The war began in the early morning hours with a massive bombardment — China’s version of “shock and awe.” Chinese planes and rockets swiftly destroyed most of Taiwan’s navy and air force as the People’s Liberation army and navy mounted a massive amphibious assault across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait. Having taken seriously President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend the island, Beijing also struck pre-emptively at U.S. and allied air bases and ships in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. managed to even the odds for a time by deploying more sophisticated submarines as well as B-21 and B-2 stealth bombers to get inside China’s air defense zones, but Washington ran out of key munitions in a matter of days and saw its network access severed. The United States and its main ally, Japan, lost thousands of servicemembers, dozens of ships, and hundreds of aircraft. Taiwan’s economy was devastated. And as a protracted siege ensued, the U.S. was much slower to rebuild, taking years to replace ships as it reckoned with how shriveled its industrial base had become compared to China’s.

The Chinese “just ran rings around us,” said former Joint Chiefs Vice Chair Gen. John Hyten in one after-action report. “They knew exactly what we were going to do before we did it.”

Dozens of versions of the above war-game scenario have been enacted over the last few years, most recently in April by the House Select Committee on competition with China. And while the ultimate outcome in these exercises is not always clear — the U.S. does better in some than others — the cost is. In every exercise the U.S. uses up all its long-range air-to-surface missiles in a few days, with a substantial portion of its planes destroyed on the ground. In every exercise the U.S. is not engaged in an abstract push-button war from 30,000 feet up like the ones Americans have come to expect since the end of the Cold War, but a horrifically bloody one.

And that’s assuming the U.S.-China war doesn’t go nuclear.

“The thing we see across all the wargames is that there are major losses on all sides. And the impact of that on our society is quite devastating,” said Becca Wasser, who played the role of the Chinese leadership in the Select Committee’s wargame and is head of the gaming lab at the Center for a New American Security. “The most common thread in these exercises is that the United States needs to take steps now in the Indo-Pacific to ensure the conflict doesn’t happen in the future. We are hugely behind the curve. Ukraine is our wakeup call. This is our watershed moment.”

The problem has come into sharp relief only in the last few years as Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to a prolonged war that has drained U.S. munitions stockpiles, and China dramatically escalated both its military spending and aggressive rhetoric against Taiwan. In the last year the U.S. has allocated nearly $50 billion in security aid to Kyiv, possibly cutting further into its deterrent against China. In other words, the failure to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine and the stress this has put on the U.S. defense industrial base should be sounding alarms for the U.S. military posture vis-a-vis Taiwan, many defense experts say. Yet critics on both sides of the aisle say the Biden administration has been slow to respond to what is minimally required to prevent an Indo-Pacific catastrophe, which is the need to rapidly build up a better deterrent — especially new stockpiles of munitions that would convince China it could be too costly to attack Taiwan.

“There is a recognition of the challenge that goes to the top of the Pentagon, but across the board there is more talk than action,” says Seth Jones, a former Obama-era defense official who compiled a report on one of the wargames conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But a swift response may not be possible, in large part because of how shrunken the U.S. manufacturing base has become since the Cold War. All of a sudden, Washington is reckoning with the fact that so many parts and pieces of munitions, planes, and ships it needs are being manufactured overseas, including in China. Among the deficiencies: components of solid rocket motors, shell casings, machine tools, fuses and precursor elements to propellants and explosives, many of which are made in China and India. Beyond that, skilled labor is sorely lacking, and the learning curve is steep. The U.S. has slashed defense workers to a third of what they were in 1985 — a number that has remained flat — and seen some 17,000 companies leave the industry, said David Norquist, president of the National Defense Industrial Association. And commercial companies are leery of the Pentagon’s tangle of rules and restrictions.

“Unfortunately, the more you dig under the hood the more problems you see,” said a senior Democratic defense expert in the Senate who was granted anonymity because he was not allowed to speak on the record for his boss. “This is largely a function of the post-Cold War period being focused on efficiency. Since the Gulf War we came to expect too much from smart munitions. We haven’t needed stockpiles or found ourselves critically low on spare parts. So we’ve decreased the wiggle room.” At a military conference earlier this year, the Navy’s intelligence chief, Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, called the problem “China blindness,” saying: “It’s very unsettling to see how much the U.S. is not connecting the dots on our number one challenge.”

The administration’s response, including the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill, was also delayed because of the protracted negotiations over Biden’s budget and the debt ceiling. Sen. Jack Reed, the Democratic chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had been planning to hold hearings on America’s defense industrial base, but put those plans off because of the time being devoted to budget and debt dickering.

