The era of US military supremacy has ended

As China’s advanced arsenal grows, the Pentagon must focus on emerging technologies, not traditional weapons platforms

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, left, the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer and other US Navy ships in the South China Sea, in October. Picture: US Navy

Could the US lose a war with China? That alarming possibility was one of the last things I ever discussed in person with my old boss, US senator John McCain.

In late 2017, we had just left a briefing that he had asked me to arrange for his colleagues about China’s growing arsenal of precision-strike missiles, long-range sensors, counter-space capabilities and other advanced weapons. Every senator was invited to the briefing; about a dozen showed up. They got a depressing dose of reality.

One briefer was a senior Pentagon official in the Obama administration named David Ochmanek. Last year, he spoke publicly about the many war games he has conducted for the US Department of Defence.

“When we fight China or Russia,” Ochmanek said, the US military “gets its arse handed to it. We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary.”

As McCain and I sat in his office after the briefing, we talked about the waning of the military dominance that the US has enjoyed since World War II. We spent the evening imagining how a war with China might unfold. He worried that our forward bases in Asia could be reduced to smoking holes in the ground, our aircraft carriers and other ships knocked out of the fight and possibly sunk, our communications networks shattered, our satellites jammed and shot out of orbit, and perhaps thousands of Americans lost in action.

“Future generations of Americans are going to look back,” McCain said, “and ask how we let this happen.”

The message was clear: If we don’t reimagine America’s outdated model of national defence and harness emerging technologies to build a different kind of military, we will fail to deter the next war — or even lose it.

Even before COVID-19, defence budgets were declining. With trillions of dollars urgently needed in stimulus spending, political leaders are already calling for sharp Pentagon budget cuts, especially to pay for enhanced pandemic preparedness. The result will be a reckoning that our “military-industrial-congressional complex” — as McCain used to call it — has long sought to avoid.

The core problem is that the decades-old assumptions underlying the US military are increasingly obsolete. We have long assumed that no adversary would be able to overmatch us technologically and deny our ability to project military power worldwide.

As a result, we have built our force around small numbers of large, expensive, manpower-intensive and hard-to-replace platforms: ships, aircraft, satellites and vehicles. Our political, military and industrial leaders have continuously directed most defence resources to these traditional platforms. And nothing — not even the 2009 recession and the painful budget “sequestration” that followed it — has altered the demands of our defence establishment for more of the same.

As the US has doubled down on old priorities, China’s military has surged forward over the past three decades and is now aggressively embracing new technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced drones and hypersonic missiles. Beijing’s new arsenal is focused not on confronting the US military directly but on undermining the way it operates — what China calls “systems destruction warfare”.

This doesn’t mean that China is 10 feet tall. But it does mean that the US is playing a losing game. And we cannot spend ourselves out of our predicament.

To change course, we must first redefine our objectives. If China continues to grow in wealth, technology and power, it will become a peer competitor to the US. Recovering our global military primacy is no longer a practical goal. We must instead pursue a more limited and achievable goal: denying military dominance to China. The US military will have to focus less on projecting power and controlling territory than on preventing China (and other competitors) from projecting power themselves and committing acts of aggression beyond their borders. We must create defence without dominance.

This will require us to think differently about modernising the US military. The goal cannot be to accumulate more and better versions of traditional platforms in the expensive pursuit of a 355-ship navy or a 386-squadron air force. We must focus instead on developing networks of systems that enable US commanders to understand the battle-space, make decisions and act — the process that our military calls “the kill chain” — and to do so better, faster and more dynamically than our adversaries. This battle network, not platforms alone, creates real military advantage.

The military we need will be rooted in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, distributed networking and advanced manufacturing. Our current force won’t survive on future battlefields. A truly digital force must be built around large networks of smaller, cheaper, more expendable, more autonomous systems. (Disclosure: I now work at a technology startup that builds national-security products.)

Producing this military will require a defence industrial base very different from the insular and consolidated one we now have. In 1991, according to a paper from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, there were 107 major defence firms; a decade later, there were five. In the 15 years that followed, nearly 80 per cent of new entrants that sought to work for the US government eventually quit, as another CSIS report has noted. Some 17,000 companies left the defence business between 2011 and 2015 alone. And while more than 100 US startups have grown into billion-dollar “unicorns” in recent years, barely any have been in the defence sector.

As a result, the US military is shockingly behind the commercial world in many critical technologies. For example, the AI-enabling computers in self-driving commercial vehicles can be hundreds of times more capable than the “flying supercomputer” on the F-35 combat aircraft.

This shortfall didn’t just happen. It was the result of incentives that Washington created, especially its failure to develop new technologies into large-scale military programs.

Reversing this dangerous situation will require hard choices. We must shift much of our military spending from the traditional military of yesterday to the advanced battle networks and capabilities of tomorrow. Such a change cannot happen all at once. It must be a process of experimentation. We must concentrate our limited resources on core strategic goals, ensure that programs are in constant competition with each other, pick winners, rapidly scale up the most promising new capabilities and cancel those that underperform.

The US can make this transition, even with smaller defence budgets, but only if our political leaders understand that the short-term pain of these choices pales in comparison to the consequences of failing to change, such as losing a future war. These changes were long overdue before the COVID-19 crisis created new budget constraints. Now they are non-negotiable.

Christian Brose is the chief strategy officer of Anduril Industries and the author of The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of Hi-Tech Warfare. From 2015 to 2018, he was staff director of the US Senate Armed Services Committee.