The Threats We Face & How We Win

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The threat posed by China looms over many of the foreign policy moves by the Trump administration, including trade deals and arms sales to U.S. allies in the Asian Pacific.
In this episode, we sit down with retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery to discuss what steps the U.S. must take now to keep communist China in check.
I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley. It's Sunday, August 10th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
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Joining us now to discuss U.S. defense policy as it relates to China is retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery.
He's with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and he's also recently traveled to Taiwan to meet with its political and military leadership. Rear Admiral, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me. Now, we've seen reports that China is limiting the supply of critical minerals to Western defense companies.
What do you know about these restrictions and what do they mean to the U.S. military? Well, these are serious.
I mean, this is a serious leverage play by China to probably to get us to adjust our export controls on them. And the reason it's a serious leverage play is that our defense industrial base has become very dependent on critical materials from China.
And particularly the most famous one being probably being the magnets in the F-35 where we need pounds of magnet for every F-35. But there are a series of these.
Some of them are the diodes that go into the... Some of the materials that go into our Aegis radars that our ships use to detect inbound missiles.
So you can find these across all our military systems. And this has got a serious impact on our ability to produce and field weapon systems over the next few years if we don't resolve this issue, at least initially by getting access to the Chinese markets, and then long term by establishing our own markets.
Yeah, on that second front there, what actions are we taking right now to start to shore it up from our end in terms of production or access to other markets? Yeah, this is a tough issue. It took us 25 years to become this dependent on China.
It's going to take us a few years to get out of this dependence. But it starts with aggressive industrial policy.
What I mean by that is what we saw recently with the Department of Defense purchasing a producer, a mineral, a steak and a mineral producer. And in doing that purchase, saying we will buy, you know, I think it was 10 years, but a significant number of years worth of product at a minimum price.

What that does is it allows other investors to come in because they know that if they invest in this, two years later it won't be driven out of business by China driving down market prices, which is what China does. China, to get leverage, to get market dominance, they back a state-owned enterprise by creating an inappropriate, unlevel playing field

so that Western producers can't compete because the prices are kept artificially low. But by the U.S.
government stepping in and saying, we will pay a fixed price, a reasonable, correct price, what the market price should be, you can get investors in because companies know that they'll have an assured customer for two, five, ten years. So that's the kind of industrial policy we're going to have to do.
And we're not going to have to do it once or twice. We're going to have to do this a dozen times across multiple areas to ensure that our defense industrial base has assured access to the critical minerals that are necessary to build, develop, build, and field the weapon systems that we're used to having.
Yeah, China is really famous or infamous for playing the long game with a lot of these things. It takes a lot of patience from our end and looking forward into the future.
It takes effort. It takes political will and commitment from both sides of the aisle, I think.
Now, you recently returned from Taiwan where you had meetings with senior officials that included the president, senior military leadership. What were your most significant takeaways from your meetings with those military and political leaders in Taiwan? Well, first, they're very appreciative of the United States.
They understand the United States is their key ally. They make that very clear.
No one else sells them weapons. No one else stands by them when they're threatened by the Chinese.
That doesn't mean they don't get some rhetorical support for, say, the Australians or the Japanese on occasion or from European countries. But when it comes to ship movements, aircraft movements, it's us.
So number one, they get that. Number two, they understand that we expect them to spend more on their defense.
So they're taking their defense spending from about 2.5% this year to 3% next year. So they're going to get right to three, and then I think they'll go to four and eventually 5% make their plans.
The irony is to get the spending up that high, they can only buy the weapons from us. We're the only people that sell to them.
And I'd say gently, our foreign military sales program is a dumpster fire. And as a result, we don't deliver weapons.
It takes seven years to get them Javelin missiles, eight years to get them Stinger manned portable air missiles. I mean, these should take two, three years.
So part of the problem is U.S. foreign military sales and delivery.
But the Taiwanese are going to do everything they can to get themselves to three, four, and eventually five percent by the end of the Trump administration. So that's a big deal.
And if I could say one last thing, they really understand that in addition to preparing for the big military, that most likely, most dangerous scenario of a cross-strait invasion, they also have to prepare for the most likely scenario, which is where China attacks their societal resilience, attacks their financial systems, their communication systems, their energy systems with diplomatic, economic, cyber and influence operations, not military attacks. And the CCP would hope to break the societal resilience of Taiwan.
Taiwan has to fight that. They need to make a lot of investments in that kind of domestic resilience.
And then the United States can help as well. Again, political will playing into this and vigilance from a political and economic standpoint.
I think a lot of people will be surprised to hear that our arms sales to some other countries are really hampered and slow. I think that's something that we're particularly efficient with.
What are the problems there? Yeah, for sure. Our arms sales, our foreign military sales overseas are hampered by a bureaucratic process inside the Department of Defense and Department of State.
They have to work together. They don't do a great job.
It's hampered by just the kind of the bureaucracy of how we integrate in the weapons providers, say Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or something like that, and the back and forth with the host country. And we recently did a harpoon sale.
That's an anti-ship cruise missile that's really critical to the fight. We did a harpoon sale to Taiwan.
The sale was first approved in 2020, and I'd say the delivery is going to be completed by 2029, if we're lucky. This should take two, three, four years max, not nine years.
So we have a backed up four-month-old sales docket with Taiwan alone of $12 billion. It was $17 or $18 billion just four years ago.
This is way too much. Countries cannot rely on us for timely delivery of weapons if it takes five, seven, nine years to get weapons to them.
Do you see action from the Trump administration to improve this? And Congress. I see both the Trump administration and Congress frustrated with this.
This is the kind of like things having accepting things as they are that President Trump doesn't like to do.

