To Fight Future Wars, the U.S. Needs More Capacity—and Seriousness

The United States appears to be losing its ability to manage the activities necessary to both make war and prevent it in the first place. War requires the sum total of what a civilization is capable of, from education to invention and production to organization. This makes war unbelievably complex, almost to the point of incomprehensibility. Hidden in the raw numbers of troops, ships and missiles on a chart are the economic, scientific, political and societal activities needed to develop, procure and field them. U.S. decision-makers seem paralyzed by an inability to motivate and harness these forces for effective national defense.

While the United States remains the foremost military power in the world, it is no longer a near-hegemonic one as it appeared to be at the end of the Cold War. History hasn’t ended; rather, it has reasserted itself, and a multipolar world of near-peer and powerful regional rivals is now a reality. History suggests this was inevitable.

It is likely just a matter of time, if not inevitable, before a state of war exists between great powers. The taboo is gone. Fighting between the United States and some combination of its allies against an enemy combination involving Russia and/or China and their allies appears increasingly plausible.

The U.S.-led (for now) West appears to hold most of the advantages of economy, technology and demonstrable military power. However, as Discourse’s David Masci recently pointed out, the actions and inaction of U.S. political and military leaders are not only squandering any existent advantages over potential enemies, but they also strike decidedly nonserious attitudes about what is needed to reassert those advantages.

Masci ascribes America’s failings to “fecklessness,” and if this seems harsh it is also understandable, given the scale of what awaits us in a superpower conflict. Understandable, too, is the desire to avoid the buzzsaw of modern combat with some combination of unconventional strategies and advanced technologies. However, both of these appeals to American ingenuity will waste our resources, time and talent unless the country is able to face its potential enemies with dominant numbers of equipment and trained personnel.

Taiwan by the Tail

There is no shortage of experts, many with substantial experience and pedigrees, who warn of a potential future war with China over Taiwan or with Russia, spinning out of Western military support for Ukraine. Given China’s growing economic and military capabilities, the former is the premier threat to the U.S. position as the dominant world power.

Though no one is yet banging a drum or starting a countdown, warnings about a potential war with China are everywhere in the media, white papers from think tanks and reports from Congress. The key issue hangs on the autonomy of Taiwan, which China’s President Xi Jinping has made his personal mission to abolish, through either peaceful or forceful means. At the same time, a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan by Chinese forces is unlikely to succeed if Taiwan resists and receives U.S. and allied support.

Most would agree that this is the state of affairs. Yet it must be said that if China did mount an invasion and the U.S. intervened, both sides would suffer shattering losses of life, ships and aircraft in the first days and weeks of the conflict. Wargames run by the Center for Strategic and International Studies project that the U.S. would succeed but experience death and destruction on a World War II scale (the losses of dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft and thousands of servicemembers) and compressed in time, mostly due to the clouds of guided missiles used in the fray.

It should not be surprising that some U.S. leaders are balking at this. Members of Congress, Department of Defense officials and the national security think tank community are looking for ways to counter a cross-strait invasion without having to expend ships, planes and lives. One avenue counsels the U.S. and its allies to forgo a forward defense of Taiwan in favor of a blockade of China on the high seas. Another envisions turning the strait into a “hellscape” with swarms of aerial and naval drones to overwhelm a Chinese invasion force.

Neither of these alternatives is a substitute for forward defense of Taiwan by directly resisting an invasion, and neither will deter China unless backed by the threat of a forward defense. Samuel Byers, senior national security adviser at the Center for Maritime Strategy, warns that there won’t be any silver bullets in a war against China and that policymakers need to guard against the tendency to look for them.

“I worry that people in think tank land and some people in government try to come up with these ideas that if war started, we can blockade China as a shortcut because we control the high seas,” Byers said. “Or we don’t need to buy 10,000 anti-ship missiles tomorrow to fight within the first island chain, or worry about the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet because we’ll have Hellscape.”

By “first island chain,” Byers refers to the archipelago encompassing Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and islands touching the South China Sea, which defines the front line of any likely U.S. conflict with China. Without linking “silver bullet” thinking to any particular individuals, he nevertheless is concerned that ideas can take hold and put U.S. strategy and defense policy on the wrong track.

