QUOTE: And this is a war the U.S. will not or cannot win for many reasons. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was correct when he warned that anyone considering fighting a land war in Asia “needed to have his or her mind examined.” In this case, what is the meaning of victory and winning? Either it is yet to be defined or there is none.
QUOTE: The Chinese “just ran rings around us,” said former Joint Chiefs Vice Chair Gen. John Hyten in one after-action report. “They knew exactly what we were going to do before we did it.” .... 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.... 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.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373
QUOTE: The U.S. military “lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat,” in the judgment of a congressional commission whose new report finds that collaboration between Russia, China, and other autocratic states is increasing the chance of a multi-front conflict—and that the U.S. would have trouble sustaining such a fight. The group found big gaps between the Defense Department’s ambitions of deterring or prevailing in a major conflict and reality. One of the reasons they came to that conclusion is the current state of the U.S. defense industrial base compared to China’s.
Suggest you read each of the articles. There are many more.
