NEUTERING AMERICA’S MILITARY STATUS

 

While the U.S. is fixated on the pandemic and the Antifa and anarchist destructive riots, Russian Collusion,and  impeachment, the Chinese have been steadily building up their ability to wage a cyber war with the U.S.  Is it any wonder that President Trump is creating a U.S. Space Force to protect us against debilitating cyber attacks.  .   Nancy
WASHINGTON EXAMINER
How China is positioning to neuter America’s military status as top dog
New book details that in war games with China, the U.S. loses every time
By Jamie McIntyre Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.     May 28, 2020

A recently published book begins with the sobering premise that if the United States were to go to war with China today, the biggest, best-trained, best-equipped military force in the history of the world, one fielded by a country that spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, would lose.

And most national security experts agree.

The book, which sparked debate inside and outside the Pentagon, is The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, by Christian Brose, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and senior policy adviser to the late Sen. John McCain.

In his introductory chapter, Brose lays out how China follows a strategy aimed at denying the U.S. the ability to project power in the way it traditionally has, essentially checkmating America’s greatest strength.

And he describes in chilling detail how the U.S. military as currently configured is uniquely unsuited to go toe-to-toe with China in a conventional force-on-force war.

“Many of the US ships, submarines, fighter jets, bomber aircraft, additional munitions, and other systems that are needed to fight would not be near the war when it started but would be thousands of miles away in the United States. They would come under immediate attack once they began their multiweek mobilization across the planet,” he writes.

“Cyberattacks would grind down the logistical movement of US forces into combat. The defenseless cargo ships and aircraft that would ferry much of that force across the Pacific would be attacked every step of the way. Satellites on which U.S. forces depend for intelligence, communications, and global positioning would be blinded by lasers, shut down by high-energy jammers, or shot out of orbit altogether by antisatellite missiles,” leaving many U.S. forces “deaf, dumb, and blind.”

 

China’s massive arsenals of advanced precision strike weapons, such as cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons, would hit U.S. planes in the region before they could take off, and U.S. aircraft carriers would have to steam away from China to stay out of range of China’s carrier-killer missiles.

In short, all signs point to an ignominious defeat.

“Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: we have lost almost every single time,” Brose writes. “The American people do not know this. Most members of Congress do not know this — even though they should. But in the Department of Defense, this is a well-known fact.”

When Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan was replaced Jim Mattis as acting defense secretary, his first three words to the press were “China, China, China.”

Before he resigned in protest, Mattis crafted the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which elevated countering China to the top priority.

And current Defense Secretary Mark Esper is leading the charge to jettison so-called legacy systems, which served the U.S. well in past wars, in favor of new technology and new ways of fighting.

“The more capable you are in war, the more likely you are to deter one. … What we’re trying to do is deter war with China,” Esper said in an interview with Hugh Hewett in May.

“I think we probably need more in terms of submarines. We need to move much more quickly on unmanned or lightly manned ships, and we certainly need new strategic deterrents,” he said. “It’s going to have things like distributed lethality. It has to be survivable against a near-peer power such as China or Russia.”

Precisely right, argues Brose.

“The U.S. military today consists of relatively small numbers of rather large, exquisite, highly expensive, heavily manned, and hard‑to‑replace things,” he writes. (Think aircraft carriers, surface ships, F-35 stealth fighters, and Abrams tanks.)

Brose envisions a future force built around lower-cost systems that are effectively expendable, such as networks of inexpensive drones and missiles. “Lots of missiles.”

“If U.S. systems are cheap to build, operate, and replenish, we would be more willing and able to lose them. … Manned systems will not fare well on future battlefields, which will be extremely violent with heavy losses on all sides.”

That’s the concept of “distributed lethality” — larger numbers of smaller systems spread over a wider area so adversaries can’t concentrate their sensors and weapons on a few big, fat targets.

“I’ve said for a long time the future strategic triad is about unmanned, cyber, and special forces,” and retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former NATO supreme commander, upon reading Brose’s chapter describing what’s been dubbed “the new American way of war.”

“It’s best in the book, and I agree with it,” Stavridis said.

Brose advocates beating China at its own game and adapting to a world in which the U.S. no longer possesses military dominance over China, what he calls a strategy of defense without dominance.

“If the United States develops a new, defensive way of war that is focused less on projecting military power than on countering the ability of others to do so, we could create the same dilemmas for our competitors that we are facing,” he writes.

“China may be capable of denying dominance to America, but America can do the same to China. And that should be our goal: preventing China from achieving a position of military dominance in Asia.”

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, who was the principal architect of the 1991 Desert Storm air campaign, said that while Brose’s book is highly readable, it only addresses part of what is a very complex problem about what the future U.S. military should look like.

“In my 40-plus years of dealing with defense, one of the things I’ve come away with is that there is no silver bullet solution,” Deptula told the Washington Examiner. “But this whole notion of swarming, of using uninhabited vehicles to be able to confuse and disturb and upset an adversary and make it more difficult to challenge us, certainly needs to be an element of our future force design.”

 

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