As noted by Wall Street Journal editors, "The most important election in the world this year is no election at all. It's a coronation," one when the Chinese Communist Party anoints President Xi Jinping for a third five-year term and all but guaranteeing an era of confrontation between China and the U.S.
Addressing more than 2,000 delegates in the Great Hall of the People at last Sunday's opening of the Communist Party congress, Xi made it clear that the plan for his country is to challenge and surpass America's dominance as a global powerhouse and revive the Mao Zedong era slogan about the rise of the East and decline of the West."
Although Xi's speech was primarily about domestic policies and goals, he reiterated that Beijing won't renounce the use of force in unifying Taiwan.
Warning of risks, challenges, and "even dangerous storms" ahead, his statement that "The complete unification of the motherland must be realized, and it will be realized," reportedly drew loud applause.
Now granted a perpetual level of autocratic authority unseen since Mao, Xi's words — supported by previous and current actions — must be taken very seriously.
Having already occupied disputed islands in the South China Sea, he is building a military capable of projecting unmatched global power and potentially holding the U.S. homeland vulnerable.
According to a 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength released by The Heritage Foundation, this is occurring as America's combat readiness to successfully intervene grows weaker. This overall rating is down from "marginal" a year earlier, the lowest in the index's nine-year history.
Heritage predicts that worse than not projecting the ability to prevail in two major regional conflicts at once — say one in the Middle East and another in the Korean peninsula — the U.S. military risks not being able to handle even "a single major regional conflict."
Part of this is most recently due to inflation which is hitting Pentagon as well as household and corporate budgets as one-time Trump administration cash infusion following years of Obama military neglect have dried up.
Whereas the Army is shrinking through a loss of $59 billion since 2018 due to flat budgets, inflation and recruiting problems, America's preparedness decline is especially acute in the U.S. Navy and Air Force.
The Heritage report notes that whereas the Navy has been saying for years it needs to grow its fleet to at least 350 ships, it has shown a "persistent inability to arrest and reverse the continued diminution of its fleet," with one analysis showing it has under-delivered on shipbuilding plans by 10 ships a year on average over the past five years.
From 2005 to 2020, the U.S. fleet grew by only five warships, from 291 to 296. During that same period, China's naval fleet expanded from 216 to 360, while also narrowing former U.S. technological advantages in every area from aircraft carrier catapults to long-range missiles.
The Heritage assessment of U.S. air power is even worse, a "very weak" rating. Citing "aging aircraft and very poor pilot training and retention," its report says that the Air Force "would struggle greatly against a peer competitor."
American fighter and bomber forces have contracted to about 40% of 1980 levels, and F-35 buys have slowed even as more modern aircraft are needed to compensate for a reduced naval fleet.
Inadequacies are compounded by a pilot shortage which "continues to plague the service," and the "current generation of fighter pilots, those who have been actively flying for the past seven years, has never experienced a healthy rate of operational flying."
On top of that, munitions inventories "probably would not support a peer-level fight that lasted more than a few weeks," with replacements potentially requiring 24 to 36 months to arrive.
As reported by Seth Jones, a senior vice president and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International studies, nearly two dozen war game iterations concluded that a U.S.-China conflict in the Taiwan Strait would expend all of our air-to-surface standoff missiles and long-range precision-guided antiship missiles within the first week.
Jones argues that if Xi becomes convinced China has an advantage in hard power, he will find a moment to act against Taiwan or some other U.S. strategic interest.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense annual report on China's military, released in November 2021, the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) has shifted strategy in recent years from territorial air defense to "offensive and defensive operations," building a force "capable of projecting airpower at a long range."
China's aviation force, the world's third largest, is estimated to include roughly 2,250 combat aircraft including 1,800 fighters, about 800 of which are considered by the Pentagon to be fourth-generation jets.
Nevertheless, China has weaknesses also, some which, if leveraged, offer advantages to America and our allies. Key among these are their dependencies upon imported energy and food, of which we have plenty of both.
China, the world's largest importer of crude oil and second largest importer of natural gas after Europe, depends heavily upon Russia and Saudi Arabia to fuel its domestic and military economy.
Accordingly, as the Biden administration's war on fossil fuels leaves America ironically begging for oil from OPEC+, Venezuela, and even Iran, it further makes no sense to increase U.S. dependence upon China for rare earth materials needed to replace gasoline vehicles with more costly electric plug-in types subsidized by American taxpayers.
Draining the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to reduce pump price escalation ahead of the congressional midterm elections further adds to national security risks.
China, which also imports many tens of millions of tons of grains annually to support its enormous population, has been snapping up vast areas of American farmland along with purchasing major agribusinesses such as pork processing giant Smithfield Foods.
According to the Agricultural Department, by the start of 2020, Chinese companies — many connected with the government — controlled about 192,000 agricultural acres in the U.S., worth $1.9 billion, including Fufeng USA, an American subsidiary which recently acquired 300 acres in North Dakota located roughly 20 minutes from an Air Force base where advanced drone fleets are tested.
Above all, America's greatest defense arsenal against China is to leverage our free enterprise economic and innovative private sector powerhouse against the repressive and stagnant Communist Party ideology inculcated by Xi's recent coronation.
Urgently, America's recent politically self-inflicted weaknesses are fixable, making the upcoming midterm elections perhaps the most consequential in modern history.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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