sensors, and air defenses—is designed specifically to block and disrupt US air, sea, and even space and cyber power.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] How might a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan unfold? China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy—a combination of missiles, submarines, sensors, and air defenses—is designed specifically to block and disrupt US air, sea, and even space and cyber power.

But the true outcome of the operation will hinge on the rapid mobilization of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ground forces, argues recently retired four-star general Charles Flynn, former commander of U.S. Army Pacific.

He warns that the real “center of gravity” of a Chinese invasion will lie in its ability to rapidly assemble, deploy, and transport land forces across the Taiwan Strait.

“What keeps me up at night is their ability to actually pull that off in 96 hours,” Flynn says.

He is convinced that building a “strategic land power network” and forging deep, enduring ties with partner armies in Asia will be vital to deterring the Chinese regime.

In this episode, Flynn lays out a roadmap for how the U.S. military should rethink its strategy, technology, and partnerships to deter Beijing and safeguard its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

“This century is going to be defined by the relationship between the United States and China. … We’ve said we’ve pivoted to the Pacific for more than a decade, and in actual behavior and actions, that’s not accurate,” Flynn says.

Before commanding U.S. Army Pacific, Flynn served as the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Training (G3/5/7). He is the brother of General Michael Flynn, former national security advisor to President Donald Trump.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

General Charles Flynn, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thanks. I appreciate you having me and am very grateful to The Epoch Times for the opportunity.

So let’s talk about this headline from the Indo-Pacific, okay, Japan is threatening us militarily, China tells the German foreign minister. That’s Reuters. What’s your reaction?

Well, I look at the two recent incidents of the rhetoric going back and forth between China and Japan, and then just 48 hours ago, aircraft from China basically locking radars on Japanese jets. I think Japan is beginning to take seriously the threats that China has imposed upon them and the penetrations of their air exclusion zone and maritime exclusion zone. And so it’s important that Japan step up and take these actions to protect their own people and their own national sovereignty, but also signal to the United States through our treaty and through our alliance that they’re not going to put up with this kind of irresponsible behavior by the Chinese.

How important, from the military perspective, is China for the United States?

It is the most important. I think, by way of threats, it poses the most dangerous one to the United States. I mean, I’ll start back a little bit.

In 2012, President Xi obviously took over the presidency of the Communist Chinese Party. And again, I’m going to say this right up front: I’m not against the Chinese people, but I am against the Communist Chinese Party. If you just jump forward to about the 2014-2015 timeframe, what was happening was their economy was moving at a pace that was unprecedented. Their modernization efforts had caught up with their training reformations and some of their reorganizations of their military formation.

So around the 2015 timeframe, they had a modernization of their military that was kicking into a second gear. They had an organizational change that was going on across their forces, and then they were fielding new capabilities. And of course, their industrial strength was just kicking into that next gear. So when you match up the modernization of their military equipment, the organizational changes that they were undergoing, and then the training reforms that they were putting in place, well, here we are in 2025. So that’s a decade ago.

And as I’ve said publicly before, if we don’t slow their trajectory down, that is a very, very dangerous outcome for the United States and arguably for the globe. And they, of course, say, well, we’re just doing this to protect ourselves. Well, maybe so. On the other hand, I think that the arsenal that they’ve created, the A2/AD arsenal that they’ve created, has a serious amount of reach in all of their forces from hypersonics.

And maybe just explain what that is.

This A2/AD arsenal, which is an anti-access area denial force, is primarily designed to defeat the strengths of the United States military. And the strengths are our air power and our maritime power, primarily. Secondarily, it’s designed to degrade, deny, and disrupt our capabilities in space and cyber. One thing it is not designed to do is find, fix, and finish distributed, mobile, reloadable, and networked land forces inside the Indo-Pacific. And the land force network and the land power network that I’m talking about is built around the United States Army, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Special Operations Forces, and then the fourth component, which is a really important component, which is the land forces inside of Asia.