So he'll he'll make changes in this part of its Congress as well.

They have to remove some mechanisms that were in there.

Sometimes some are legitimate oversight mechanisms. Some are overkill.

They've got to figure that out, get the laws right.

But it's going to take the real center of gravity on this is the Department of Defense and the Department of State running a streamlined process between the two of them to get these weapons systems approved, the contracts let, and then get out of the way so American business can do what American business is great at, which is produce these weapons and deliver them to a key ally. Are there parallels between the support Ukraine needs and what Taiwan might need in the future for a conflict? How can U.S.
policy sort of evolve to be more proactive rather than reactive in both these theaters? Yeah, that's a great question. I'd throw Israel in as well.
I mean, these are three beleaguered democracies that the United States is clearly the primary provider of weapon systems to. In the case of Ukraine, it is now weapons from the United States being purchased by Europe.
But for the past two years before that, you know, in the Biden administration, it was weapons, you know, provided by the United States and purchased by Europe going to Ukraine. Israel is almost all United States support and Taiwan is all United States support.
We're delivering a lot of different weapons to each of those three countries. There is a little bit of overlap, but we have to be careful and watch that.
And those are areas where we ought to be making special investments, like Patriot air defense systems and the missiles that go with them, the PAC-2 and PAC-3 missiles. The NASAM's air defense system and the AMRAM missile that goes with it, those systems need to be put into exceptionally high production.

And we've seen some of the money for that flowing to the Department of Defense from the Ukraine supplemental last year, from this year's reconciliation or one big, beautiful bill that was passed. Those bring in investments where the Department of Defense actually invests in the ability of companies to build more weapons faster.
That's what we need to do. We need to prioritize which weapons systems and then make the investments and reap the rewards.
What additional steps should the U.S. take right now to deter a potential Chinese military move against Taiwan? You know, I think we have to look at it in three different bins.
One is making Taiwan more resilient. That's both weapon systems and societal resilience.
It's making sure they have the right anti-ship cruise missiles, they have the right mines, they have the right anti-armor and short-range air defense gear. But also that they have good cyber defense, good electrical power, good reliability, good sources of LNG, that's liquid natural gas, to run their systems.
So number one is taking care of Taiwan. Number two is taking care of the United States, making sure we've got the weapon systems we need, you know, because, you know, China, when they put that max, you know, that kind of most dangerous scenario, start the cross-state invasion, the only military that can stop it is the United States.
The only way to prevent it from ever happening is the United States to show enough muscle, to show enough muscle ahead of time that China doesn't try to do the invasion. So that's making sure we have the right enough submarines, enough strike aircraft, the right kind of missiles, and then a whole lot of unmanned surface and air drones to get the system.
Then the third and final part is that we in the Taiwan militaries, the U.S. and Taiwan militaries work together seamlessly.
That's not the case right now. We spent 40 years from 1979 to 2024 not exercising together.
We need to exercise together. We need to work together.
We need to move from like a de-conflicted level of interoperability all the way up to fully integrated.

To get that fully integrated level of interoperability, you need to exercise together routinely, weekly, monthly, not just Navy to Navy, but joint together. together.
If we can do those three things, build up Taiwan, build up the United States,

and work together in a more interoperable way, that's going to present a significant challenge to China, one for which I think they'll pass. And so you'll deter China from invading in that cross-strait invasion.
And that's the key. We'd prefer to deter them than to have to defeat them.
On that final note there about exercising together, have we not done that because that would be seen as an act of aggression by China? What's the reason we haven't been doing that? So that's exactly it. So, you know, before 1979, you know, we had 15 to 20,000 troops on Taiwan.
We operated, we fought part of the Vietnam War from Taiwan.

