FDD Taiwan Cyber War Game Exposes US Interagency Planning Gaps on Chinese Coercion
The exercise modeled degradation over weeks, not hours—the realistic timeline for an adversary studying Taiwan's rerouting options and targeting backups adaptively. That tempo means US military support (if triggered at all) arrives after the political window has already closed.
If Taiwan's government loses public confidence in infrastructure resilience before INDOPACOM can position assets or coordinate civilian-sector responses, the coercion succeeds without a single shot fired. The FDD framing—avoid direct US confrontation—suggests China's calculus has shifted from "defeat Taiwan militarily" to "make Taiwan's government capitulate to political demands before Washington can coordinate a response.
INDOPACOM and the interagency now face a documented planning gap precisely where China's most probable Taiwan scenario lives—not amphibious assault but sustained infrastructure disruption paired with political coercion.
The FDD exercise modeled what Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon have already demonstrated: adversaries with persistent access to telecom and power backups can sustain multi-week outages while studying US response and adapting targeting in real time. DoD's institutional posture—treating cyber-enabled coercion as "other agencies' problem"—means no single command owns the response architecture, no FYDP line funds interagency tabletops, and no unified playbook exists for the scenario Taiwanese participants just rehearsed.
The gap is not analytical; it is structural and budgetary. Watch whether CISA convenes an emergency interagency tabletop within 90 days, or whether the exercise remains a Taiwan-side briefing with no domestic follow-up.
Did the Taiwanese participants in the FDD exercise identify specific backup systems—satellite links, alternative power routing, emergency comms—that failed under sustained pressure, and if so, have those vulnerabilities been shared with US telecommunications carriers operating in the Indo-Pacific?
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