We Must Adequately Fund the Military Tech Race Against China

Original article here

Over the last several days, the United States Congress has spent much time in committee hearings outlining the importance of curtailing China’s growing technology sector.

Members are correct to worry about how China continues using artificial intelligence, the “connected” cars it produces, and the backdoors it imposes in its tech exports to get ahead of the United States. It utilizes all this data and intelligence to not only best America’s product offerings in the economic space but also to rival its military.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is doing an alarmingly successful job of modernizing its defense industry, an initiative it plans to complete by 2035. It continues to increase defense spending by 7 percent annually and is ramping up production of critical weapons artillery and supplies, much of which it is building with stolen U.S. intellectual property. China’s navy has already become the largest in the world, and many of its other service branches continue to grow massively in size and scope.

While Congress is acting wisely by exploring various sanction and divestment efforts to slow the growth of China’s tech dominance, these new congressional proposals won’t do much if the United States doesn’t increase the trajectory of its own military innovation.

The truth is that the U.S. military isn’t building and creating as much as it used to. This is especially true of the U.S. Air Force, which has complained about Congress’ spending caps preventing it from retaining its status as the mightiest capable and lethal in the world.

While this funding noose on the military’s innovation engine has been a problem ever since President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2023 limited military spending, the situation has gotten especially “real” in recent weeks.

Deborah Lee James and Whitten Peters, the respective former Secretaries of the U.S. Air Force for the Obama and Trump administrations, recently expressed concern about how funding has gotten so dry that the Air Force is even considering gutting or watering down its longtime plans to keep up with the Chinese Air Force’s new tech plans.

With this “Next Generation Air Dominance” (NGAD) air superiority initiative, the U.S. is supposed to build a new sixth-generation fighter system (including a new fighter aircraft and other manned and unmanned aerial vehicles) that will be more efficient than the one China plans on finalizing by 2035. America’s defense brass has been clear that not building this system—in other words, letting China build its own sixth-generation system unchallenged—would effectively cede U.S. air superiority to the People’s Liberation Army.

Although the Air Force understands the importance of the program, it seems that it might be flirting with the idea of watering it down due to shrinking budgetary resources.

But without the NGAD, the Air Force would have to rely even more on the F-35, which even laymen who read the newspaper know is essentially a flaming pile of garbage with wings.

Consider this information, courtesy of the Project on Government Oversight:

The F-35 program officially began on October 26, 2001, when Lockheed Martin received the coveted development contract. That day was more than 22 years ago. The costs of the program through its anticipated lifespan have risen $1.7 trillion since then. What the American people have so far received for that enormous financial commitment is an aircraft program where less than a third of the jets are capable of performing their combat role according to multiple government source.

Just the tool we need to win the tech war against China.

It’s time to end this fool’s errand. The U.S. cannot protect itself from China’s progress in military technology through divestment efforts alone. It also needs to produce innovations at a better cadence than China. If we do anything less, we might as well throw up a white flag to our red friends in Eastern Asia.

Paul Boardman is chairman of the Decouple China PAC.