So when I look at the map, I see people, I see terrain, I see borders, and I see sovereignty. When others look at the map, and traditionally, I think this has been part of our challenge in the United States, we look at the map and we see blue. We see an ocean, and we see air, and we say, well, we can solve this problem with more ships, more subs, more airplanes, more jets, more precision-guided munitions, more satellites.

Look, I’m not against a large U.S. Navy and a large U.S. Air Force and all the other capabilities that have to come with things, platforms. In fact, we need them. Why? Because they do only what the United States can do, which is keep the global commons open. I’m saying that it is a region and it’s a multinational problem. It’s a joint and multinational theater, and it can only be solved by joint and multinational applications in all domains. That includes the land forces. The predominant force in Asia is its armies.

I’ll go through a couple of facts. India, 80 percent of its military is its army. Indonesia, 75 percent. Thailand, 75 percent. Vietnam, 80 percent. The Philippine army has more divisions than the U.S. Army does. And I could go on and on. The point I’m making is there’s a natural partnering and a persistent state of connection between land forces in the region. And we cannot discount those forces in the region that are land-based. What do they do?

They protect their territorial integrity and they defend their national sovereignty. And some of those forces are beginning to step up in ways that we never saw before. And that’s one of the things I’m very proud of in my time, you know, over the last 10 years out in the region is really trying to tie together a strategic land power network as a counterweight to what the Chinese are doing.

I’ll go on a little bit here and also say that some experts, and I’ll leave that, you know, open, often refer to the Chinese Navy as its center of gravity. And I say no, it’s not its center of gravity. Why? Because the military definition is that which you need in order to achieve your objective. Okay.

My view is you can’t invade Taiwan with the Chinese Navy and the Chinese Air Force; you actually have to deliver an invasion force. And that is its Chinese army. That’s the PLA [People’s Liberation Army], okay, of which there are many of them.

And my point is that we have a way of increasing the indications and warnings to our national command authority by watching the army. Why? Because the army actually has to mobilize, move, combat configure, combat load, and then get across the Taiwan Strait in order to seize, hold, and subjugate the people of Taiwan. Now, the last time we did something like that successfully was Inchon Landing. It is a highly, highly complex operation.

The point I’m making here is that naval incursions and air incursions are happening every day at alarming rates. And that keeps the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy really engaged every day, not to mention Japanese, Korean, and, of course, Taiwan and others. But my point here is that if we get command and control, we get intelligence collection forward, along with sustainment, along with protection, and we tie together the synergy between the forces in the region on the land, then we can impose dilemmas on the Chinese that heretofore we’ve not put on them.

If you want to understand if they’re going to mobilize that PLA army, then you’ve got to watch the PLA army because it will take time for them to actually move from their garrisons to the coast, load those vessels, and get across. You’re not going to see and have that kind of time with air power and naval power from the Chinese. There’ll be some indicators, but when they start moving that army, then there’s a problem. Things need to stop very quickly.

So what keeps me up at night? What keeps me up at night is their ability to actually pull that off in 96 hours. That’s what keeps me up at night. So anything that we can do to slow down that timeline, feed doubt, sow paranoia, and introduce new dilemmas to the Chinese leadership, then we are on a stronger footing by way of deterrence and denying them the ability to think that they could pull that off.

One of the things that was clear to me, and I’d love to get your perspective, I believe is abundantly clear in the new national security strategy for the U.S., is that the U.S. is going to protect Taiwan. And it’s a, I mean, it sort of feels unequivocal to me from what I read. What’s your take?

Well, I think it states in there that, you know, our current policy of status quo is going to remain. Now, you know, I would also tell you that we need to continue to do what we have been doing for years with Taiwan, really since 1979, which is we have foreign military sales. We have foreign military financing. We have training exchanges that go on. And so, as far back as when I was a division commander in 2014, when we sold them Apaches, when we sold them M1 tanks, we sent trainers from the Army over there to do that training. All of the services do that. Why?

