This is a conversation with Mark Cancian. Mark is an incredibly accomplished scholar and a soldier - he has spent three decades in the U.S. Marine Corps, served in Vietnam, the Operation Desert Storm and the Iraq War and he has taught and worked at Harvard and John Hopkins Universities and today he serves as a Senior Advisor at the Washington think-tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But the reason we talked today was because last Mark was one of the leads on an incredibly interesting project that took place last year - the largest and most complex publicly available wargame of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Using an incredible amount of data, a large number of players and 25 iterations, Mark and his colleagues tried to simulate what would happen if China attacked. In this conversation we talked about how this invasion would go down, what would be its result, whether the United States military is ready for it and how to stop it from escalating into a global conflict. You can find the report from the wargame in the description below and now enjoy the podcast.   

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics

Wargame report: https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargaming-chinese-invasion-taiwan

00:00 - Intro

01:24 - What would a Chinese invasion look like?

18:19 - Do Chinese wargames have the same results?

23:29 - How should the U.S. military prepare?

34:25 - Is the United States prepared for the mass casualties?

37:05 - Why the U.S. Air Force Needs To Change

39:45 - “The Anti-Chinese Coalition”

43:39 - How to prevent an escalation into a global conflict

46:20 - Probability of a Chinese Invasion