FDD War Game Reveals US Cyber Gaps Against China on Taiwan — SkimNews
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Foundation for Defense of Democracies ran a war game in Taiwan in late September, briefing findings to President Lai Ching-te and his national security team on how Beijing could extract political concessions without invading.
- Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy rear admiral and FDD senior fellow, said the Pentagon treats Taiwan cyber prep as another agency's problem and those agencies lack the budget or process to run such tabletops.
- The exercise, played in two phases, escalated from localized cellular disruptions and satellite pressure to damaged undersea cables and disabled electrical substations supporting telecoms, with Craig Singleton, FDD's China program director, role-playing Beijing.
- Singleton said Taiwanese participants rerouted traffic successfully, but sustaining services for weeks as China studied the response and targeted backup systems proved the harder test.
- The scenario was informed by—but did not directly name—Salt Typhoon, which breached US and global telecoms, and Volt Typhoon, which seeks access to critical infrastructure for disruptive attacks during a major crisis.
- The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's 2026 threat assessment found China does not currently plan to invade Taiwan in 2027 and prefers unification without force, and US officials have since assessed an invasion before 2028 as increasingly unlikely.
- Montgomery warned that an early 2028 Democratic Progressive Party victory in Taiwan's presidential election could trigger intensified Chinese cyber and economic coercion.
Why it matters: The exercise exposes a structural blind spot: while US military planners rehearse a Taiwan invasion, no civilian agency owns the budget or process to prepare for the multi-week disruption of Taiwan's communications, power, and financial systems that the ODNI now considers the more probable Chinese strategy heading into Taiwan's 2028 election.
Ask SkimNews