Because there’s this interoperability leg of the stool by way of capability exchanges and sales that go on with Taiwan. So when we give them a platform, then we have to send trainers and industry to help them understand what those capabilities really mean. So when I look at what is going on today with additional funding that Taiwan is putting on the table and that the U.S. military and the capabilities that we have and how important they are to the defense of Taiwan, then I think that that is a good place to be, the United States and Taiwan, in being able to assist them and enable them in defending their independence, their freedoms and prosperity, and basically their territorial integrity and national sovereignty.

These two points are inexplicably tied. I mean, the countries in the region are looking to defend their borders, defend their wealth, defend their people, and maintain their territorial integrity. Not unlike what the national security strategy says about our own United States of America and being able to protect our borders, our territorial integrity, and our national sovereignty.

It sounds like you’re saying that the U.S. should put more military assets in these countries in partnership with those militaries. And that’s been described even by some people that are, you know, let’s say friendly to this administration and so forth, as being almost like intervention or almost like an occupying force or some sort of, you know, nation-building or perhaps empire even. How do you respond to that kind of criticism, that this would be somehow away from an America First vision, what you’re describing?

I actually think it’s part of that, but I’ll say it a different way. So first of all, and again, to remind folks, America’s day starts in the Second Island Chain. Those are U.S. citizens. And that is part of our defensive perimeter all the way out to Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands [CNMI], and the Marshall Islands. So we already are a Pacific nation. We have four of our five treaty allies out there—Korea, Japan, Australia, and Thailand. And obviously, I say that this century is going to be defined by the relationship between the United States and China, like last century was defined by the relationship between the United States and Europe. What I’m ascribing to is that there’s no better defense than a forward defense.

So for years, we have sailed in the commons, we have flown in the commons, and we have basically protected the global commons to maintain the freedom of navigation through those commons, primarily for commerce and for, you know, again, protecting the territorial integrity of our allies and partners in the region. Really, what I’m saying is that we already have a sizable U.S. military in Korea and Japan. I’m not looking to do more bases. What I’m really looking to do is have more faces in more places with fewer bases.

So what that means is dynamic, rotational, and an increase in multinational and joint exercises that are out in the region. Look, when I was in uniform as the U.S. Army commander in the Pacific, we had over 40 army-to-army and joint exercises that the army alone had in the region. So my point is, we need to be in those regions and in those areas and in those countries to increase the confidence of those partners and allies in the region that the United States will help them defend what they need to do.

But I also take a look at the national security strategy, and I think about the remarks of Secretary Hegseth at Reagan, and I’ll sum up, I think, the foreign policy of that strategy as this administration is going to help those that help themselves. It’s also said another way, I would say, that in order to have some say, they’re going to want you to pay. They’re going to want you to put some money on the table. Why?

Because it’s an investment in your own defense and protecting your own territorial integrity and national sovereignty. And a large part of their security umbrella in the region is their land forces, just like China. China’s army and the people’s police force are enormous. So, you know, I think that we are downplaying in sort of a high-risk way the role of land forces in the region. And I’ve had these conversations with a number of people.

I’ve been saying it for at least four or five years as a four-star and retired four-star. But I really was talking about it even as a three-star and a two-star in my time out there. And I just think that we’re 10 years from that window of modernization, organizational change, and the technology injected into the military in China.

And I think that we cannot wait anymore. We cannot wait. I mean, speed is our biggest problem right now. We have to have a greater sense of urgency to counter what the Chinese are doing in the region. I’ll remind folks that their goal is regional hegemony and then global dominance. Okay. So that’s stated plainly by their leaders. So if they can gain that regional hegemony, that gives them a step to their global aspirations. We have to prevent that regional hegemony from going on.

Secretary Bessent has said, you know, we don’t want to decouple. We want to de-risk. I understand that. But I think we need to look at certain sectors to say, well, how much risk is in, say, the critical mineral and rare earth element area? Very, very high risk. How much risk is in the pharmaceutical sector? Very, a significant amount of risk. So I guess within those sectors, we’re going to have to decide which ones we are going to actually go further in de-risking and maybe even de-linking, you know, our connection to China.

