As Americans we’re used to the idea that the US military is the dominant military force in the world. But the military itself has produced a classified briefing that suggests that may not be the case anymore. What the report finds is that America’s ability to engage in combat with China would likely result in a loss.
The report is a comprehensive review of U.S. military power prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and delivered most recently to top White House officials in the last year. It catalogs China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the U.S. military’s supply chain choke points. Its details have not been previously reported.
The picture it paints is consistent and disturbing.
Sec. of War Pete Hegseth talked about this on a podcast almost exactly a year ago.
In the past x-number of years—10,12,15—the Pentagon has a perfect record in all of its war games against China. We lose every time, inside the Pentagon war games…The way our system works, the way our bureaucratic system works where the speed of weapons procurement works, we’re always a decade behind in fighting the last war…
China’s building an army specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America that is their strategic outset, take Hypersonic missiles. So if our whole if our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers and the ability to project power that way strategically around the globe. And yeah we have a nuclear Triad and all of that but a big part of it. And if you know 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict, what does that look like?…
They they have a full spectrum, long-term view of not just regional but global domination and we have our heads up our asses.
Citing this statement from a year ago is probably as close as you’ll see the NY Times come to praising Pete Hegseth, but the gist of this whole editorial is that he’s right.
The assessment shows something more worrying than the potential outcome of a war over Taiwan. It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones. And it traces a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power.
War games can be wrong; analysts sometimes overstate adversaries’ abilities. Yet this larger point should not be ignored. Nearly four decades after victory in the Cold War, the U.S. military is ill prepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies…
A world in which a totalitarian China achieves military superiority in Asia and Russia feels free to menace Europe would make Americans poorer and threaten democracies everywhere. It is a prospect we should act resolutely to prevent.
The editorial goes on to list a series of reasons we find ourselves in this situation. Naturally, this being the NY TImes, they don’t mention a focus on woke sideshows which has infiltrated the military the same as it has every other big institution. They skip over that but the do mention our reliance on five major military contractors who have made a living selling complicated (and therefore expensive) weapons that no one else can build.
There is also a conceptual failure: the idea that more sophisticated is always better. For decades the American military has relied on systems that are bespoke, complex and wildly expensive.
That made some sense back when our primary adversary, the Soviet Union, pursued a similar approach, allowing the West to spend it into the ground. The trouble with highly engineered and expensive weapons is that they are all but impossible to produce rapidly or purchase in large numbers. The Army wants to field its own small drones — not for a few hundred dollars per unit, as in Ukraine, but a more sophisticated version of the same weapon for tens of thousands of dollars. Unsurprisingly, the more complex version takes much longer to produce.
The Times promises this is just the first of a series of editorials looking at this issue. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. But some of what they are saying in this initial entry sounds a lot like what Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has been saying. If you’re not familiar with Luckey or Anduril, this 60 Minutes segment is a good introduction. Luckey’s approach is to mass produce weapons that are cheaper and simpler to make so that, in case of war, they could be produced in any machine shop in America. He’s also creating AI guided drones and submersibles that can extend US force without putting US service members at risk. He doesn’t look like your ordinary military contractor and that’s sort of the point.
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