Deterrence delayed

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NICK EICHER: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: keeping pace with China.

Late last year, the Defense Department requested $900 billion dollars for its 2026 budget. That’s nearly double what it was a decade ago. But is it even enough, and is the strategy sufficient? WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: At the end of the Cold War, the American military had a clear path to success: maintain dominance. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress this summer that the path has narrowed, and China is the reason.

PETE HEGSETH: 25 years ago, our military was unchallenged, yet we squandered that advantage as China carried out an unprecedented military buildup.

The defense spending bill aims to make up for lost time: Increasing U.S. manufacturing capabilities, particularly in shipbuilding and nuclear technology. And, funding the purchase of more autonomous and long-range drones.

HEGSETH: We're reestablishing deterrence. When an opponent sees our well-equipped and tough-as-nails warriors, they will decide that today is not the day to test American resolve.

Hegseth says China is the one to keep pace with … something the administration emphasized with an $11 billion dollar arms sale to Taiwan last month.

Bob Peters is a defense analyst with the Heritage Foundation.

BOB PETERS: I'm all in favor of us arming Taiwan to the teeth.

The Defense Department says China is trying to amass a large and well-trained military to project power worldwide.

PETERS: Xi Jinping, who I think is 76 years old, has said that China will solve the Taiwan issue in his lifetime.

That doesn’t leave much time to update fleets or weapons… and many of the government's biggest projects are behind schedule and over budget.

In 2018, the government decided to update the “nuclear triad”... that’s the nation’s land, air, and sea-based systems.

A big part of that is replacing land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. The transition was supposed to be complete 10 years from now … But this fall, the Air Force pushed completion to 2050… meaning current missiles will have been in service for 80 years. And the estimated cost will be nearly 141 billion dollars… 81 percent over the last estimate.

And that is just a single component of the update.

PETERS: So the bottom line is that we're trying to build new plutonium pits, new warheads, new bombers, new rockets, new rocket silos, new ballistic missile submarines, all at the same time. And it's not going well, because basically we took a 40 year holiday from building nuclear weapons.

Another dimension is human capital:

PETERS: Everybody who had any experience doing it all retired during that period, and we're paying the price for that now.

And unlike the Cold War, America is now facing Russia and China. But some worry the proposed strategies won’t work this time.

HENRY SOKOLSKI: The committees see a problem, and they don't have many ready solutions.

Henry Sokolski is the executive director of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center.

SOKOLSKI: So they go back to the solutions that were used before, during the Cold War. That is excusable, explainable, but it will not be a complete thought for what we’re up against.

He agrees that the old systems need an update. But he worries this bill opens the door to build more nuclear weapons… not just replace the old ones… and that door is hard to shut.

Besides, Sokolski argues, in the last century America tried deterrence three times: before the first and second World Wars, and the Cold War. Only one of deterred a hot war.

SOKOLSKI: It's hard to understand how military things alone, of any sort are the winning ticket entirely. They may be necessary, but they cannot be sufficient.

Sokolski also worries that we’re sinking money into large, complicated, and expensive equipment that we can’t manufacture quickly if it gets destroyed.

SOKOLSKI: The idea that you can concentrate military value by making a vessel bigger is simply to invite it being hit as a juicy target… if you can see it, you can hit it.

He says the way to combat this is to make things like camouflage, decoys, and cheap drones—creating more targets and hiding the biggest ones. Part of the defense bill calls for designing and manufacturing those smaller pieces of equipment—lessons learned from Ukraine’s drone warfare.

SOKOLSKI: That effort needs to be supported as much as possible, and the old ways need to be seriously questioned.

Questioned, but not necessarily abandoned. Defense analyst Peters says leaders shouldn’t overestimate the lessons learned from a country with few options.

PETERS: They're using the cheap drones, because they're cheap, and that's what they can get their hands on and so forth.

America has more options, but what it may not have is time. Peters and Sokolski both say that with a quarter-century of inertia away from weapons manufacturing, it will take years to right the ship.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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