The most urgent task is to manufacture and move massive numbers of missiles and other high-tech munitions to East Asia to shore up the U.S. deterrent against China, says Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the Select Committee. What is most needed: far more Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs), Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASMs), Harpoon anti-ship missiles, Tomahawk cruise missiles and other munitions, Gallagher said.

“You need this to be prioritized at the SecDef [secretary of defense] level,” Gallagher told me in an interview in early May. But when Gallagher asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin questions about Taiwan’s defenses at a recent hearing, “he couldn’t really answer,” Gallagher said. “I asked Austin point blank, ‘What is your highest priority?’ and he responded with all this jargon about readiness levels.” Gallagher said the Pentagon should offer prime missile contractors such as Lockheed Martin a slew of new multi-year contracts.

The Pentagon declined to comment, but at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations on May 3, Under Secretary of Defense William LaPlante said the Biden administration and its allies in Europe and Asia were moving quickly to fill the gaps.

“We’re in the middle of a pivot, and that’s very exciting to see,” said LaPlante, who added that he just returned from a meeting of NATO and “all we’re talking about is our industrial base.” Biden’s proposed defense budget plans for the first time to procure missiles and other munitions with multi-year contracts, as is now done with planes and ships. LaPlante said the administration is beginning to deliver some large weapons systems to overseas allies in record time. New NATO member Finland, for example, got approval for 65 F-35 fighters only in February of 2020 and is slated to have the planes delivered next year.

Some U.S. intelligence and defense officials fear that Beijing understands the deficiency in American readiness all too well and could try to exploit it by attacking or blockading Taiwan in the next few years. Earlier this year, CIA Director Bill Burns said the United States believes that Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. This was so, Burns said, despite the likelihood that Xi was “surprised and unsettled” by the “very poor performance” of the Russian military in Ukraine.

In April, China’s military completed three days of large-scale combat exercises around Taiwan that rehearsed blockading the island and said in a statement it is “ready to fight … at any time to resolutely smash any form of ‘Taiwan independence’ and foreign interference attempts.” The actions followed U.S. pledges to arm up Taiwan and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s diplomatically risky meeting on U.S. soil with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In recent months several Chinese fighter jets have buzzed American military aircraft over the South China sea. Barring a confrontation over Taiwan, however, Xi and other senior Chinese officials have said they do not want war with the United States. Relations between the two powers should not be a “zero-sum game where one side outcompetes or thrives at the expense of the other,” as Xi told Biden at their last bilateral meeting in Bali in November, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement.

So far, China’s actions seem to be speaking louder than such words. LaPlante conceded that fears Beijing is calculating it must act against Taiwan sooner than later are “a very valid concern. It is always a question that is on everybody’s mind.” In an interview, LaPlante said that sense of urgency is why Biden has invoked the emergency Defense Production Act, enacted during the Korean War, to rebuild and expand the nation’s domestic hypersonic missile industry. This is a key area of Chinese advancement, and U.S. officials fear that Beijing seeks to use hypersonics to push U.S. ships and bases out of close range in the Asia-Pacific region.

Many critics say it’s not enough. “We’re in a window of maximum danger,” says Christian Brose, a former senior aide to the late Sen. John McCain, who for years was a lone voice in the wilderness warning against the Chinese and Russian buildup. “We could throw a trillion dollars a year at the defense budget now, and we’re not going to get a meaningful increase in traditional military capabilities in the next five years. They cannot be produced.”

One of the reasons, again, is that China and other countries — not all of them friendly — make and supply a lot of that stuff now. Over decades of what many say was delusional thinking by both political parties about turning China into a friendly “stakeholder” in a peaceful international system, Washington heedlessly ceded shipbuilding, aircraft parts and circuit boards over to China and other cheap overseas labor forces. America’s new F-35 fighter jets, for example, contain a magnet component made with an alloy almost exclusively manufactured in China. China also totally dominates machine tools and rare earth metals, essentials for manufacturing missiles and munitions, as well as lithium used in batteries, cobalt and the aluminum and titanium used in semiconductors. While Beijing has made new advances in explosives, most American military explosives are made at a single aging Army plant in Tennessee, Forbes reported in March.

“While they were industrializing, we were deindustrializing,” says Brose. Today China commands some 45 percent to 50 percent of total shipbuilding globally, while the United States has less than one percent. “Given those numbers, explain to me how the United States is going to win a traditional shipbuilding race with China?”

“The bottom line is this whole problem was decades in the making,” added Brose. “It’s not something that just kind of crept up on us and surprised us over the last couple of years.”