I mean, they were a good ally of us. They fought with us in Korea.
These were a key partner, and they fought with us in Vietnam. They were a key partner to the United States.
And so we had this level of interoperability. After the 1979 decision, the One China Policy, the Taiwan Relations Act, what we said was we would supply them with weapons and we'd be ready to support them.
And we very cruelly cut out the training and exercising together. You can't win.
Right now, if you added up our forces and the Taiwan forces, it would be two plus two equals three. You can't defeat China like that.
You've got to be interoperable. So we've got to exercise together.
Congress saw this. They tired of the administrations not doing it.
So in 2023, they passed the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act, which very clearly says to the Department of Defense, thou shalt do service-to-service exercises, joint exercises, even try to bring in your allies and partners like Japan, but build up that interoperability. I'm hoping that the Trump administration will take that guidance from Congress seriously and do that.
But you're absolutely right. The reason people are scared to do it is they don't want to provoke China.
But my final thought on that is, apparently we're willing to sacrifice 7,000 to 20,000 Americans. That's what would happen in a war with Taiwan to prevent a Chinese invasion.
But we're not willing ahead of that invasion to provoke them with an exercise. That doesn't make any sense.
That's illogical to say, I'm going to fight you, but I'm not going to prepare to fight you for fear of provoking you. That is a policy that needs to be tossed out.
Let's talk about Russia, which is a key trading partner with China. You've called for stricter enforcement of sanctions targeting recipients of Russian fossil fuels.
What mechanisms are currently being underutilized? What impact would an effective enforcement have on China as well as India, for example? Look, we could get a new law. I know Senator Graham has pushed a new law that would put some very tough tariffs and export controls on recipients of Russian fossil fuels delivered by the shadow fleet of illegal oilers and tankers.
That's helpful. The reality is laws exist now to hold, the president has the power now to hold countries accountable that are receiving this secondary, that are secondary receivers, tertiary receivers of this shadow fleet oil and natural gas.
We've now talked publicly that the two big countries involved in this are India and China. Both of them do it for obvious reasons.
They profiteer. This helps their economies.
It makes the unit cost of energy cheaper when they buy discounted Russian oil and natural gas, and their productivity goes up. But their productivity goes up on the backs of dead Ukrainian civilians and soldiers who are fighting this Russian war machine.
And I love that President Trump called them a Russian war machine. That's what they are.
They are running a wartime economy. It's fueled almost 50% by the sale of these fossil fuels.
And Putin then spends 40% of his federal budget

on defense. So if we can cut off the fossil fuels, we'll cut off the funds to pay for defense,

and that'll give Vladimir Putin some tough decisions about how he spends a dwindling

federal budget. Final question.
With all your knowledge of the Indo-Pacific and European

and And that'll give Vladimir Putin some tough decisions about how he spends a dwindling federal budget. Final question.
With all your knowledge of the Indo-Pacific and European theaters of war, what's your greatest strategic concern for the U.S. over the next year? I mean, there's a lot of things to be worried about.
Kim Jong-un feeling ignored and doing nuclear saber rattling. That worries me a little bit.
But I think probably the greatest concern is a Russia that either wins on the battlefield, which I don't think is likely, or domestically begins to have systemic cracks that put Putin's legitimacy at risk. I don't know what he'll do when that happens.
And that's why the president has been wise to try to shut him down. Look, I think it's a mix of sanctions plus defensive weapons plus offensive weapons.
But we're giving that to Ukraine to force Russia to legitimately negotiate at the table, to withdraw its forces from portions of Ukraine that they've taken since the illegal invasion of 2022 and to demilitarize the rest of their occupied Ukraine in a way that makes it safe for Ukraine to exist. To me, the biggest risk is a overstretched poop.
Are you afraid of who comes in and fills that void or that he would react in a very extreme way? Yes. I'll take either one of those answers as being a real problem, but probably the one that's closest, the wolf closest to the sled is him when he finally recognizes that President Trump is a more powerful figure than he is.

And he has to bend the knee to President Trump.

And look, President Trump has given Putin more than enough time to end this thing in a way that doesn't embarrass or place Putin's regime at risk.

He's chosen this path of continued war.

I mean, how many times has President Trump said, Vladimir, stop?

Have a great day. place Putin's regime at risk.
He's chosen this path of continued war. I mean, how many times has President Trump said, Vladimir, stop? How many times has he come off a phone call and said, Putin's assured him the missile attacks will stop? As Melania, his wife, has had to tell President Trump, well, they hit another city today.
Putin has been extremely disrespectful of President Trump. And I think

President Trump's finally getting to the point where he's going to hold Putin accountable.

Like you laid out, a precarious situation, very tough to manage. It's been fascinating

to watch. It's also a little frightening, like you mentioned.
Thank you so much for talking with us.

We appreciate you lending your expertise to our show.

Thank you for having me.

That was retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery,

and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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