We didn’t have this problem with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This is a problem primarily that’s been created by our policies towards them since their entry into the WTO. And that free trade nation status allowed them to be woven into all the regions across the globe and into every sector. And they deliberately made decisions to check us or box us or prevent us in certain sectors. And now look at the position that we find ourselves in. It’s very dangerous.

Well, this all has been part of their unrestricted warfare strategy. This has been, you know, you could call it military strategy, you could call it industrial policy. From their perspective, these are all kind of interlinked, interwoven at large, right? When someone’s waging war against you, you kind of wait until someone says, I’m waging war against you. But they do it without saying so. And with plausible deniability, it’s almost like you don’t notice, and you behave, I mean, to great detriment. So, you know, I think, again, by looking at what their own leaders have said and what their propaganda organs have said and what they’ve actually done, they’ve been waging war for ten years. You know, if you want to talk about that window that you just described, right? So you would agree with that?

I would.

Yes, so, and somehow we—it’s been very hard for us to notice. And I don’t even know, is the U.S. military able to recognize all of that activity as military activity?

What I would say is I think the military has recognized it, but let me give a couple of points here. First of all, sometimes we need an event, and I’ll just draw a historical analogy because it’s the 9th of December. The Second World War did not start on the 7th of December 1941. It actually started in 1931, 10 years prior, with the Japanese invading Manchuria. And then you have the Spanish Civil War in Europe. You have the Italians in Ethiopia. There were a series of regional wars that were going on across the globe. It was World Wars II, not just one war.

And then if you go forward to like ’37 through ’39, the things that were happening in Europe, in your own home country, what was happening when the Japanese then went into Southeast Asia. December 7, 1941, was the end of a decade of regional wars that had exploded into now what was a world war. Well, where do we find ourselves today? We’ve got a regional war going on in Europe with Ukraine and Russia, and NATO is tangled up in it.

We’ve got the Israeli-Iran-Gaza war going on across the Middle East. You could argue there are other spots of war going on in Africa and even Southeast Asia. And so the last thing that we actually need is another regional war in the Indo-Pacific, because in my view, that’s a global war. That would be akin to what I just outlined from 1931 to 1941. And look what that rendered: 85 million people, by some estimates, were killed.

So if I just take the clock back on my own watch, because I went back out there in my second assignment in 2014 as a two-star division commander, and then I was a two-star deputy commander in the U.S. Army Pacific, and I think about what was going on during that period of time. This is why I say that China has been on an incremental, insidious, and irresponsible path to create conditions where they gain regional hegemony because they have global aspirations. And so, yes, they have been conducting war. I’m going to say that primarily this has been going on in the information domain and in the legal domain.

Okay. What about financial? Well, I mean, you’re including that in the trade, I guess.

I am, yes. And in the previous question, we talked about those sectors that they had gone in and dominated. And now we find ourselves with 90 percent of the processing of rare earth elements and critical minerals done by China. So we shouldn’t find ourselves surprised by the fact that we’re going to have difficulty making batteries, we’re going to have difficulty making magnets, we’re going to have difficulty making semiconductors and protecting them. I’m not saying we don’t need technology and we need AI. We need those big companies to do that. But it’s going to be a long, hard slog to regain control of our end-to-end supply chains. So that’s the economic deliverable that we’ve already talked about.

I’ll just draw one example, a story. And you hear about in the country, of course, there’s land being purchased. All of a sudden, it’s a thing that land is being purchased around military bases inside the United States. or farmland, or they’ll use the excuse of farmland. Okay, just park that for a minute. I’m going to give you a couple of stories of two countries that I won’t name, but both of them are in Southeast Asia.