“You have to be careful about the mindset that people in D.C. and the foreign policy establishment have, even the unwritten or the unspoken assumptions, because these tangibly drive the budget that Congress passes and the decisions that senior leaders make,” he said. “There is a sort of silver bullet mindset. ‘Oh, this will do it.’ And that’s a tough habit to break, it seems.”

Silver or Steel?

The origins of such mindsets typically come from misinterpreting historical lessons and current events. Enthusiasm for blockading China, in addition to avoiding the horrors and costs of direct confrontation, is inspired by U.S. success in its submarine campaign against Imperial Japan in World War II. The strangulation of supply lines to Japan’s home islands from its resource-rich conquests was one of the key reasons for the empire’s defeat. Indeed, modern submarines would be supremely useful in prosecuting a long war against China, since it is also dependent on overseas trade and access to resources.

But Byers says there are three principal challenges to remember when it comes to blockading China. First, citing J.C. Wylie, a Cold War-era U.S. Navy rear admiral and historian, Byers points out that the three-and-a-half-year submarine campaign against Japan worked in tandem with hard-fought air, naval and ground campaigns on other Pacific fronts that cost the U.S. hundreds of ships, tens of thousands of aircraft and over a hundred thousand lives. Second, China today has thousands of merchant ships, and going after them will take a long time. Many American ships, submarines and aircraft will be needed to contain Chinese forces inside the first island chain. And third, the very act of stepping back from a forward defense of Taiwan removes U.S. forces as a deterrent to a Chinese invasion. If Taiwan falls as a result, there will be tremendous international and domestic pressure on the U.S. to make peace, undermining the long-war blockade approach.

There are myriad other issues to contend with in a blockade strategy, such as going after Chinese vessels in neutral waters, dealing with Chinese cargo on neutral vessels and handling vociferous international opposition to U.S. actions. Byers says that none of this is insurmountable and blockade could be a useful part of a Taiwan Strait crisis response. However, he warns policymakers against thinking of it as a lower-cost, lower-risk alternative to direct military intervention. To be sure, it comes with its own sizable risks.

The same could be said for the U.S. taking lessons from current events and reaching the same dubious conclusion that a mass-casualty confrontation can be avoided while saving Taiwan. One of these ideas gaining currency is that the U.S. will be able to drone its way out of casualties with swarms of cheap, remotely piloted and autonomous vehicles of various types. This lesson, by way of the Russia-Ukraine war, is informing alternative strategies and research and development guidance all the way up to the top reaches of the Pentagon.

While much has been written and broadcast about the revolutionary effect of drones on the war in Ukraine for both sides, these sources tend to talk past each other and eschew the use of a common terminology. All this serves to confuse rather than enlighten. Much of the battlefield impact of modified commercial drones, such as quadcopters, is because the lines are relatively static and the opposing forces are close to each other. This will not be the case in a battle for the Taiwan Strait.

A whole article would be needed to describe the taxonomy of drones, so for the purposes of drone swarms in the Taiwan Strait, I mean a variety of remotely operated and autonomous systems that are essentially loitering munitions, small cruise missiles, boats and submersibles. Proponents of the so-called Hellscape concept of throwing drones at a Chinese invasion force cite the effectiveness of aerial systems in Ukraine and other conflicts, as well as Ukraine’s ability to neutralize the Russian Black Sea Fleet with aerial and naval attack drones.

While Hellscape critics are not opposed to U.S. acquisition of such weapons per se, they don’t believe these weapons should be a substitute for existing types of needed missiles and munitions, not to mention more ships and planes. Naval blogger CDR Salamander writes that Hellscape is an example of the Pentagon wading into a brand new concept requiring new research and development, program awards, acquisitions and fielding—all of which require funding and, more importantly, time. Most of what would be needed to realize Hellscape remains undefined, which means it is probably years if not decades away from deployment. This is typical of Defense Department thinking: Forgo proven weapons today in the expectation of developing superior alternatives tomorrow.

