Forget the Mexico border, the new US military budget is focused on ‘China, China, China’
- Acting Pentagon chief named hypersonic missiles, space operations, technology theft and militarising land in the South China Sea as threats posed by China
- China ‘seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States’, warned Patrick Shanahan
To a remarkable degree, the 2020 Pentagon budget proposal is shaped by national security threats that acting defence secretary Patrick Shanahan summarised in three words: “China, China, China.”
The US is still fighting small wars against Islamic extremists, and Russia is considered a serious concern, but Shanahan wants to shift the military’s main focus to what he considers the more pressing security problem of a rapidly growing Chinese military.
This theme, which Shanahan outlined on Thursday in presenting the administration’s proposed 2020 defence budget to the Senate Armed Services Committee, is competing for attention with more immediate problems like President Donald Trump’s effort to use the military to build a border wall.
The hearing, for example, spent more time on the wall and prospects for using military funds to build parts of it than on any aspect of foreign policy, including the conflict in Syria or military competition with China, Russia or North Korea.