The U.S. Is on Track to Lose a War With China

In his address to generals and admirals late last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vividly described his vision of how wars are won. Soldiers and sailors are prepared to ship out “in the dead of night, in fair weather or foul, to go to dangerous places to find those who would do our nation harm, and deliver justice on behalf of the American people in close and brutal combat if necessary,” Hegseth said. “In this profession,” he went on, “you feel comfortable inside the violence so that our citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is our calling card, and victory our only acceptable end state.”

This stress on bravery and lethality in hand-to-hand fighting evoked Spartan and Roman warriors who stared their enemies in the eye and killed them with spears or swords. But the U.S. military is not going to confront the Athenians or Carthaginians in its next war, and the results of that war will not be determined by individual valor. Indeed, if the United States goes to war with China, its closest competitor and greatest geopolitical challenger, the bravery of soldiers on both sides will be largely irrelevant. Since the beginning of the 20th century, industrial-scale wars have been won through superiority in production capacity, logistics, and technological mastery.

If Hegseth and other U.S. military planners think they are going to defeat China through ferocity in close combat, they are fooling themselves. The course of Russia’s war on Ukraine—which looks more and more like the prototype for wars of the near future—is being determined not by the valor or lethality of the average infantryman, but by the ability of Ukraine and its allies to inflict pain on the Russian economy, and to waste Russian battlefield and home-front resources through the manufacture of millions of drones, artillery shells, and long-range weapons systems. Such equipment is now being used to attack oil refineries, power plants, and other targets hundreds or thousands of miles behind the front lines.

As I argue in my new book, War and Power: Who Wins Wars—And Why, generations of military leaders in powerful nations have long made fundamental errors in thinking about what prepares a state to win a war. Many of those mistakes reflect what we might call a “battle-centric” understanding of conflict—an assumption that outcomes are determined by what happens when troops meet in the field. In this line of thinking, a war may turn on a decisive battle, often in the war’s early stages, in which one side suddenly renders the other’s position untenable.

In modern warfare, though, most battles are not contests for control of areas of immense strategic importance, and they almost never destroy equipment in quantities that determine the outcome of wars. Rather than deciding wars, individual battles reveal a war’s course by showing how different militaries are generating forces and adapting to changing conditions. Today’s wars are decided less by the military capabilities that each side has at the start than  by the participants’ ability to generate new forces, adapt to new technologies, and work in coordination with allies.

At the start of World War I, many major European powers presumed that they could quickly end the conflict by overwhelming their enemy in early battles. Most famously, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan was based on the premise that the German army could swiftly defeat the French army and seize Paris, driving France out of the war and allowing the Germans to turn the mass of their army on imperial Russia. Events did not work out that way. Instead of ending before Christmas 1914, as parties on both sides of the hostilities had predicted, a war of attrition went on for more than four years, drew in soldiers from around the globe, and killed many millions of people.

In World War II, individual battles, even those remembered as the most important, rarely destroyed much equipment relative to how much was being produced at the time. In 1943, for instance, the German and Soviet armies fought the largest tank battle of the war at Kursk—an event frequently described as a turning point in the war. Yet during the most intense phase of the engagement—the opening 10 days—Germany lost only approximately 300 tanks, most of which were older, less efficient models. At that time, Germany was producing tanks at a pace of 11,000 a year. The obsolescent models destroyed at Kursk were soon replaced by more modern tanks, increasing the average quality of the German tank fleet.

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