Trump admin sought redactions on key China war game report warning of US military readiness gaps

By Fox News · Fox News

FIRST ON FOX: The Trump administration asked for redactions to a sweeping new Heritage Foundation report modeling a potential US–China war over Taiwan, even though the analysis relied entirely on publicly available, unclassified data, according to the report’s authors. The redacted report , TIDALWAVE, warns that the United States could reach a breaking point within weeks of a high‑intensity conflict with China — conclusions that the authors say prompted senior national security officials to seek redactions over concerns adversaries could exploit the findings or use them to identify U.S. and allied military vulnerabilities. Those conclusions include warnings that U.S. forces would culminate far sooner than China, suffer catastrophic losses to aircraft and sustainment infrastructure in the Pacific, and still fail to prevent a global economic shock estimated at roughly $10 trillion, nearly a tenth of global GDP. SKIES AT STAKE: INSIDE THE US-CHINA RACE FOR AIR DOMINANCE According to the authors, the AI‑enabled model drew exclusively on open‑source government, academic, industry and commercial information. An unredacted version of the report was provided to authorized U.S. government recipients for internal use. Unlike traditional tabletop war games, TIDALWAVE employs an AI‑enabled model that runs thousands of iterations, tracking how losses in platforms, munitions, and fuel compound over time and drive cascading operational failure early in the conflict. According to a Heritage spokesperson, the report had been shown to "high-level national security officials" who requested some of the specifics be crossed out in black ink before its release to the public. The report still details how quickly U.S. forces could reach a breaking point and why the conflict would carry global consequences. "Redactions were made at the request of the U.S. government to prevent disclosure of information that could reasonably enable an adversary to (1) re mediate or ‘close’ critical vulnerab…