The Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-air missile systems are both man portable. Both have been used to devastating effect by Ukraine against Russian forces.
Unfortunately, Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin say it will take years to replenish stocks of these weapons that are rapidly being depleted as the United States resupplies Ukraine. Congress has appropriated funds for that replenishment, but the Pentagon is dragging its feet with replenishment orders. Still, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin must share in the blame for not preserving a reserve of parts necessary for the construction of new systems. Considering the likely value of Stingers to the Marine Corps in any future war with China, this readiness failure is inexcusable.
Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the military-industrial complex iceberg. Where it matters most — in equipping the U.S. military with the tools that it needs to win a war with China today, tomorrow, or in the next five to 10 years — the military-industrial complex is failing.
Most of the blame must fall on the Pentagon. As China devotes resources to winning a war on the 10-year horizon, the Pentagon continues to fetishize winning the unknown war 20, 30, and 40 years from now. The risk of putting such a heavy emphasis on longer-term procurement is clear. Just look at the war in Ukraine. Even as they correctly predicted President Vladimir Putin’s February invasion of Ukraine, most U.S. defense analysts assumed Russia would secure a rapid victory. They assumed that the mass of Russian air and armor would trample Ukrainian resistance. They failed to predict how highly mobile Ukrainian forces armed with light anti-tank and anti-air weaponry would flip the script on Russia, turning its lumbering combat power into a mass of vulnerabilities. Predicting the form of future wars is a dangerous game.
We must embrace the urgency of now.
After all, China’s military procurement, training, and strategy are aimed to flip the script against the U.S. military. Facing a rising likelihood of conflict with the U.S. over freedom of navigation and/or Taiwan, China has invested vast sums of money in figuring out how to outmaneuver U.S. military advantages. Unfortunately, too few senior officers and civilian officials in the Pentagon and the military-industrial base appear to have received the message.
Consider the F-35 fighter jet.
Produced by Lockheed Martin, the jet’s development has seen vast cost overruns and an extraordinary degree of mismanagement. Few, if any, officials have paid a career price for these failings — yet the F-35 is a highly advanced fighter jet. Its stealth frame allows aircrews to hide from the enemy while sharing vast amounts of targeting and intelligence data with other allied forces. For NATO, the F-35 is ideal, allowing a near symbiotic alignment of different air forces from many different nations. Facing China, however, which must be the preeminent U.S. national security concern, the F-35 comes with problems that the People’s Liberation Army has figured out how to exploit.
Put simply, the PLA has decided that the best way to deal with the stealthy threat posed by the F-35 is to keep it away from the fight. That means targeting the Navy’s aircraft carrier fleets with swarms of long-range anti-ship ballistic missiles, each enabled by redundant satellite links. At a minimum, this means the Navy will have to keep its carriers at thousands of kilometers from the front line fight, forcing the F-35s to fly a long way to enter and remain in that fight. Scholars such as Bryan Clark and Timothy Walton have a new report out suggesting ways the Navy might address this challenge, such as by reforming carrier air wings to center on strike aircraft and refueler drones versus a broader portfolio of aircraft. But it remains unclear whether the Navy bureaucracy will tolerate such revolutionary thinking (though the submarine force offers a little hope).
Considering the Navy’s enduring ship-building debacle, revolutionary reform seems unlikely. The major shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls saw cost overruns of nearly $15 billion and disastrous delays in its construction of the inaugural Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier. The Navy suggests that the Ford class is now ready to roll, even producing videos to that literal effect. We’ll see.
Regardless, China has avoided America’s mistakes. While the PLA produces vast stockpiles of fighter jets, bombers, missiles, and excellent air defense warships, such as its Type 055 Renhai class, the U.S. continues to produce ships too slowly, too expensively, and with far too little regard for what is actually needed to win. The recent record of procurement choices based on expectations of future wars is hardly inspiring.
Take the disastrous Zumwalt-class destroyer, the three vessels of which cost around $5 billion each. While construction of new vessels has been suspended, Raytheon still says that via the Zumwalt class, “the company is bringing the Navy’s ship requirements to life.” Give me a break. This statement only makes sense if the “Navy’s ship requirements” are defined as “something utterly unaffordable, under-armed, but easily able to become a PLA-induced coral reef.”
Again, where is the accountability? The Navy and military-industrial complex thought that a small stealth ship full of advanced computers would be cool. But their misjudgment starved funds from older and cheaper, but proven, warships such as the Arleigh Burke class. A similar tale applies to the disastrous story of the Independence- and Freedom-class littoral combat ships, most of which seem to face reserve duty or decommissioning. More billions lost.
Such wasteful failures aren’t always the rule. The Air Force, for example, deserves credit for forcing Boeing to pay for billions of dollars in cost overruns as it develops a new refueler aircraft. But other problems abound. Why couldn’t the U.S. military’s two future fighter jet development programs, the Navy’s F/A-XX program and the Air Force’s NGAD program, be combined into a single program? The increasing potency of long-range PLA sensors and weapons means both the Navy and Air Force need basically similar things from their next-generation fighter aircraft: stealth, long range, advanced data systems, and heavy weapons load-outs (though drone wingmen may be used to offset the weapons need). Duplication is a waste of money.
Some cost overruns are worse than others, however. Raytheon, for example, faces a federal criminal investigation into price-gouging the government on numerous lucrative contracts. But just as senior military officers deserve promotion and reward for delivering their subordinates what’s needed now and at value for the taxpayers, they must be prevented from retiring only to then join defense contractors and use their influence to ensure the contractors’ interests come first. The top line is that defense contractors need more money to scale up what they are doing right and more penalties for their failings.
Where the process works by delivering things that are needed to achieve a war-fighting advantage that can be scaled, the military-industrial complex sometimes thrives. Raytheon makes exceptionally good naval radar systems, such as its new SPY-6 product. The development of laser and longer-range anti-ship missiles is also progressing apace. Again, however, the Pentagon has failed to throw sufficient funds at Lockheed Martin in order to extend the range and scaled production of its excellent JASSM and LRASM long-range anti-surface and anti-ship missile systems. These will be absolutely critical in any war with China.
Top line: The arms-supply shortages flowing from Ukraine are only the tip of the iceberg. We should learn lessons before the PLA iceberg hits us.
