FABRIZIO GOWDY | NOVEMBER 7, 2020 | OPINIONS

Virtually every American alive today has lived their entire life with the understanding that the United States of America is the world’s preeminent military power. Most Americans believe the U.S. is an untouchable superpower with military capabilities far greater than our closest competitors. And yet, this is an illusion.

The reality is, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has wallowed in its lone superpower status while China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has made enormous strides in bridging the gap in military capability. American complacency has led to the erosion of our strategic advantages. In a recent series of simulations, the Pentagon concluded American forces would likely be unable to expel the PLA from Taiwan in the case of an invasion. This might come as a shock to most Americans. After all, the U.S. spends three times more on its military than China and more than the next 10 countries combined.

The problem for the U.S. is that China is spending far more efficiently than we are. America spends large sums of money on expensive, aging “legacy systems.” These defense mechanisms, some of which have been in use since the Second World War, have scores of lobbyists in Washington vouching for their continued funding. Meanwhile, emergent technologies that will shape the future of warfare are going ignored by the U.S. defense establishment. China has invested heavily in artificial intelligence (A.I.), unmanned vehicles, and quantum weapons, and is projected to be the leader in these fields within the next decade.

China’s DF-26, the “carrier Killer.” (Retrieved from google images)

The current situation is akin to a board game. We may have more checkers pieces and be better at checkers, but China isn’t interested in beating us at our own game. China is building chess pieces that will make our pieces outdated and obsolete. For example, China’s $21 million DF-26 missiles (“carrier killers”) can fly 2,500 miles in a matter of minutes and cripple or even sink a $13 billion American aircraft carrier.

A Pentagon report published in September 2020 alleged China is amassing an arsenal of anti-satellite weapons capable of shooting down satellites critical for communication and GPS. With the heavy dependency on digital technology of the twenty-first century, a coordinated attack on our satellites could render large swaths of the U.S. military useless.

China is also gaining the upper hand in cyberspace. Our reliance on increasingly interconnected technology makes us vulnerable to Chinese cyberwarfare. In the near future, state-sponsored Chinese hackers and cybercriminals could hit home with attacks on the American power grids and telecommunications networks.

China’s rapid rise as a military power is in large part a result of Chinese theft, spying, and hacking. The PLA used stolen blueprints of our patriot missile program, littoral combat ships, and the F-35 fighter jet to advance its own similar programs. The F-35 project is a prime example of the U.S. dumping loads of money into a military innovation, only to have China steal our secrets. The F-35 took almost 15 years and $400 billion to develop, while China’s copycat J-20 fighter jet was created with stolen U.S. military secrets and produced at a cost of just $4.4 billion.

But while theft and hacking is a major issue, structural issues within America’s military-industrial complex are an often overlooked source of problems. At the height of the Cold War, over a hundred defense contractors were competing with one another to churn out new technologies and weapons. But as defense contracts dried up in the 1990s, the industry quickly consolidated.

Today, only a handful of large corporations remain, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. With less competitors, these conglomerates are spending less and less time innovating and more time lobbying and fighting each other for defense contracts. In 2017, the five largest defense contractors spent just a combined $6.6 billion on research and development. By contrast, the five largest private sector A.I. leaders spent $70.5 billion on research and development, according to Christian Brose, national security advisor to late Sen. John McCain and former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Aside from the lack of competition within the industry, current incentive structures favor stagnation. It is far more appealing to build old armaments, which reliably turn a profit, rather than attempting to innovate and design new technologies, which could fail to return on their investment.

Future conflicts will be increasingly high-tech, unmanned, or even entirely virtual; we cannot afford to fall behind China in fields such as A.I. and robotics. But while China’s ruling Communist Party has ordered the country’s tech sector to work hand-in-hand with the PLA, there is a widening gulf between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. Christian Brose explained this phenomenon in his recent book, “The Kill Chain.” According to Brose, cultural and political differences between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, coupled with excessive government regulations and bureaucracy, make partnership with the U.S. defense establishment difficult and unappealing, especially for smaller, younger start-ups on the cutting edge of emerging technologies. Instead, large, consolidated, more established firms are the only ones willing and able to navigate the red tape necessary to win contracts. The Pentagon needs to make it easier for technology leaders to collaborate; it needs Silicon Valley far more than Silicon Valley needs the Pentagon..

Our military superiority is quickly becoming an illusion at the expense of a rising China. Our ability to control key regions, especially the Pacific, is slipping. If we do not rethink our national defense, this trend will only accelerate, and our days as the world’s preeminent military superpower will be numbered.

The National Security Threat