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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| Navy's intelligence chief, Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, called the problem ‘China blindness,’ saying: ‘It's very unsettling to see how much the U.S. is not connecting the dots on our number one challenge.’ |
| 2023-06-09 |
| [Politico] The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China (Because America might lose.) The problem has come into sharp relief only in the last few years as Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to a prolonged war that has drained U.S. munitions stockpiles, and China dramatically escalated both its military spending and aggressive rhetoric against Taiwan. In the last year the U.S. has allocated nearly $50 billion in security aid to Kyiv, possibly cutting further into its deterrent against China. In other words, the failure to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine and the stress this has put on the U.S. defense industrial base should be sounding alarms for the U.S. military posture vis-a-vis Taiwan, many defense experts say. Yet critics on both sides of the aisle say the Biden administration has been slow to respond to what is minimally required to prevent an Indo-Pacific catastrophe, which is the need to rapidly build up a better deterrent — especially new stockpiles of munitions that would convince China it could be too costly to attack Taiwan. “There is a recognition of the challenge that goes to the top of the Pentagon, but across the board there is more talk than action,” says Seth Jones, a former Obama-era defense official who compiled a report on one of the wargames conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But a swift response may not be possible, in large part because of how shrunken the U.S. manufacturing base has become since the Cold War. All of a sudden, Washington is reckoning with the fact that so many parts and pieces of munitions, planes, and ships it needs are being manufactured overseas, including in China. Among the deficiencies: components of solid rocket motors, shell casings, machine tools, fuses and precursor elements to propellants and explosives, many of which are made in China and India. Beyond that, skilled labor is sorely lacking, and the learning curve is steep. The U.S. has slashed defense workers to a third of what they were in 1985 — a number that has remained flat — and seen some 17,000 companies leave the industry, said David Norquist, president of the National Defense Industrial Association. And commercial companies are leery of the Pentagon’s tangle of rules and restrictions. “Unfortunately, the more you dig under the hood the more problems you see,” said a senior Democratic defense expert in the Senate who was granted anonymity because he was not allowed to speak on the record for his boss. “This is largely a function of the post-Cold War period being focused on efficiency. Since the Gulf War we came to expect too much from smart munitions. We haven’t needed stockpiles or found ourselves critically low on spare parts. So we’ve decreased the wiggle room.” At a military conference earlier this year, the Navy’s intelligence chief, Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, called the problem “China blindness,” saying: “It’s very unsettling to see how much the U.S. is not connecting the dots on our number one challenge.” The administration’s response, including the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill, was also delayed because of the protracted negotiations over Biden’s budget and the debt ceiling. Sen. Jack Reed, the Democratic chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had been planning to hold hearings on America’s defense industrial base, but put those plans off because of the time being devoted to budget and debt dickering. |
| Posted by:NoMoreBS |
| #4 /\ Out of the question? Not in the least. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-06-09 21:30 |
| #3 After reading the article, I wonder if the invasion of the Southern Border and the economic, cultural and political destabilization that 8 MILLION new illegals is set to impose is not also a part of this strategy by the CCP/PLA through their surrogates in the Biden Administration? Certainly the efforts to neuter Trump as a candidate receive their unquestioning support through the Dark Money pipeline into the DNC for exactly the same reason. |
| Posted by: NoMoreBS 2023-06-09 18:57 |
| #2 Some have sold us out for money. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2023-06-09 16:41 |
| #1 "China Blindness?" The "Dots" have long been connected. We have simply surrendered to the Chinese. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-06-09 15:15 |