Our military prepares for and trains for every eventuality, using computer simulations and real-world exercises. The Pentagon is worried, though, because in virtually all of the war games simulating a conflict with China, the United States nearly always loses!
The problem isn’t our troops. I would argue that the American armed forces have an intangible advantage that isn’t easily quantified by the computers: namely, combat experience. But the reasons the Pentagon fears that we might not be able to win a war with China, who is shaping up to be our major adversary, has to do with broader problems in our country.
First of all, in the war games, the United States runs out of ammunition. According to Michael Hirsh, in his Politico article The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China (Because America might lose), “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.”
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.
We are sending so much of our weaponry to Ukraine, we don’t have enough for ourselves, should a war break out with China!
Oh, but then we could mobilize America’s industrial might. In World War II, our Pacific fleet was all but destroyed at Pearl Harbor, but American industry soon put out so many planes, tanks, ships, and ammunition that the Axis Powers were overwhelmed.
The problem today, though, is that America doesn’t have industrial might like that anymore. Recall that we have shipped much of our manufacturing base abroad, including to China. Not only that, our defense industry with its high tech smart weaponry is dependent on parts made in China!
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.
The main purpose of government is to protect its citizens. If it can’t or won’t do that, due to other priorities, the government is in a state of catastrophic failure. And if the nation itself becomes dependent on its adversaries, it is already defeated.
Image by Priyam Patel from Pixabay
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