War With China in 6 Months?

China's navy is on the move. Is war in the Pacific on the horizon? Welcome to China Uncensored, I'm Chris Chappell. China is ramping up for a major war in the Pacific. Unlike anything anyone's seen since World War 2. Or Pacific Rim. Great movie. Not enough people talk about it anymore. I'm talking bases, ships, drones, submarines, and research vessels that can scout the bottom of the ocean and cut undersea internet cables. The pace of the progress is mind-blowing. Take for example Yulin Naval Base. This was Yulin Naval Base, home of China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, in November of 2020. And this was it in May of 2026. Notice the massive increase in the number of warships. They got a glow up, now they want a blow up. This kind of enormous expansion in bases across China and across the South China Sea, like this artificial island at Antelope Reef, ...can only have one purpose, to allow China to host and produce even more military ships. According to the Wall Street Journal, since 2020, China has added 71 major warships and submarines, 19 of them just last year. This includes major warships like aircraft carriers, the jewel of modern conventional naval warfare. China is set to go from 3 aircraft carriers to 9 by 2035, not too far behind the US's carrier fleet of 11. It's the only time going all the way up to 11 isn't nearly good enough. But it's not just about how many ships they're building and how quickly. It's the type of ships that should have the US worried. Because China isn't just building conventional warships. They are building a new, more flexible, significantly more modern navy. For example, this is the amphibious Yuzhao-class Type 071 landing platform dock, or LPD. It's capable of holding four Z-8 helicopters and 800 marines plus their equipment and four Type 726 air-cushion landing craft, along with a laser-directed energy weapon and various point defense systems. Dang it, why do genocidal authoritarian regimes get the equipment that sounds like the coolest Christmas toy ever? According to satellite images seen by Naval News, China was seen expanding construction of the Type 071 LPD from just Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding in Shanghai to include COMEC, also known as Guangzhou Shipyard International, in Longshui Island, Guangzhou. These ships are seriously futuristic. And in case you missed it, let me say it again, they're amphibious. Which is more than just a little crazy to think about. Research vessels are also coming out fast. According to Taiwan's Coast Guard, China operates more than 120 oceanographic research vessels. As an associate professor at National Taiwan University's Institute of Oceanography put it, they are launching research ships as fast as dropping dumplings into a pot. But surely they're just hungry for science. They want to learn some juicy, savory, chewy new information. Damn it, that mention of dumplings made me hungry. There's a reason why China is producing so many research vessels. These are the kinds of ships that gather critical intelligence for China's military, such as seafloor geography for submarine warfare and maps for undersea cable cutting, a skill China's been practicing around the world. See all these zigzag patterns? Those are just some of the paths that Chinese research vessels took earlier this year right around Taiwan's south and east, the same area where China is ramping up operations and harassing shipping. China's research vessels have even been seen further into the Pacific, at places like Nauru, And everywhere else around the world, as you can see with all those orange lines showing China's research fleet moving from just January 2020 to September 2026. It's the worst thing to leak out of China. Okay, second worst thing to leak out of China. This points us to another critical fact. China isn't just building more, it's doing more as well. Chinese aircraft carriers are conducting operations in more places, and in doing so, gathering valuable data that China can later use to wage war throughout the Pacific. The same goes for China's Coast Guard, which is also scarier than it sounds when you realize it guards coasts they say belong to them but aggressively don't. The Coast Guard, together with the Chinese Navy and Air Force, has engaged in operations that have become larger, more frequent, and more assertive. In the first six months of 2026, China's Coast Guard vessels were spotted around the Scarborough Shoal 933 times. That's almost as much as the number of times they were seen in all of 2025. To illustrate just how expansive China's coast guard has become, here's what the first island chain looked like on July 3rd this year. All those circles represent groups of Chinese navy and coast guard ships spotted that day. This doesn't include the time when a Chinese naval flotilla circled around Australia last year and conducted live fire drills without warning. Australia only learned about it through a commercial pilot. So why is China building so much so fast? Back in 2021, US Admiral Philip Davidson, then head of US Indo-Pacific Command, warned that China could attempt to invade Taiwan within the next six years. As in, by 2027, which let me remind you, is coming in two months. This prediction is known as the Davidson Window. Although, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its 2026 Annual Threat Assessment that, "...Chinese leaders do not currently plan to execute an invasion of Taiwan in 2027, nor do they have a fixed timeline for achieving unification." Whew, what a relief. I'm glad we can all rest easy knowing that China won't do anything short-sighted, stupid, and evil, right? Right? Well, US General Ronald Clarke, the head of the US Army's largest service component, US Army Pacific, isn't taking any chances. In a Honolulu conference, he said, Is the window still valid? The answer for us at US Army Pacific is yes. Which is why General Clarke says he wants the US Army to be ready for a Pacific war by April 2nd, 2027. Probably because if an invasion happened on April 1st, everyone would just think, man, you're taking this April Fool's prank really far. But here's the thing. Even if we don't see war happen in 2027, China's growing so powerful so fast that we're going to need to be on our toes for years, perhaps decades. A lot of it is thanks to China's military-civilian fusion. Unlike American companies like Boeing, which largely separates commercial and military production, Chinese companies completely blur the line between the defense industry and commercial business. Often, defense and commercial production lines are right next to each other. Like you see here on Changxing Island, where there are commercial and other vessels in orange and military vessels in blue. Commercial and military production side-by-side is insane. It'd be like going to McDonald's and having to return a hamburger because you didn't order it to be filled with bullets. This civil-military fusion, combined with Chinese subsidies and reduced dual-use R&D costs, has helped China produce so much, so fast. It's why Changxing Island was able to produce things like the new Type 076 drone carrier, which China has just used to test and recover China's first autonomous combat aircraft. Flying murder robots. It's like China watches dystopian sci-fi movies and says, hey, hit the pause button, I can't take notes that fast. More recently, Changxing Island was also spotted producing what people believe to be nuclear-powered submarines, which made a former US Navy submariner and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security say, Ah! Oh wait, that's my reaction. What he said was, we were all kinds of gobsmacked. Because it showed that China's producing nuclear-powered boats, even in places that didn't have a history of doing so, at least until now. China, as you can see here in appropriate communist red, is already shifting its submarine fleet from diesel fuel to nuclear-powered boats. And it even managed to outpace the US in producing the latter. This is critical for expanding China's military reach beyond its shores, and making their coast guard guard more coasts that ain't theirs. At this rate by 2040, US officials expect Chinese submarines will routinely operate in the Indian Ocean, Arctic approaches, and possibly the Atlantic. That floating trash island has competition for the biggest garbage floating in an ocean. This is all while having the support of China's space programs, which have also ramped up exponentially in recent years. Because land, sea, and air isn't enough for China, they also want to harass the cosmos. This is all to say the US is finding itself at a critical point in history where it needs to keep ahead against what essentially is another world-class navy. And here's a note to end on. When we talk about defeating China in a kinetic war, the question we should not be asking is whether a Pacific War costs too much for China. China knows invading Taiwan will be costly. The real question is whether China thinks it can win despite the cost, no matter how high they may be. So when we think about solutions, we need to make it so that no matter how many resources China throws at the problem, it creates, it can't win no matter what. Doing that can prevent war from happening in the first place. That's real victory. And I hope that's what the US and its allies strive for. We need to talk about this way more often. This and Pacific Rim. Once again, I'm Chris Chappell. See you next time.