Pentagon needs to become more nimble to counter China threat, US lawmakers are told
- Experts issue warnings about the Chinese military build-up in the western Pacific and about expanded ties between China, Russia, Iran and North Korea
- President Xi Jinping is counting on technological innovation to counter China’s many economic headwinds, says US director of national intelligence
The US Defence Department has a big budget, lots of fancy equipment and impressive capabilities, but if it does not drastically increase its ability to incorporate technology, make decisions faster and spend in the right places, it will lose any future war with China, witnesses at two congressional committees testified on Tuesday.
“This contest to rapidly adopt commercial technologies is an all too level playing field with our competitors. China also has access to world-class technology companies and the PLA is working to [upgrade] its forces” both technologically and organisationally, said Paul Scharre, executive vice-president of the Centre for a New American Security, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The Pentagon “cannot lead in 21st century technologies with a 20th century bureaucracy”, he added.
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“President Xi’s emphasis on control and central oversight is unlikely to solve the challenges posed by China’s endemic corruption, demographic decline and structural economic constraints,” Haines said.
“And over the coming year, tension between these challenges and China’s aspirations for greater geopolitical power will probably become all the more apparent.
“And given its ambitions, Beijing will continue to use its military forces to intimidate its neighbours and to shape the region’s actions.”
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The Chinese embassy in Washington countered that its defence policy contributes to global peace and the international order.
“In comparison, the US military spending has been the world’s biggest for years, accounting for around a quarter of the global total and equalling nearly the sum of the next nine countries combined,” said embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu.
The US House testimony by top intelligence officials with the DNI, CIA, FBI, State Department and National Security Agency officials came the day after a parallel hearing before the Senate.
While enhanced links between authoritarian states improve their capability and partially insulate them from international pressure, individual parochial interests will limit cooperation and ensure that collaboration advances incrementally, Haines said.
Witnesses said the US needed to sharpen its game in a range of military areas to better counter China.
These include: strengthening strong alliances to further leverage its range and capabilities; better coordinating its restrictions on semiconductors and other hi-tech exports that have Chinese military applications; and improving its supply base to produce the hardware needed for an effective deterrent.
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“I would not hold a great degree of confidence in our ability to predict that China will not use force in the western Pacific over the next several years,” Hal Brands, a global affairs professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told the Senate committee, citing the importance of preparation.
“The reality is that the scale of the PLA build-up is just such that I worry we are losing, rather than gaining, ground.”
The US also must spend as much time understanding China as China devotes to studying the US system, others said.
This recommendation comes, however, as the number of American students studying in China drops sharply and expert ties decline.
“We are in a long-term strategic competition with China and Russia. Ultimately, this competition is not just a rivalry of military or economic power but also a competition of ideas,” said Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island.
“The US could lose without fighting. Just as Chinese leaders have studied America’s way of war, we need to study theirs.”
Witnesses also cited the danger of foreign tampering in the US presidential election in November, with Russia the biggest threat but China also a factor. “We cannot rule out” that the Chinese Communist Party would use social media app TikTok to influence the vote, Haines said.
In a report released on Monday, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies said the US defence industrial base lacked the capacity, responsiveness, flexibility and surge capability to meet US military production requirements as China increases its own production capabilities.
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“China’s defence industrial base is operating on a wartime footing, while the US defence industrial base is largely operating on a peacetime footing,” the report said.
China’s investment pace is five to six times faster than the US in munitions, high-end weapons systems and other equipment and has a shipbuilding capacity 230 times larger than America’s, the report added.
“It’s true that technology is absolutely critical to winning wars. But what matters most is finding the best ways of using the technology,” said Scharre in his Senate testimony, adding that the Pentagon “is still stuck in a mindset from the 1960s”.