Capacity Versus Capability

Much of the skepticism about the Pentagon getting around painful strategic problems with Yankee ingenuity is because it has been prioritizing R&D instead of procurement for decades, too often with little to show for it. Mackenzie Eaglen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that the last time the U.S. embarked on a comprehensive military buildup was during the Reagan administration, when the amount of the defense budget devoted to procuring new weapons systems exceeded the amount allotted for R&D programs at a ratio of 2.47 to 1. These days it has dropped closer to 1 to 1. In her opinion, a healthy ratio of procurement to R&D should be about 2.25 to 1.

“[Ronald] Reagan, the president who used the military the least, had budgets approaching 30% for procurement,” Eaglen said, “whereas today, the figure is less than 20% for procurement.”

According to Eaglen, since the start of the 21st century, presidents and their defense departments have prioritized to varying degrees what they would call investing in the future. And the future is in R&D, science and technology. This trend is supported by members of Congress who have universities in their districts that receive some amount of Defense Department funding, which a lot of them get. Typically, programs with political backers are among the last to get cut.

Meanwhile, procurement programs are the easiest to scale back. Eaglen describes military procurement as the “bill payer” of the defense budget. When money must be found for other purposes, it is easiest to just buy less of something or slow acquisition down for the next budget, so procurement becomes a frequently kicked can. The tension between acquisitions of existing weapon types and development of new technologies is what Eaglen calls capacity (existing) versus capability (hypothetical), and the trend toward future development is leaving the U.S. with fewer ships, fewer planes and empty magazines just when China, Russia and other hostile powers need to be deterred or, worse, fought.

“We’re always cutting the present to buy the future, but the future never arrives on time,” she said.

To make matters worse, the impulse to invest in the future too often yields little of tangible value. Eaglen cites her 2021 report, the 2020s Tri-Service Modernization Crunch, to illustrate just how many high-profile, supposedly transformational programs have been canceled in recent years, taking billions of dollars and wasted time with them. Some of the key disappointments include the Army’s Future Combat System ($22 billion) and Comanche helicopter ($10.8 billion), the Air Force’s Airborne Laser ($5.4 billion) and the Navy’s Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle ($4 billion). Left unmentioned are expensive programs leading to acquisitions of dubious military usefulness, chief among these being the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship.

The paradox is that about two-thirds of the defense budget is “walled off” each year for fixed costs such as personnel, operations and maintenance. In any given year, the Pentagon moves around only about 10 to 15% of the budget, and Congress may tinker with another 5%. Even when defense budgets are “eye-wateringly large,” Eaglen says that structural problems with Congress’ penchant for continuing resolutions, the Pentagon’s bureaucratic inertia and persistent inflation all conspire to prevent the U.S. military from achieving the capacity to deter and, if necessary, defeat today’s threats.

Desperate but Not Serious

There are distressing indications that the United States is no longer a serious world power, while its potential rivals seem serious as heart attacks. If Congress were serious, it would not abdicate its legislative responsibility to pass national budgets rather than relying on continuing resolutions, which impose limits on defense spending options. If the Pentagon were serious, it would face existent threats with procurement of actual military equipment that has already been developed and ensure it had enough people in uniform. If President Biden were serious, he would make America’s warfighting capacity his top priority.

The horrors and costs of war have been well documented by some of its most notable practitioners. Yet it is because of the enduring specters of death and destruction that war has forever been the ultimate arbiter in conflicts between countries and even civilizations. Perhaps in a future age humanity will evolve beyond armed conflict in foreign policy, but that age is not this one.

In the modern world, even when rival countries are managing their disputes with diplomacy, wealth transfers and wishful thinking, war is lurking in the background as a motivational threat. The fact is, the nations that are serious about organizing for war will be the ones that get to define how their regions and perhaps even the world order are organized.

The proverb tells us, “For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.” A modern corollary might run, “For want of an oiler, the world order was lost.” The Unites States military is running on such a fine line that the temporary loss of a fuel supply ship with no replacement sidelines an entire aircraft carrier battle group, as recently happened in the Middle East. Serious war planners must realize that far more significant losses will come with any war they fail to deter by neglecting capacity today for hypothetical capability in a tomorrow that may be too late.