WASHINGTON – The US military may not be able to win one war – let alone two – as the Pentagon struggles to keep its forces equipped against potential threats from China and Russia, according to a new report on US military power.
The conservative Heritage Foundation said in its annual “Index of US Military Strength” report that years of underfunding and “undefined priorities” have resulted in the military becoming “weak in relation to the force needed to defend national interests on the world stage.”
“[T]The report said that the current US military power is at great risk of being unable to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict. The force probably won’t be able to do much more and is definitely not equipped to handle two almost simultaneously [major conflicts.]”
At the same time, the potential for fighting on two fronts has increased as Russia continues to wage war on Ukraine, and China grows fiercer in the Pacific, according to the report.
“Overall, the US military position can only be classified as weak,” the report said.
Across the services, the report ranked only the Marine Corps as “strong” in the think tank’s assessment of the force’s capability, capability, and readiness. While the Army achieved a “marginal” rating, the space force and navy were rated “weak” and the air force was rated “very weak.”
“Overall, the military services continue to prioritize preparedness and have seen some improvement over the past few years, but modernization programmes, particularly in shipbuilding, continue to suffer as resources are committed to preparing for the future, recovering from 20 years of operations and offsetting the effects of inflation.
This raises a serious problem as the United States prepares to confront a rapidly growing and increasingly aggressive Chinese army, Representative Mike Gallagher (R-W) said on Tuesday.
“The particular problem with that is that if you look at our priority theater, the Indo-Pacific, the two priority services are the Navy and the Air Force – and those seem to be the worst,” the panel member told reporters.
To bolster its power, the United States must be willing to invest in military equipment — ships, missiles, and other weapons — to provide the force with the equipment needed to prepare for future conflict, according to the report.
“in this time [Biden] The Department’s Proposed Defense Budget for [fiscal year] The report said 2023 is far short of what services need to restore readiness and replace obsolete equipment, and Congress intends to increase the proposed budget by 5[%] represent barely half The current inflation ratewhich is close to 10[%]. “
The armed forces also have a capacity problem – not having enough personnel, weapons, and other equipment to fight a war. The report ranked the Navy worse than its sister services, cutting its rating ability by two notches from “marginal” to “very poor” – the lowest on the scale.
Part of the issue is the Biden administration’s diplomacy – the “replacement” mentality.[ing] The soft power of hard power,” which Gallagher called “naive at best.”
“I’m afraid when you look at the geopolitical environment, we will find ourselves in competition with China or Taiwan within the next few years if we continue down the path of naive disarmament,” he said.
Gallagher based his timeline on that of former Indo-Pacific Navy chief Admiral Phil Davidson, who told lawmakers last year that China might try to take control of Taiwan by 2027.
At the heart of the hard power problem is the diminishing size of the Navy’s fleet, according to the report. To fight in two wars, the think tank said the Navy would need about 400 ships — a big bump from the 292 current ships the service said it had until last week.
In 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the Navy to reach a target of 355 ships “as soon as possible.”
Instead, the service cut ships faster than they built them.
But even as ship numbers have dwindled, naval operations have not slowed — creating an additional obstacle to increasing the fleet, Heritage senior defense researcher Dakota Wood said Tuesday. The United States owns about half of the ships it did during the Cold War, but the number of ships at sea at any given time — about 100 — has not changed since at least the early 1990s.
“You work on your ships twice as hard, the crew doubles the difficulty, and the maintenance issues multiply, so when you finally get to the [ship]Wood said.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Navy already has 355 ships and plans to add about 65 more ships by 2026, according to the Pentagon’s annual report. A Chinese military report was published in November. By 2030, China is expected to have 460 ships.
“The British Royal Navy…is down to just 17 or 18 surface fighters,” Wood said. “China is adding roughly the equivalent of the British Royal Navy to its own fleet almost every year, and certainly every two years.”
But Gallagher said the Navy alone cannot fight looming threats from China and Russia — the Heritage report makes clear that the entire military should invest more in hard power.
“The lesson is that we have to rebuild our munitions industrial base,” Gallagher said. “The Defense Production Act can be updated and used for actual defense purposes, Not for infant formula. ”
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on the details of the report, saying he had not seen it, but described the US military as “the most powerful fighting force the world has ever known.”
“Every day around the world, the men and women of our armed forces protect vital national interests of the United States by supporting diplomacy, confronting aggression, deterring conflict, demonstrating strength and protecting the American people,” said the spokesperson, Air Commodore Patrick Ryder. .
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