The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China (Because America might lose)

Dozens of versions of the above war-game scenario have been enacted over the last few years, most recently in April by the House Select Committee on competition with China. And while the ultimate outcome in these exercises is not always clear — the U.S. does better in some than others — the cost is. In every exercise the U.S. uses up all its long-range air-to-surface missiles in a few days, with a substantial portion of its planes destroyed on the ground. In every exercise the U.S. is not engaged in an abstract push-button war from 30,000 feet up like the ones Americans have come to expect since the end of the Cold War, but a horrifically bloody one.

And that’s assuming the U.S.-China war doesn’t go nuclear.

“The thing we see across all the wargames is that there are major losses on all sides. And the impact of that on our society is quite devastating,” said Becca Wasser, who played the role of the Chinese leadership in the Select Committee’s wargame and is head of the gaming lab at the Center for a New American Security. “The most common thread in these exercises is that the United States needs to take steps now in the Indo-Pacific to ensure the conflict doesn’t happen in the future. We are hugely behind the curve. Ukraine is our wakeup call. This is our watershed moment.”

The problem has come into sharp relief only in the last few years as Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to a prolonged war that has drained U.S. munitions stockpiles, and China dramatically escalated both its military spending and aggressive rhetoric against Taiwan. In the last year the U.S. has allocated nearly $50 billion in security aid to Kyiv, possibly cutting further into its deterrent against China. In other words, the failure to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine and the stress this has put on the U.S. defense industrial base should be sounding alarms for the U.S. military posture vis-a-vis Taiwan, many defense experts say. Yet critics on both sides of the aisle say the Biden administration has been slow to respond to what is minimally required to prevent an Indo-Pacific catastrophe, which is the need to rapidly build up a better deterrent — especially new stockpiles of munitions that would convince China it could be too costly to attack Taiwan.

“There is a recognition of the challenge that goes to the top of the Pentagon, but across the board there is more talk than action,” says Seth Jones, a former Obama-era defense official who compiled a report on one of the wargames conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But a swift response may not be possible, in large part because of how shrunken the U.S. manufacturing base has become since the Cold War. All of a sudden, Washington is reckoning with the fact that so many parts and pieces of munitions, planes, and ships it needs are being manufactured overseas, including in China. Among the deficiencies: components of solid rocket motors, shell casings, machine tools, fuses and precursor elements to propellants and explosives, many of which are made in China and India. Beyond that, skilled labor is sorely lacking, and the learning curve is steep. The U.S. has slashed defense workers to a third of what they were in 1985 — a number that has remained flat — and seen some 17,000 companies leave the industry, said David Norquist, president of the National Defense Industrial Association. And commercial companies are leery of the Pentagon’s tangle of rules and restrictions.

“Unfortunately, the more you dig under the hood the more problems you see,” said a senior Democratic defense expert in the Senate who was granted anonymity because he was not allowed to speak on the record for his boss. “This is largely a function of the post-Cold War period being focused on efficiency. Since the Gulf War we came to expect too much from smart munitions. We haven’t needed stockpiles or found ourselves critically low on spare parts. So we’ve decreased the wiggle room.” At a military conference earlier this year, the Navy’s intelligence chief, Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, called the problem “China blindness,” saying: “It’s very unsettling to see how much the U.S. is not connecting the dots on our number one challenge.”

The administration’s response, including the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill, was also delayed because of the protracted negotiations over Biden’s budget and the debt ceiling. Sen. Jack Reed, the Democratic chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had been planning to hold hearings on America’s defense industrial base, but put those plans off because of the time being devoted to budget and debt dickering.

The most urgent task is to manufacture and move massive numbers of missiles and other high-tech munitions to East Asia to shore up the U.S. deterrent against China, says Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the Select Committee. What is most needed: far more Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs), Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASMs), Harpoon anti-ship missiles, Tomahawk cruise missiles and other munitions, Gallagher said.

“You need this to be prioritized at the SecDef [secretary of defense] level,” Gallagher told me in an interview in early May. But when Gallagher asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin questions about Taiwan’s defenses at a recent hearing, “he couldn’t really answer,” Gallagher said. “I asked Austin point blank, ‘What is your highest priority?’ and he responded with all this jargon about readiness levels.” Gallagher said the Pentagon should offer prime missile contractors such as Lockheed Martin a slew of new multi-year contracts.

The Pentagon declined to comment, but at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations on May 3, Under Secretary of Defense William LaPlante said the Biden administration and its allies in Europe and Asia were moving quickly to fill the gaps.

“We’re in the middle of a pivot, and that’s very exciting to see,” said LaPlante, who added that he just returned from a meeting of NATO and “all we’re talking about is our industrial base.” Biden’s proposed defense budget plans for the first time to procure missiles and other munitions with multi-year contracts, as is now done with planes and ships. LaPlante said the administration is beginning to deliver some large weapons systems to overseas allies in record time. New NATO member Finland, for example, got approval for 65 F-35 fighters only in February of 2020 and is slated to have the planes delivered next year.

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