So here’s the playbook. China buys land. They buy that land near locations where we primarily train. They own 90 percent of a telecommunications company. They put towers on the land. So you automatically know what they’re doing with those towers nearby, proximity-wise, to where we train. Then they own large parts of media companies. And then they build bot farms to spew misinformation and disinformation about the West and about the United States. This is happening throughout the Indo-Pacific. It’s happening all over Asia. I would argue it’s happening all across the globe, including inside our own country.

And so these are the kinds of things that we have to counter because that’s an example of the information warfare path that they have been on. The lawfare is very clear. I mean, they’re out, you know, sensing, collecting, ramming boats, firing flares, and then, you know, making a case to say, well, it’s, you know, it’s the South China Sea. It’s named after China. Like, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is it’s the global commons. And there’s, of course, arguments in courts about who owns what.

But the fact of the matter is all of those countries that surround the South China Sea are concerned about the violations of their territorial integrity and their national sovereignty. Again, when I see the South China Sea, and I think back to my time from 2014, we told them not to build islands. They built islands. We told them not to militarize the islands. They militarized them. We told them not to position forces on those islands. They did that. So we asked them to do it three times, and every single time they violated it. Now, I look at the South China Sea.

Again, I’m a land guy, so I see these land features being made, and I see terrain being created. Why? Yes, to choke off the superhighway through the South China Sea. But that’s also the fishing rights for about 125 million people. I mean, that’s a lot of commerce that’s at stake there, at risk there, examples of where this information warfare and lawfare coupled with the economic warfare that they’re conducting is tied to the military buildup that they’ve had going on. I’m talking about a decade, but it’s been going on for more than that. And so these things all come together.

And of course, it is the Communist Chinese Party [CCP] that’s in charge of this, and they’re calling the shots. Again, this is not against the Chinese people, but this is against the Chinese Communist Party. And we have to be very, very clear-eyed about that being an adversary. The enemy is not the people, but that party is an enemy, and it is an adversary. And we need to take stock in the fact that they’ve been at this for a number of years. And to your point earlier, we have to wake up, we have to get a sense of urgency, and we have to come up with a strategy and a plan to counter what they’ve been doing.

How much do you think that this national security strategy that we just saw drop, how much do you think that that addresses exactly what you talked about?

I think it squarely addresses almost all of it. Now, you know, I know there’s a debate out there about, well, the Western Hemisphere is first. Well, I mean, I think that our homeland has always been, you know, at least in military terms, to defend the homeland first. You have to protect, you know, your families, your freedoms, your independence, our prosperity. But, you know, and then after that, it’s China as an adversary.

Now, what I would say is I think the best defense is a forward defense. And I’m not talking about stationing permanently more forces in the region. What I’m talking about is a combination of permanency, which we already have, Korea, Japan, and forces in Singapore, and then rotationally. In other words, doing that with the known exercises and the known training periods that we have to rehearse the very functions that we need to do in the event that conflict or crisis emerges out there.

The other way to do this dynamically, is surprise experiments and surprise exercises that we have to conduct in the region. And this is where I think industry and the Department of War can do a much, much better job of being able to get things into the region and test certain capabilities out in that region. Everything from electronic warfare to new munitions, to sensors, to collection platforms, to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. If we are going to test something, we need to put it in the hands of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Guardians and put it in an operational force forward. Why?

Because it’s important for our force to be able to get hands-on applications of those new capabilities and new technologies. It forces us to change organizations. That’s the best feedback to the industry. But maybe this is the most important part; it is a signal of deterrence to our adversaries out there. Because we are doing new things with new capabilities, and they didn’t see it before. And again, that slows down their trajectory.

So this is interesting, right? Because going back to the headline that I mentioned at the beginning, right? The way they will portray that, I’m talking about the Chinese Communist Party, is that this is the U.S. and these other countries saber-rattling. This is Japan. Japan’s saying, we’re going to protect ourselves. Or Japan’s saying, Taiwan is important to us. I’m being a little bit paraphrasing here, but basically, that’s actually saber-rattling, and there’s even people in America, and not a small number, that would say that doesn’t kind of sound like saber rattling to me, so explain this. This is deterrence; this is not saber-rattling. Explain this to me.

