Beijing is a pacing threat to the United States largely thanks to its interlinked industrial base. While Capitol Hill works to secure US supply chains for economic competition, the Pentagon needs to leverage America’s remaining advantages to maintain deterrence.

How Do We Get There?

1. Use America’s free-market advantage to defeat China on tech.
2. Support domestic critical industries like rare earth minerals.
3. Build a more cost-effective military that mitigates China’s advantages.

Re: Building Defense is a limited series that highlights Hudson’s policy recommendations for revitalizing the US defense industrial base for great power competition.

Sketching Out the Details

1. Recognize the dangers of Chinese high-tech dominance and build a free-market coalition to defeat it.

America and its allies have the tools to build a shared software-defined manufacturing ecosystem backed by a free-world technology stack [the technologies that make up a system]. This is the cornerstone of a safer and more prosperous US-led coalition, one that geopolitical swing states will want to join. If we fail, China’s totalitarian technology stack will flourish, ushering in a more fractured and hostile world. In that case, Americans may view their iPhones and car batteries the way Hezbollah operatives now see their pagers.

Read Mike Gallagher’s op-ed “Exploding Pagers and the Tech Race with China.”

2. James Litinsky: Rebuild American critical industries to prevent Chinese supply chain dominance.

We need to have a supply chain for these industries from non–foreign entities of concern, or allied nations, or whatever the right nomenclature is so that this supply chain is forced from the beginning to develop. To develop and be broad. We cannot lose this supply chain. And right now, I think 90 plus percent of the drones . . . are made in China. Or the stuff for our military is made in China. Why wouldn’t we solve this problem now? Especially when right now it’s just an acute national security issue. As it becomes a bigger, broader, commercial national security issue, it becomes virtually impossible to solve. But again, if we do it now, there’s a higher likelihood that we will have the downstream trillions of dollars of market cap here as opposed to dominating there.

Watch the event, read the transcript, or listen to Mike Gallagher’s conversation with Litinsky, “Competing with China on Critical Minerals.”

3. Overcome insufficient defense budgets and China’s geographical advantages to restore deterrence.

The Air Force’s diminished fighter force now lacks the ability to sustain operations at scale over the vast dimensions of the Indo-Pacific and is increasingly out-sticked by China’s long-range air-to-air kill chains. And since the same kill chains will force the Air Force’s aerial refueling tankers to operate further from the fight, the fighter aircraft they support may not be able to reach engagement areas that are located around the Taiwan Strait or spend much time once there. Extending the reach and mission endurance of the Air Force’s fighters will be a key to resolving these shortfalls and creating the affordable mass that is needed to deter, and if necessary, defeat Chinese aggression. This will require the service to acquire cost-effective crewed and uncrewed combat systems and weapons—and do so in a time of compressed budgets.

Read Timothy A. Walton’s op-ed “Four Solutions for Addressing the Air Force’s Distance Anxiety.”

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.

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