The PRC's Buildup is not a Jobs Program
It's all right there
Though I have a few friendly nits to pick with an item or two mentioned by outgoing Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Admiral John C. Aquilino, USN, at the National Defense Industrial Association's Emerging Technologies and Defense symposium in Washington, D.C. yesterday, as reported by Tyler Rogoway, (specifically the assumption that we can create, maintain in a contested environment, and rely on, “…a grand networking scheme that ties everyone in the battlespace together — including regional allies — and offers a single 'pane of glass' God's eye view of the battlefield to everyone from soldiers on desolate windswept islands, to allied warships, to commanders managing the conflict thousands of miles away.“ that has “..has to have a persistent understanding of the battlespace, where everything is at every second to a targeting level quality.“) - there is a much more grounded comment that everyone needs to have continuously at the top of mind.
When a nation is clearly planning for something, it is best to acknowledge it and make your own plans accordingly.
I don’t think we are, but this is the reality of what the People’s Republic of China has been doing as we’ve been engaged in imperial policing in central and southwest Asian backwaters.
We all need to continue to repeat this until we are sick of saying it. By then, perhaps, just perhaps, people will start to hear us;
"What I think is they're on their five year [plan], and if you go back three different budgets for them, or four years, over our 20 years in the desert, they focused very clearly on delivering a force capable to take on the United States. And the speed and acceleration that they have shown and they are delivering, right, when you talk about outputs, we all look at the Chinese to understand, truly, where they are, what they're doing. The largest military buildup since World War Two, both in conventional forces and then strategic-nuclear. J-20s are in full-rate production, ships coming off their industrial baseline at numbers that only replicate what we did in the Lehman time and the 600 ship Navy kind of time frame. Again, nuclear build up... is the largest and continuous we've seen. So those are the concerning pieces. And that's what we're walking into."
Are those in DC responding properly?
"a grand networking scheme that ties everyone in the battlespace together —"??? Anyone else get a little shiver running down your back? How many network security failures have we had in the US Guvmint in the last 5 years? How many IT parts are out there still collating and mirroring network traffic? With China as the culprit. Anytime anyone tells you a highly classified network is "secure" just run away. Your network is only as a secure as the dullest tool in your IT shed (Jack Teixeira immediately comes to mind).
I give the "grand networking scheme (now there's a predictive word) less than 12 hrs after the balloon goes pop.
DC is not. It’s the crab pot, and we haven’t had a competitive service strategy since Goldwater-Nichols. We’ve got a realistic likelyhood of losing the Big One in the next few years.