This Isn't the War You're Looking For

The war in Ukraine tells us less than you might think about the likely nature of a U.S.-China conflict

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds into its third year, it has understandably become a dominant frame through which much of the national security community views modern warfare. From artillery consumption rates and the ubiquity of drone usage to the power of open-source intelligence and electronic warfare, the Ukraine conflict has become a looking glass into what future wars might look like. Its lessons are being used to drive U.S. defense strategy, acquisitions, and more. But we should be cautious, because if a U.S.-China conflict ever does come, especially one over Taiwan, it won’t look like Bakhmut or Kursk. It will probably look more like the long-range expeditionary challenge of the Falklands War, or the U.S. Navy's costly—but ultimately successful—struggle against Kamikaze strikes off Okinawa. (For Taiwan's sake, we should hope to convince China's leaders it would look something like the failed Gallipoli campaign.)

The Spanish Civil War was a preview of the war in Europe. The Pacific War? Not so much…

If one were an informed observer in the mid-1930s, with great power war looming on the horizon, you might have looked to the Spanish Civil War to get a sense of what was to come. It was the largest conflict then underway, drawing in foreign fighters and major power support, and showcasing mechanized armies, new aircraft types, and ideological zeal. But if your concern was how the United States might fight Japan in the Pacific, it would have been a misleading lens. Spain showed little of the realities of amphibious assaults, long-range naval operations, or the use of submarines to strangle an economy. Today, we face a similar temptation: to think that the war we’re watching now will tell us what the next one will look like. But it might not. And in the case of a U.S.-China war, it probably won’t.

Condor Legion bombers, Spanish Civil War

This is not to say Ukraine is irrelevant. It can offer insight into how a fight on Taiwan might unfold—dense urban combat, heavy casualties, and the brutal physics of modern firepower. Surprise drones attacks in both Ukraine and Iran show us how it might start. But as I’ve written before, while a war might be concluded on Taiwan, it will almost certainly be decided elsewhere—largely at sea and in the air. The war we’re watching now is a continental, attritional struggle fought largely over land. The war we must prepare for would be primarily maritime and air-based, fought over vast distances and driven by mobility, logistics, and joint force integration.

The differences are stark. In Ukraine, NATO can reinforce overland with trucks and trains. In a Pacific conflict, U.S. forces would operate thousands of miles from home, dependent on contested sea lines of communication and vulnerable forward bases.

Ukraine and the Black Sea, overlaid to scale with the Pacific

The PLA isn’t the Russian military, and Taiwan isn’t Donetsk. And while much has been made of the use of drones in Ukraine, we should be careful about assuming those lessons translate neatly to the maritime domain. At sea—except for underwater—there is little cover or concealment, just vast ocean expanses. Navies have been dealing with long-range, drone-like threats for decades in the form of anti-ship missiles and aircraft. The idea of small, expendable platforms providing surveillance or delivering strikes at sea isn't revolutionary, it’s evolutionary. In a high-end naval conflict in open ocean, it’s not clear to me that drones would dramatically change the balance.

What could tip the balance, however, is the sheer scale and offensive orientation of China’s military capabilities. The PLA Rocket Force, for instance, fields a conventional missile arsenal that vastly outstrips anything Russia has employed in Ukraine. As I noted last year, the PLARF can hold at risk U.S. and allied air bases, ports, and ships throughout the region with precision conventional firepower—an essential difference. We're not looking at another Russia: a petro-state largely equipped with Cold War leftovers, plus whatever it can get from places like Iran and North Korea. Instead, we're looking at a peer competitor with a purpose-built set of offensive strike capabilities designed not just to keep U.S. and allied forces at bay, but to actively disrupt, disable, and disorient them from the outset—and possibly, by surprise.

There were better analogs in the 1930s, and there are better ones now

In the interwar years, U.S. Naval War College wargames and fleet problems anticipated many of the operational challenges that would define the Pacific War. They focused on things like long-range fleet operations, maritime logistics, and contested island campaigns—the very same issues the U.S. Navy would confront from 1942 onward. Meanwhile, the Second Sino-Japanese War offered insight into the brutal realities of prolonged continental conflict in Asia, including the costs of overextension.

Today, one of the most instructive modern parallels is likely the Falklands War. Though limited in scale, it offers a more relevant case study than Ukraine for what a future Indo-Pacific conflict might look like. The United Kingdom had to project power across 8,000 miles of ocean without nearby bases, using a naval task force vulnerable to missile attack and reliant on carrier air power and long-range bombers. Amphibious landings had to be executed under threat. Logistics chains had to be sustained at distance and under pressure. Despite the different scale, the operational DNA of the Falklands campaign has much in common with the challenges the U.S. and its allies (and China) would face in a Western Pacific fight.

China's military, for its part, has drawn its own historical lessons—particularly from the Pacific War. As discussed by Toshi Yoshihara, PLA strategists have studied the U.S. Pacific island-hopping campaign not just as a blueprint, but as a set of cautionary lessons. They've internalized the need to preemptively strike key forward bases, dominate maritime logistics, and effectively wield their industrial strength. These are the kinds of strategic insights that indicate a military not just learning from the past, but preparing deliberately to avoid its adversary's past mistakes. In that sense, China may be doing what we risk failing to do: learning from the right wars in the right way.

None of this is to say we should ignore Ukraine. But we must avoid the comfort of assuming the war we see now is the war we will fight next. Strategic surprise often comes not from failing to learn, but from learning the wrong things. In preparing for conflict with China, we should be looking not just at the war we have available to observe, but at the war we might actually have to fight—and above all, the one we need to deter.

Note: this piece was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence.