(Daily Signal)—Heritage Foundation researchers harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to argue in a new report that the U.S. is not prepared for a war with China.
“We believe a war is coming,” says Rob Greenway, director of the Allison Center for National Security at the D.C. think tank. “We believe we are not prepared for it. We have proven we’re not prepared for it.”
This weakness actually “incentivizes the Chinese,” Greenway told The Daily Signal.
Greenway and his team at Heritage used artificial intelligence to simulate an extended conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific, in order to identify vulnerabilities for both the U.S. and China. The report also provides recommendations to the U.S. government.
Data collection and analysis for the 375-page report, titled “TIDALWAVE,” took about a year.
“No one has done this before because it’s such a heavy lift,” said Greenway, who also served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council in the president’s first administration. “Without leveraging technology and figuring out how best to make it work for our purposes, it would have been impossible.”
The exercise uncovered previously unidentified vulnerabilities for both U.S. and China, he noted, and thus parts of the report were redacted for national security purposes.
The Heritage researchers who led the project have briefed government officials and members of Congress on the report.
“The People’s Republic of China poses the most significant threat that the U.S. has faced in decades, yet despite such a broadly accepted fact, we remain dangerously unprepared to counter this adversary,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said.
“Heritage is committed to applying the latest technology to undertake unprecedented challenges and provide solutions to the most pressing national security threats we face,” Roberts added.
Findings and Vulnerabilities
Through the research process, Greenway says he was surprised to uncover the extent to which the U.S. has not corrected “deficiencies.”
For example, in a conflict with China, critical U.S. munitions would begin to be unavailable after about a week and would be completely exhausted after 35-40 days in most cases, the exercise found.
But Greenway says he was also surprised to learn “the extent that China is vulnerable—far more so than I would have expected.”
It is also clear from the research that U.S. partners and allies need to play a larger role in preparing to guard against Chinese aggression, he said.
The “cost” of a U.S. conflict with China would be “massive enough to push the entire planet into a global recession,” Greenway said, adding that disincentivizing China from starting a war is critical.
Addressing Vulnerabilities
Shortly before the report’s release, Trump announced plans to ask for a $500 billion increase to the U.S. defense budget for 2027. If Congress approves that increase, Greenway expressed hope that the new Heritage report is “going to inform” decisions related to future defense spending.
The money needed to fix the U.S. vulnerabilities is “a fraction” of the sum Trump is calling on Congress to approve for defense spending, according to Anna Gustafson, a research assistant in the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation.
Solving the deficiencies would take an estimated three to five years and cost about $300 billion, Gustafson noted.
Greenway stated that the current goals are for Congress to approve the required defense spending, and for the Trump administration, more specifically the intelligence community and the departments of War, Commerce, and Treasury, “to exploit the Chinese vulnerabilities that we identified.”
In short, the aim is for the U.S. to have “sufficient resources to engage in protracted conflict and win,” and for China to “have insufficient resources,” he said.
“We are confident that, as a result of doing this work,” Greenway says, “departments and agencies for our government and Congress are going to act.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
