‘We don’t have anywhere near the inventory for a China fight’
An interview with former CIA analyst John Culver, an authority on China’s military.
May 11, 2026
John Culver is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military, a subject he began studying as a CIA analyst in 1985. From 2015 to 2018, he served as national intelligence officer for East Asia. Since retiring from the CIA in 2020, he has been a
nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In advance of the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, I spoke with Culver about China’s military capabilities and what lessons the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is drawing from the U.S. conflict with Iran. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Could you briefly summarize how China’s military has changed since the 1980s?
It’s hard to not be hyperbolic when you talk about the transformation from the force that I first saw, which was equipped largely with Korean and some Vietnam War-era gear. Today, it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage. I don’t think we have an advantage in missile, space, cyber, reconnaissance, etc. I think they are leading us in some categories such as air-to-air missiles, surface-to-air missiles, counter-space capabilities and electronic warfare.
The thing that should jump off the page at you is how many advanced munitions they’re building — magnitudes greater than our industrial base could produce. The Chinese have one shipyard that
builds more than all of our shipyards combined. They deploy enough ships every year to replicate the entire French navy. If the reports are true that we expended a huge portion of our long-range strike and theater missile defense capacity fighting Iran, then we don’t have anywhere near the inventory we would need for a China fight.
The response that you hear from the U.S. military is, “Well, sure, they’ve got quantity, but we have quality.” Is that still true?
It’s true that the Chinese haven’t fought a war since 1979, but it’s also true the U.S. hasn’t fought anything like a peer since 1945. So if China wants to get into a counterinsurgency war, we’d have a clear advantage since that’s been where most of our experience has been in the last 20 years. But in terms of war at sea or in the air, I wouldn’t give either side much of an edge. I think the U.S. focuses on the Chinese invasion of Taiwan because that’s the scenario we are most confident we could defeat. That’s about sinking ships, and we can be pretty good at that. More troublesome is if it’s a punitive campaign by the Chinese that doesn’t expose their forces to direct strike by the United States unless we’re willing to bomb mainland China.
What do you mean by a punitive campaign?
It’s the kind of campaign that the Chinese have conducted more often than not every time that the PLA’s gone to war. Whether you want to look back at the Indian border in 1962 or the war with Vietnam in 1979 or various pressure campaigns against Taiwan, the goal isn’t to seize territory, it’s to deliver a punishing blow against the adversary. In a Taiwan scenario, they could pretty quickly seize islands controlled by Taiwan off China’s coast. They could carry out large-scale strikes on Taiwan, destroy much of its military and industrial capacity, attempt to kill Taiwan’s political and military leadership. The threat then to Taiwan and then indirectly to the United States is that, if a war starts, Taiwan’s going to be finished as a semiconductor producer.
That’s a pretty devastating threat, given that Taiwan makes over 90 percent of the most advanced semiconductors.
Right. Plus in any conflict scenario, you’re going to take most of Asia offline. So it isn’t just direct economic effects from the end of Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing. The ability for merchant ships and aircraft to transit through the Western Pacific is suddenly at risk. So take the Strait of Hormuz problem and expand that by severalfold to encompass the South China Sea all the way to the Strait of Malacca and all of Northeast Asia, including all of Japan and South Korea’s ports.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brags about all the targets the U.S. is hitting in Iran. Is that something that concerns the Chinese?
They have invested a tremendous amount in air defenses. Probably the best-defended airspace in the world other than the Moscow area is the stretch of the Chinese coast from Hainan Island up to Beijing. I think what really gives them confidence is that this is not a new way of war. You could go back
to Desert Storm in 1991 or Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, and the U.S. is still following the same tradecraft where we forward-deploy aircraft into the region. Iran does not have very capable long-range strike systems, but still, according to
The Washington Post, the Iranians managed to hit at least 228 U.S. targets in the Mideast. If the U.S. thinks it’s going to build up its air forces in advance of a campaign against China, we’re going to be putting eggs into some fairly fragile baskets. If we’re going to deploy advanced aircraft to Japan, Australia or perhaps South Korea, China can do something about all of those in a way that Iran really can’t.
What about U.S. aircraft carriers?
The problem is for aircraft carriers to be combat-relevant, we would have to win at least contested air capability within about 1,000 miles of the combat zone. There’s really no safe spaces. The Chinese track our aircraft carriers every hour of every day. I think some of the thinking in the Pentagon, and it may have evolved since I retired, is that when we think there’s going to be a war, we need to get our high-value naval assets out of the theater, and then we would have to fight our way back in. From where, it’s not clear. Guam is no bastion either.
Then why are we investing many billions of dollars into more aircraft carriers or even now in Trump-class battleships? I think the military services have a nostalgia for the things that meet their expectations for how you get promoted. I don’t know if there’s a career track yet for drone operator that can get you an admiral’s star.