Let’s talk about deterrence. So the essence of deterrence is winning without fighting. Okay, so I could argue that the two regional wars that we have ongoing today are because our deterrence faltered. So we can’t afford to have our deterrence questioned in the Indo-Pacific. Because back to my earlier comments, you’re going to take two regional wars, add a third, and you’ve got a global war on your hands. So my point is that in order to place capabilities out there like command and control, protection, collection, sustainment, and to disperse those, you’re actually reinforcing confidence with our allies and partners in the region.

At the same time, you’re creating a deterrent effect on the adversary because again, we want to be in places that surprise their ability to actually operate. Okay, I’ll give you an example. In early 2024, we placed a mid-range capable battery, a new capability in the multi-domain task force in the Philippines. It was up on the northern tip of the island of Luzon. This mid-range capability is a combination of Tomahawk and SM-6 missiles, land-based with deep range. As soon as that landed and we set it up in the middle of the night and offloaded it, within 24 hours, the Chinese came out with a statement that basically said, Philippines, be careful of becoming the cat’s claw for the United States. So this is the intimidation. This is the coercion effect that the Chinese have in the region.

And of course, what did the Philippines say? And good on the Philippines. They countered right away by saying, we will train, we will project, and we will protect our people any way that we choose. They were basically making a comment about their sovereignty. And that is a really good example of the region stepping up and saying, we are not putting up with your insidious, irresponsible, and incremental approach to draining our resources and sapping our will.

And this is where I think the United States plays an important role in being able to demonstrate new capabilities, new organizations, and introduce new technologies and new concepts with our allies and partners in the region to, again, slow down the trajectory of the Chinese military and the way that they’re employing their military forces and their application of those forces in the region against our treaty allies and partners.

I want to talk about the Chinese military for a moment. So we’ve, of course, been tracking these massive changes, actually, in the leadership of the military, purges of certain generals, like top, top leaders. You know, over the course of the last, let’s say about a year, it’s been very clear from our analysis that Xi Jinping has a lot less control of the military than he did before. Okay. But that’s our analysis. I’m open to being countered here, you know, just to be clear, right?

But, and, you know, over this time period, basically every single leader of a region and also, you know, type of military, whether it’s, you know, army or air force, has been replaced. I think there are two by our count, roughly, that are either not in big trouble in some way or have been removed altogether. And we can’t entirely tell if this is Xi Jinping removing people who he’s figured out are not loyal to him, which he appointed all of them, or if this is the military leaders basically asserting more control themselves, which we believe they do actually have a lot more control than before when he was sort of the top, top, top guy. But anyway, what does that do to a military when almost every single leader has been removed? And of course, they’ve been replaced and everything, but you could understand this at a level that I think few people could.

A couple of things. One, we need to be careful about mirror imaging, how we would feel vs how they see this. Okay, so I’ll state that up front. You said in the last year—I will tell you that this has been going on for about three years. There’s been a rash of removals over the last three plus years. That’s one component of it. There’s another component of this. He’s also done reorganization. Rocket forces, command and control, army, navy, the police forces, they’ve had some command and control adjustments over time.

The STRATCOM [United States Strategic Command] commander previously talked about a nuclear breakout. They’ve had some because they’re growing their nuclear forces. So, you know, I guess I couple a couple of points to two things here. One, it’s been going on for longer than a year. And two, there are reorganizations going on inside the military that are generating some of these changes.

Now, one argument is Xi’s putting in loyalists. Another argument is that he may not be putting in loyalists, but he’s rooting out corruption. You can look at it both ways. He’s clearly going to put people in there that he trusts, but why is he taking them out? It may be for incompetence. It may be because of the reorganization. It may be for corruption. It’s probably a combination of all three.

There is a final option. The final option is that they don’t trust him enough and he doesn’t have as much power as they would like to portray to the rest of the world. Because, of course, they always want to have this sort of unified picture.

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