The U.S. Department of Defense has issued a stark assessment of China’s military trajectory, warning that Beijing has set a concrete timeline for achieving the capability to defeat Taiwan militarily.

In its 2025 annual report to Congress on China’s military and security developments, the Pentagon states that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is working toward a decisive benchmark just two years away.

“China expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027.”

The report treats the 2027 date not as speculative rhetoric, but as an organizing principle for China’s military modernization, training, and force-structure decisions.

The year aligns with the PLA’s internal modernization goals and coincides with the 100th anniversary of the PLA’s founding, a milestone Chinese leaders have repeatedly tied to combat readiness.

The Pentagon’s assessment goes further than previous reports by emphasizing that China’s planning explicitly accounts for the possibility of U.S. involvement.

Rather than preparing only for a limited conflict with Taiwan, the PLA is described as measuring its capabilities against Washington itself.

“The PLA measures its concepts and capabilities against the ‘strong enemy’ of the United States.”

According to the report, China’s leadership believes that a Taiwan conflict would almost certainly draw in U.S. forces and therefore requires the ability to counter American military power across multiple domains.

This includes long-range precision strikes, cyber operations, space warfare, and nuclear deterrence, all designed to delay, degrade, or deter U.S. intervention during a crisis.

The Pentagon outlines several military options China is refining to force unification with Taiwan, ranging from coercive pressure to full-scale conflict.

These include amphibious invasion, sustained firepower strikes, and maritime blockades. The report warns that China has tested key elements of these scenarios through increasingly complex exercises around Taiwan.

“The PLA continues to refine multiple military options to force Taiwan unification by brute force.”

China’s concept of victory does not necessarily imply a rapid or total conquest.

Instead, the report highlights Beijing’s focus on “war control” and escalation management—using force selectively while attempting to prevent broader conflict from spiraling beyond China’s control.

This approach reflects lessons Beijing has drawn from observing Russia’s war in Ukraine, particularly the risks of prolonged conflict and international mobilization against an aggressor.

The Pentagon situates the Taiwan timeline within a wider shift in China’s military doctrine.

The report states that Beijing increasingly views future conflict as a contest between entire national systems rather than just armed forces, a concept it describes as “national total war.”

“China’s top military strategy focuses squarely on overcoming the United States through a whole-of-nation mobilization effort.”

Under this framework, economic resilience, industrial capacity, information control, and civilian-military integration are treated as essential components of warfighting power.

The Taiwan scenario is therefore not isolated but embedded in China’s broader ambition to displace the United States as the dominant military power in the Indo-Pacific.

While the report does not predict that China will initiate a war by 2027, it underscores that Beijing is actively preparing to give itself that option.

The Pentagon frames deterrence as increasingly time-sensitive, warning that the balance of power around Taiwan is tightening as China closes remaining capability gaps.

The assessment suggests that the coming years will be critical in shaping whether China views military action as feasible or prohibitively costly—a calculation that will depend not only on Taiwan’s defenses, but on the credibility of U.S. and allied deterrence across the region.