The U.S. is Unprepared for Competition with China
The Heritage Foundation Index of US Military Strength 2023 Rates the U.S. Military as Weak
On October 12, 2022, the Biden Administration published its National Security Strategy.
The document is not strategic, and it is not based in reality.
It offers only a general list of equally weighted preferences over topics ranging from defense to technology, education to climate change, and Africa to the Arctic.
Regarding defense, it declares that Russia is a problem, and that China constitutes the nation’s premier threat, but it states erroneously, that China is a separate problem from Russia.
It barely addresses the threat from Iran, or North Korea, and then only as pesky regional autocratic powers that the U.S. will manage.
In fact, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran form a unified anti-American military bloc dedicated to the removal of the U.S. as world leader.
Despite this glaring error, if one just contemplates China’s unprecedented military and technological build-up, its control of the South China Sea, its domination in hypersonic missile technology, and its recent aggressive military operation against Taiwan, it is unfathomable that the administration offers no sense of urgency or alarm.
Rather, it states with no supporting documentation, that the U.S. somehow has a decade to outcompete China and put things right.
Simply stated, this flies in the face of reality especially given the new report by the Heritage Foundation regarding the strength of the U.S. military.
The Heritage Foundation is considered one of the best think tanks in the world. It publishes an annual Index of U.S. Military Strength.
This is what the Index for 2023 reports:
“As currently postured, the U.S. military is at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests. It is rated as weak relative to the force needed to defend national interests on a global stage against actual challenges in the world as it is, rather than as we wish it were. This is the logical consequence of years of sustained use, underfunding, poorly defined priorities, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and a profound lack of seriousness across the national security establishment even as threats to U.S. interests have surged.”
Certainly, the weakness of our strategic forces could not have escaped the notice of the administration, especially given the numerous recent media reports detailing how the American military is unable to attract enough recruits to meet its yearly quota for the volunteer force.
Moreover, the administration must be aware that the CIA, its premier national intelligence agency, is only now getting back into the espionage game against China after two decades of focusing on terrorism as its primary mission.
Not to mention that Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, who was once so confident that China would not move against Taiwan in the near future, has just modified his past comments and now believes that:
“There has been a change in the approach from Beijing toward Taiwan in recent years. And instead of sticking with the status quo that was established in a positive way, [there was] a fundamental decision that the status quo was no longer acceptable, and that Beijing was determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.”
All of these problems indicate that there is, indeed, a need for strategic urgency. A need for prioritization. And a need for redistributing funds.
Conclusion:
The administration doesn’t want to admit to the weaknesses of the U.S. military, lack of coverage by CIA, or to the existence of a unified anti-American military bloc, because to do so would require it to act.
And to act would require it to completely change its policy and force it to move trillions of dollars from social transformation to defense.
So, like a horse with blinders, it chooses to live in a fantasy world where the threats are divided into separate problems that the U.S. can deal with, how it wants, and according to a time it chooses.
Unfortunately, China didn’t get the memo.
