(The Epoch Times)—The U.S. Navy on Sept. 19 released a new strategic document centered on countering communist China’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
It directs the Navy to develop “readiness for the possibility of war with the People’s Republic of China by 2027,” pointing to China’s preparations for a possible invasion of Taiwan in the same year.
“The Navy emphatically acknowledges the need for a larger, more lethal force,” the document, titled “Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy,” states.
“By 2027, the Navy will be more ready for sustained combat as part of a Joint and Combined force, prioritizing the People’s Republic of China as the pacing challenge and focusing on enabling the joint warfighting ecosystem.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, claims that Taiwan is a part of its territory that must be united with the mainland through any means necessary.
However, Taiwan is self-governed by a democratically elected government and has never been controlled by the CCP.
CCP leader Xi Jinping has nevertheless ordered the communist regime’s military wing to prepare for war and to develop the capabilities required to invade Taiwan.
The regime has since engaged in a more than decade-long shipbuilding spree, massively expanding its fleet, drone capabilities, and nuclear arsenal.
Most importantly, for a Taiwan invasion scenario, it has also launched its own advanced aircraft carriers and destroyers.
That poses a problem for the United States, as the U.S. Navy floats far fewer ships than the Chinese, and must spread them more widely to maintain its global military presence.
China, meanwhile, can position the vast majority of its naval and coast guard units close to home, where they can receive cover from land-based units and where it is easier to maintain their supply lines.
A congressional report published in July found that “the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat” against China.
The July report also said that China is likely to increase its hostile behavior in the coming years to “normalize unlawful behavior” around Taiwan as it seeks to take advantage of the United States’ lack of ability to deter conflict.
Key to the new Navy document’s goals, therefore, is the fulfillment of Project 33, a naval initiative aiming to ready the force by eliminating delays in maintenance, scaling the use of autonomous and robotic systems, and increasing navy recruitment, among other things.
“We cannot manifest a bigger traditional Navy in a few short years, nor will we rely on mass without the right capabilities to win the sea control contest,” the document reads.
“Nearer-term operational challenges demand that we integrate proven robotic and autonomous capabilities as soon as possible.
“We must do so with a focus on how we will use these systems in war. By 2027, we will integrate proven robotic and autonomous systems for routine use by the commanders who will employ them.”
Scaling the deployment of autonomous systems is just part of the puzzle, with the document underscoring that the United States’ grim position in the Indo-Pacific “goes well beyond just the size of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] Navy fleet.”
The document notes that China’s joint forces are developing into an integrated fighting force “specifically designed to defeat ours” and are backed by China’s massive industrial base.
The document also calls on the Navy to work with Congress to secure critical supply chains and lays out a vision in which all fleet headquarters in the service will field their own maritime operations centers.
The goal of the latter directive is to ensure that the U.S. Navy can continue to maintain superiority in command and control, military intelligence, and maneuvers, even against a numerically superior foe in a vast and distributed region.
“We must meet all the objectives in this Navigation Plan to field the people and capabilities needed to fight and win today, in 2027, and beyond,” the document states.
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.
