What use is a symbolic dead horse, if not for a sound symbolic beating?
Another officer--a senior U.S. flag officer, yet--has gone public with criticism of the nation's military readiness, and here we are, just in time for Veterans Day, wondering what the American military will look like tomorrow. Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, says Ukraine is just the warm-up for things to come.
Military commanders aren't ones to mince words, and Admiral Richard hasn't done so. According to The Wall Street Journal, he said: "The big one is coming. And it isn't going to be very long before we're going to get tested in ways that we haven't been tested" in "a long time."
The admiral indicated his assessment of the U.S. level of deterrent against China with this:
"The ship . . . is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are." He added that it won't matter "how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are--we're not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem."
Our only current clear naval advantage lies in submarines, he noted--"maybe the only true asymmetric advantage we still have." But--there'a always one of those--the Pentagon must address maintenance problems and get new construction going, he said.
Add Admiral Richard's warnings to the bleakness of recent assessments of the U.S. military's overall capacity. Most don't believe the U.S., at current strength, is able to engage in separate conflicts simultaneously. Not successfully, anyway. And winning a single major conflict isn't the layup it used to be.
The United States continues to outspend everyone on defense, and in fiscal year 2022 Americans gave $1.94 trillion to it. But it's down to 3.1 percent of the GDP and projected to fall further in the next decade. (Defense spending represented more than 6 percent of the GDP for much of the Cold War.)
The Navy's ill-fated and poorly executed littoral combat ship (LCS) program serves as one example of boondoggle gone awry. More than $31 billion has been spent on that program in 14 years, and many of the ships essentially have been recalled for failure to perform, including the USS Little Rock.
The current LCS fleet numbers 35 ships, down from 55. The Navy estimates it will cost $60 billion to continue operating them over the next 25 years. Meanwhile, Red China continues to devote more money to defense and quietly has adopted advanced technology, some of which appears to outpace our ability to counter.
The Journal reports of China testing a hypersonic missile last year that flew around the world and landed safely back at home. This should have raised more alarms than it did.
"It means China can put any U.S. city or facility at risk and perhaps without being detected," an editorial in the paper noted. "The fact that the test took the U.S. by surprise and that it surpassed America's hypersonic capabilities makes it worse. How we lost the hypersonic race to China and Russia deserves hearings in Congress."
Back to the admirable admiral, who told it with the bark off: The U.S. military has "lost the art" of moving fast. He believes it will take a moonshot-by-1969 effort to make things right and overcome the military's current approach of "mitigating assumed eventual failure." We can't afford to ride our own coattails, and the Red Chinese won't be impressed with how diverse or sustainable our military is.
cc: Congress.
A friend who worked for CARTI in the early 2000s chaperoned a trip for pediatric cancer patients to San Diego. The group's itinerary included a visit to Naval Base San Diego and a tour of the USS Pinckney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer homeported following deployment. Afterwards, as kids, chaperones and sailors milled around on deck before the visitors debarked, the friend visited with the ship's XO.
"Does the U.S. Navy have a rival in today's world?" he asked. A moment or two of contemplation later, the XO provided a substantial, thoughtful response. The gist being that mainland China, perhaps, was getting there.
Almost two decades later, much has changed. The U.S. military is a post- retirement-comeback Michael Jordan--aging, slower, greyer. And the Pentagon's priorities appear to be in need of adjusting. Because there's a Kobe in the league now, and like it or not, the schedule might deliver him one unfortunate day.
And if it does, the game plan better have evolved beyond "mitigating assumed failure."