"The next war is likely to be very fast [with] missile exchanges over the Taiwan Strait," Whitley told an Atlantic Council conference on the military lessons to be learned from the first year of the Ukraine conflict on Monday.
The United States needed to work with Taiwan to prepare in advance the kind of training, familiarity with light tactical weapons and operational expertise it succeeded in developing in Ukraine in the years building up to the conflict that began in February 2022, Whitley said.
"How do you get an ally or friend to hang on until we can get there? How do you build in Taiwan that [capability] we have seen in Ukraine: that we are not seeing there [in Taiwan] yet?" he said.
Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) Distinguished Research Fellow Thomas X. Hammes told the conference that in the event of a conflict with China over Taiwan the US armed forces would have to "break the back" of Chinese People's Liberation Army air, sea and rocket forces.