DLNews Military:
US TROOPS TO PREPARE FOR WAR WITH CHINA
The signs point to war with China for U.S. Air Force General Michael Minihan.
In a memorandum, the senior military official calculates that the People's Republic could invade Taiwan as early as 2025 - and that the U.S. will fight on the side of the democratic island nation. So Minihan ordered the 107,000 men and women under his command Friday to prepare for war.
"I hope I'm wrong. However, I feel that we will fight in 2025," Minihan wrote in the memorandum, first reported by "ABC News." He heads the Air Mobility Command, which is responsible for aerial refueling, among other things.
The four-star general's logic: China's dictator Xi Jinping, 69, secured his third term at the party's October 2022 congress and appointed a war council. Next year's presidential election in Taiwan will likely give him an excuse to invade. The U.S. also holds presidential elections in November 2024 - the government in Washington would then be distracted for months.
The U.S. Department of Defense immediately contradicted Minihan: "These comments are not representative of the Department's view of China," the Pentagon said.
However, many Western observers agree that war with China is almost set in stone. The only question is when, beliefs the U.S. intelligence agency CIA, for example. Philip Davidson, ex-commander of the U.S. fleet in the Indo-Pacific, considers an invasion by 2027 to be realistic - a view shared by officials in Robert Habeck's (53, Green Party) Ministry of Economics.
Shortly after his re-election, China's dictator Xi gave the order to strengthen the training and operational readiness of the soldiers comprehensively. The army should prepare for ANY war, he said in Beijing.
U.S. President Joe Biden, 80, promised Taiwan to let American soldiers fight the People's Liberation Army in a TV interview in September. However, scholars at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington predict China would lose the war.
Why is China targeting Taiwan in the first place?
For decades, the Chinese regime has viewed the island nation as a renegade province. After Mao Tse Tung (1893-1976) defeated the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) in the Chinese Civil War, Chiang fled to the Chinese island of Formosa to continue the Republic of China (Taiwan's official name), which was founded in 1912. Taiwan has been an independent state since 1949 but has never declared independence and is now recognized by only a few nations. Yet it was considered the successor to the empire until the 1970s.
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