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New acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper is bad news for China

By Tom Rogan

“Cannon to the right of them / Cannon to the left of them / Cannon in front of them / Volley’ed and thundered.”
— Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”

Current Secretary of the Army and newly announced acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper is delivering a similar message of deterrent threat to China. That makes him well-placed to sustain the American-led international order in the 21st century.

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Like Patrick Shanahan, the man he’ll replace, Esper is a former defense contractor rather than a career military officer à la Jim Mattis. But like both Mattis and Shanahan, Esper appears ready to confront China’s threat. Positively referencing American alliances at the Atlantic Council in May, Esper observed,

We need to modernize together. And we need to build those capabilities. Because when we fight as a coalition we’re far, far more likely to have success … the Pacific is a vast area covered by a lot of water. But it depends where the fight ends up. We talk about fighting in the first island chain or the second, but who knows where the first scrap if it happens, and let’s hope it doesn’t, with the Chinese ends up. But when we think about it we think about some of the Army’s modernization priorities. So you think about number one for us: long-range precision fires.

Esper continued,

Critical to the fight in Europe, but will also be particularly critical in the Asia-Pacific where we can employ weapons that hundreds of miles, and in some cases over a thousand miles using hypersonics. And really not only take care of what we need to do army-to-army but really support the Navy and Air Force. We can support the Air Force with long range fires by suppressing enemy air defenses, by taking out enemy airfields, and with the navy the same thing: We can hold at bay, [surface-to-air missile] sites. We can also hold at bay an enemy’s navy.

Esper nails it here.

Ensuring America’s closest allies are more ably equipped to fight alongside us will deter China and Russia. But Esper also rightly recognizes the new exigency of the long-range fight. When he refers to “precision fires,” he is talking about missile strike capabilities. And his explanation of the need for these capabilities is well put. Defeating China in any Pacific war will require knocking out the Chinese military infrastructure on its constructed islands (what Esper refers to with “island chains”) in the South China Sea. But if the U.S. Army can smash those island strongholds in advance of U.S. carrier groups and Air Force bombers, the Navy and Air Force will be able to operate at lower risk in face of China’s ballistic missile forces, air force, and navy. This is the means to victory in a fight that, unfortunately, is likely to someday soon to occur.

But it’s not just about China.

Long-range artillery and missile strike capabilities will also enable NATO to gut a Russian combined arms offensive into Europe. Russian blitzkrieg strategy is focused on rapid land seizure covered by high-capability air defense strongholds. But if the Army can turn those air defense units to dust, the Air Force can then wreck Russian ground units.

More of this please, Mr. Esper. (Also more research into unexplained aerial phenomena, please.)

Anyway, you can watch Esper’s comments below.

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