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OPINION:
A small mystery has been solved: The person who interrupted our arms shipments to Ukraine was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, grandson of former CIA Director William Colby.
Did Mr. Colby make the right call? Perhaps, but he had excellent reasons for making the decision. The reasons are China and our inability to resume the role of the “arsenal of democracy” we had in World War II.
President Trump has reshuffled our military shipments to Ukraine, many to come directly from our NATO allies. Those will be arms that purchases from our arms industry will replace, but that’s a big problem.
For example, Lockheed Martin made more than 500 Patriot missiles last year. The company is apparently trying to build capacity to produce 750 by 2027 to meet growing global demand. (Why either of those numbers is unclassified is a mystery to me.)
What is “global demand”? That, naturally, varies by weapon system. Both sides are feeding 155-millimeter artillery shells into the Russia-Ukraine war in quantities in the millions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has the benefit of Iranian drone production and North Korean ammunition. We lack both, and we have a bigger problem than Ukraine: China.
In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said China plans to invade Taiwan in 2027 and warned of the enormous consequences for the region. Mr. Hegseth said, “We know that [Chinese President] Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. The [People’s Liberation Army] is building the capabilities needed to do it — at breakneck speed. The PLA is training for it every day. The PLA is rehearsing for the real deal.”
The problem is that, among other things, we would lose thousands of lives and billions of dollars in equipment (ships, aircraft and satellites) in that war, and we would certainly run out of ammunition (missiles, bombs and more) if the war lasted more than a few days or weeks. This has been proved over and over in war games and studies.
That is because of the almost-comical deindustrialization of the United States and the hyperindustrialization of China. The Chinese are outproducing us in everything related to war: ships, aircraft, missiles, bombs and whatnot. That wouldn’t be a problem but for the fact that our technological edge has been whittled down to the point that many Chinese (and Russian) weapons systems are just as good as ours. Some may even be better.
Our B-2 bombers used some 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, at 30,000 pounds apiece, to hit Iran’s nuclear sites. It will probably take more than two years to manufacture replacements.
That brings us back to the dullest of all subjects: the defense industrial base. That term has been bandied about and applied to many industries, but it shouldn’t be. We can’t rely on Costco’s three-dimensional printers, as the inventive authors of “Ghost Fleet” did. We need to have in existence and actively engaged the means of producing the missiles, aircraft and other tools of war necessary to defeat the Chinese.
This is no small task because it will require investing tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars into defense companies. That’s not the right way to go. The right approach is, as The Wall Street Journal said recently, to rebuild our defenses with a war against China in mind.
If Mr. Xi sticks to his 2027 timetable, we won’t have time to maneuver the tax code to encourage defense production. Nor will we have the opportunity to shorten the times under which our defense weapon systems are delivered. For example, the U.S. Navy’s new attack submarine was supposed to be ready in about 2031. It’s going to be delayed by at least another decade.
So, a war with China over Taiwan will not be fought in a gentlemanly fashion. When it breaks out, we must suspect that the Chinese will do some or all of the following: seek to destroy our navigational, communications and spy satellites; launch air and missile attacks on our ships both near and far from Taiwan; attack vulnerable U.S. air bases such as Yokuta in Japan; and attack our cyber capabilities to a degree never before seen.
That’s just the beginning.
The Chinese will also effectively blitz the island of Taiwan. It will almost certainly knock out all Taiwanese aircraft, ships and ground installations. The Taiwanese will do their best to fight back, but they are badly overmatched.
We know we face a fight in about two years. The fight with China may be short and bloody or long and extremely bloody. If we knew how it would come out, it would be unlike almost every other war in history.
Ukraine is far less important than the coming fight with China. Nevertheless, it needs our support. We need to prepare for China while still supplying Ukraine.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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