Food and Soldiers: China’s Strategic Weaknesses

“That is true of Russians and Americans, and it’s even more true of China,” he said.

Luttwak asked a simple question: “Can the People’s Republic of China as it now exists, actually wage a war ... a small war ... such as, for example, a war to take Taiwan?”

Using the metaphor of sustainability, he argued that the CCP would be in trouble if it fought a war against Taiwan today, especially if the war continued for more than several months. His analysis wasn’t based on standard military comparisons of the two countries’ military order of battle, weapon systems, or numbers of soldiers.

According to Luttwak: “Russia does not import food. Russia may import some special pâté de foie gras from Paris, but the food the Russians make is the food they eat.”

Second, Russia doesn’t import energy; Russia exports energy.

China imports human food and animal feed, he said, including “95 million tons of soybeans, plus approximately 20–30,000 tons of maize, wheat, sorghum, millet, and these other things to feed to animals.“ In addition to meat, ”there are of course dairy imports, a lot of dairy imports.”

Consequently, according to Luttwak, “China is a protein-eating country, and the protein is important. Now, whatever else may happen, the moment a fight of any kind starts, even a small war, G-7 type sanctions start,” meaning that China will be cut off from imports such as soybeans from the United States and Canada.

He argued that once a war starts, “within about three months, they'll have to kill ... most of the pigs and the chicken, the mutton, the beef.”

Luttwak further claimed that during Mao’s rule over China, people survived because they ate more simply. They didn’t have much meat and certainly no yogurt.

“China used to be self-sufficient,“ he said. ”In other words, it used to be the way Russia is now for food. And now, it is completely different.”

Luttwak noted that Chinese leadership failed to ensure that China would continue expanding local sources of food. Despite recent laws preventing the conversion of agricultural land to housing or industry, China has continued to lose its agricultural land, primarily due to land erosion, industrialization, and urbanization.

He noted that “China has a large domestic production of petroleum and gas.” In wartime, he argued, China would be able to divert energy resources used for the export trade to support its population.

He then compared the USSR’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the PLA’s possible invasion of Taiwan.

According to Luttwak, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was “able to put in 400,000 troops in the first 24 hours. And within 48 hours 800,000 troops.”

However, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it made the big mistake of only using 135,000 troops to invade a country that is 4 1/2 times larger than Czechoslovakia (603,700 square kilometers versus 127,900 square kilometers) and four times more populous. (In 1968, Czechoslovakia’s population was 10 million people; in 2022, Ukraine’s population was about 41 million people.) In Luttwak’s view, Russia should have planned to deploy four times the number of troops that the USSR sent into Czechoslovakia, or approximately 3.2 million.

According to his theory of post-heroic warfare, “the acceptance of casualties has gone down everywhere. Let’s say ... [on] June 6, 1944, on Omaha beach, there was a mistake ... 2,200 Americans died in one morning ... but the war continued.”

“[In] Vietnam, the United States lost 50,000 over 10 years ... and that was considered very traumatic. ... And, of course, since that time, society has changed further,” Luttwak said. “American families are smaller ... so tolerance for casualties has gone down a lot. Now it doesn’t mean, of course, that if you go into a place like Iraq or Afghanistan and you lose a few thousand, that’s OK. But what you can’t do is to lose 10,000 dead before breakfast and continue normally. That is the post-heroic change.”

In a model in which families are very small, “there are no spare male children, then families and society and the culture and the government all have to reduce casualties,” he said.

Luttwak told a story about the clash between Chinese and Indian troops in the Galwan River Valley of Ladakh in 2020. Approximately 20 Indian soldiers were killed, and shortly after the fighting, the dead were given military funerals, including a brigadier general.

The CCP, however, announced its killed-in-action eight months after the fighting. The CCP acknowledged four soldiers had been killed: one officer and three enlisted. What happened during those seven months is the interesting part of the story.

The PLA officer’s wife, a local music teacher, was promoted to a position as a music professor at a major conservatory.

The three enlisted soldiers were also each given special propaganda value. One soldier who looked very young was made into a local hero. Another PLA soldier was made into the “good guy” who was reported to have said, “I will give my life to defend the motherland—every inch of the motherland; I’m here to defend every inch.” Of course, Ladakh was never part of China—an inconvenient truth.

The CCP presented the third enlisted soldier as “very traditional.“ In a letter that he supposedly wrote before he died, he said, ”Dear Mom and Dad, I’m very sorry that I will not be there for you when you need me, but if there is an afterlife ... then I hope to be there with you.” Luttwak noted the illogic of a reference to the afterlife by communist atheists.

In short, the Chinese “were concerned about the public reaction.”

He concluded that although China would be unable to win a war in the near- to mid-term timeframe, it might, nonetheless, start such a war.

“I am not at all confident that the fact that China cannot fight a war means that they will not try to fight a war,” Luttwak said.

However, he predicted that “if China starts a war, it will have to stop quite quickly.”