Does the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, assuming it’s approved, change the trend lines?
It would probably help to some extent, but I worry that we could be throwing good money after bad. What we need to do is harden our deployed forces so they can withstand a first strike from China and then we need to build more munitions than we think is even sane. The consumption rate of these very expensive systems is just astounding. Whichever side runs out of bullets first is going to lose.
What about the Pentagon’s plans to turn the Taiwan Strait into a “Hellscape” using drones and missiles to target a Chinese invasion fleet? It sounds cool. It was probably designed to intimidate the Chinese and make them think twice. And that’s always a good idea. The problem is, what drones are you talking about launching from where? You would have to pre-deploy them if not on Taiwan itself then on Luzon or the Japanese southwest islands, all of which can be struck by the Chinese. That’s the tyranny of time and distance when you look at war in the Pacific.
How do you think the Chinese are looking at the dual blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, by the U.S. and Iran, and about what that means for the Chinese potential to blockade Taiwan?
The Taiwan Strait is 100 miles wide. The Strait of Hormuz is only 21 miles. So there are major differences. But I think one lesson that the Chinese might draw is that, because of the advances in anti-ship capability, and the dynamics of human nature to avoid risk, there’s real power in being the side that’s trying to impede shipping rather than to enable it. A lot of the effect of a blockade is the impact on shipping insurance and the willingness of freight haulers to go into a war zone. China can create a lot of chaos and cut off almost all shipping into Taiwan just by declaring a blockade. They have multiple ways to enforce that. They can also strike all of Taiwan’s port-handling facilities. So you can send your giant replenishment ships in, and there’ll be no way to offload.
What would or should the U.S. do in a scenario like that?
I think the lesson is mostly try to avoid that scenario. I wonder when Americans might start to say, maybe Taiwan is a war we don’t want to get involved in, because at best you might fight it to a Pyrrhic victory. You might avoid nuclear escalation, but you might not. So unless you can explain to the American people why it’s worth it, which we didn’t even attempt to do with Iran, I don’t know if that’s something you want to do.
I think Taiwan is a crisis Xi Jinping also wants to avoid, not an opportunity he wants to seize. And when you see what he’s done to his military in the last two years by eviscerating the senior command ranks, he doesn’t look to me like a guy who’s in a great big hurry.
The PLA had become systemically corrupt. I think Xi’s conclusion as of last year was that he can’t rely on the PLA to fix itself. So that’s why he’s cutting so deeply. There’s
a great study published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in February that said that he fired at least 53 percent of his three- and four-stars. That’s incredible. Mao did nothing like that.
What he’s doing isn’t about a Taiwan scenario, it’s about Tiananmen 2.0. If push comes to shove, the army once again might have to save the party as it did in 1989. And if you don’t know if they would do that again, well, that’s the wrong answer if you’re the Chinese Communist Party. Your military has to be absolutely reliable and loyal.
Looking at the unpopularity of the U.S. war with Iran, do Chinese leaders say the Americans don’t have the stomach for a fight?
They have a very dark portrait of the United States as a global hegemon that’s declining in power and becoming more violent as it tries to cling to its primacy. They see us as a very militarily aggressive country that’s now abandoned all of its soft power through programs like USAID and Voice of America. While they think the U.S. public has a low tolerance for long-scale war, based on what they’ve seen since Vietnam, they still see us as highly inclined to engage in military conflict. So that’s one reason why I conclude that a war over Taiwan is not something that Xi Jinping is looking for.
Do you think China is less or more afraid of the United States militarily after the Iran war or does it make no difference?
I don’t think it makes a big difference. I think what they’ve seen so far underscores some of the lessons they’d already learned about the need for large magazines for these very sophisticated weapons.
The operation that might’ve impressed them more than what they saw in Iran was what we did in Venezuela, where we mounted a Special Operations raid that seized a foreign head of state. When they heard about the U.S. hacking into the camera system in Caracas, they might’ve had a moment where they wondered about their own camera system in Beijing. I think the Israelis, after their strikes on the Iranian leadership, said the same thing, that they were hacking cameras in Tehran to track high-profile targets. You may feel secure that you have cameras everywhere in Beijing, but then what if an adversary has the same feed?
It seems like Trump is motivated to end the war with Iran before the summit with Xi.
I really don’t know if the Chinese would raise it. They haven’t staked out a very firm position other than a “war is bad” stance. They’ve seen some benefits from the energy disruption. It’s been a boost for their green technology sales. They have the largest strategic petroleum reserve in the world, and they’ve been filling it while everybody else is emptying theirs. So I don’t detect they’re under extreme pressure. Their biggest problems are internal and structural. It’s not the war in Iran.