{"id":17284,"date":"2022-11-06T13:40:34","date_gmt":"2022-11-06T09:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/?p=17284"},"modified":"2022-11-17T12:21:49","modified_gmt":"2022-11-17T08:21:49","slug":"the-big-one-is-coming-and-the-u-s-military-isnt-ready","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/the-big-one-is-coming-and-the-u-s-military-isnt-ready\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Big One Is Coming\u2019 and the U.S. Military Isn\u2019t Ready"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>A U.S. flag officer talks candidly about the fading U.S. deterrent.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine revealed the fading power of America\u2019s military deterrent, a fact that too few of our leaders seem willing to admit in public. So it is encouraging to hear a senior flag officer acknowledge the danger in a way that we hope is the start of a campaign to educate the American public.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis Ukraine crisis that we\u2019re in right now, this is just the warmup,\u201d Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said this week at a conference. \u201cThe big one is coming. And it isn\u2019t going to be very long before we\u2019re going to get tested in ways that we haven\u2019t been tested\u201d for \u201ca long time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>How bad is it? Well, the admiral said, \u201cAs I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are.\u201d Sinking slowly is hardly a consolation. As \u201cthose curves keep going,\u201d it won\u2019t matter \u201chow good our commanders are, or how good our horses are\u2014we\u2019re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Note that modifier \u201cnear-term.\u201d This is a more urgent vulnerability than most of the political class cares to recognize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Adm. Richard noted that America retains an advantage in submarines\u2014\u201cmaybe the only true asymmetric advantage we still have\u201d\u2014but even that may erode unless America picks up the pace \u201cgetting our maintenance problems fixed, getting new construction going.\u201d Building three Virginia-class fast-attack submarines a year would be a good place to start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The news last year that China tested a hypersonic missile that flew around the world and landed at home should have raised more alarms than it did. It means China can put any U.S. city or facility at risk and perhaps without being detected. The fact that the test took the U.S. by surprise and that it surpassed America\u2019s hypersonic capabilities makes it worse. How we lost the hypersonic race to China and Russia deserves hearings in Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe used to know how to move fast, and we have lost the art of that,\u201d the admiral added. The military talks \u201cabout how we are going to mitigate our assumed eventual failure\u201d to field new ballistic submarines, bombers or long-range weapons, instead of flipping the question to ask: \u201cWhat\u2019s it going to take? Is it money? Is it people? Do you need authorities?\u201d That\u2019s \u201chow we got to the Moon by 1969.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Educating the public about U.S. military weaknesses runs the risk of encouraging adversaries to exploit them. But the greater risk today is slouching ahead in blind complacency until China invades Taiwan or takes some other action that damages U.S. interests or allies because Bejiing thinks the U.S. can do nothing about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>By The Editorial Board, wsj.com<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A U.S. flag officer talks candidly about the fading U.S. deterrent. Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine revealed the fading power of America\u2019s military deterrent, a fact that too few of our leaders seem willing to admit in public. So it is encouraging to hear a senior flag officer acknowledge the danger in a way that we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17286,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17284\/revisions\/17286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geworld.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}