China’s defense industry production is growing at an incredible speed, while the sector in the United States does not seem to be keeping up.
If there is bipartisan consensus on anything in America, it is the need to restrain China’s great power ambitions. The United States is focusing on the economic and technological aspects of competition – but the military aspect is also there.
Given China’s economic problems – high youth unemployment, a problematic real estate market, increased state debt, an aging society, and lower-than-expected growth – researchers and policymakers hope that Beijing will be forced to limit its defense expenditures. Others go as far as to overestimate the Chinese army, claiming that it will not challenge U.S. hegemony in the near future – wrote Seth G. Jones, head of the security policy division at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, in an analysis published on the pages of Foreign Affairs, known as the mouthpiece of the deep state.
➽ China Is Ready for War: And Thanks to a Crumbling Defense Industrial Base, America Is Not
However, these assessments do not take into account how much China’s defense industrial base is growing.
- Despite economic challenges, the country’s defense spending is growing exponentially.
- China is developing weapon systems to compete with U.S. deterrent capabilities.
- The Asian country has caught up with the United States in terms of mass-produced and industrial-made weapons capabilities.
It is already leading in some areas:
it has become the world’s largest shipbuilder, with a capacity roughly 230 times that of the United States.
- Between 2021 and early 2024, China’s defense industry produced more than 400 modern fighter jets and 20 large warships,
- doubled the country’s nuclear warhead arsenal, and
- more than doubled the stockpile of ballistic and cruise missiles.
- During the same period, China increased satellite launches by 50%.
- The country now acquires weapon systems five to six times faster than the United States.
John Aquilino, former commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, called this military expansion “the most extensive and rapid since World War II.”
🔴 China’s defense industry is now a military heavyweight, and the U.S. defense industrial base cannot keep pace with it.
The American system lacks the capacity and flexibility to allow the military to deter China – and if a conflict breaks out, a war in the Indo-Pacific region.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has made it clear that he wants to create a world-class military.
A key part of this process is the establishment of a defense industrial base capable of producing the hardware (such as ships, aircraft, tanks, and missiles) and software (such as command, control, communication, and intelligence technology and systems) needed for military forces.
In the past decade, China has become a serious competitor to the United States in weapon production.
❗ China’s huge state-owned companies serve as the engine of production, tasked with developing and building the country’s weapon systems.
❗ Four of the world’s top ten defense-producing companies are Chinese.
❗ This is a drastic change from a decade ago, when not a single Chinese company made it onto the list of the world’s top one hundred defense industry companies.
- Chinese defense companies now rival American giants in size and production capacity, such as Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon), Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.
It is not just the volume of defense industry production that is increasing.
Beijing has also improved its research, development, and procurement processes, and alongside hardware, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has built a digital architecture to help coordinate command, control, and communication networks in wartime.
China’s defense developments pose a serious threat to the United States, as well as its allies and partners, including Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan.
China has thousands of missiles, some of which can reach U.S. soil. Assessing Chinese military capabilities, Frank Kendall III, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force, even remarked:
“China is preparing for war, specifically a war against the United States”.
❌ In contrast, the U.S. military does not have enough ammunition and other supplies for a protracted war against China in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, or the East China Sea.
- In simulated exercises of conflicts arising in the Taiwan Strait, the United States typically depletes its stockpile of long-range anti-ship missiles in the first week.
These weapons would be critical in an actual war as they could strike beyond the range of Chinese air defenses.
The U.S. defense industrial base currently lacks the flexibility to make up for these shortcomings.
In the United States, there is an anachronistic procurement system that is much better suited to the calm pace of peacetime than the urgency of wartime.
As a 2009 study by the U.S. Department of Defense bluntly put it:
“Large defense programs still take ten or more years to complete, despite producing fewer units than planned and often at two to three times the planned cost.”
The fragility of defense industrial supply chains poses an additional problem. American defense companies produce limited quantities of key components, such as solid rocket engines, processor units, or castings
❗ The situation is complicated by China’s domination of the world’s battery supply chains and monopoly on several types of raw materials used in the defense sector – such as certain ferrous and non-ferrous metals, specialty metals, and industrial minerals.
⛔ If tensions escalate or war breaks out, China could cut off U.S. access to these materials, undermining American manufacturing capabilities for night vision goggles, tanks, and other defense equipment.
The biggest challenge is the workforce. The American labor market is not able to provide enough workers with the necessary skills for defense production. The problem is particularly acute in shipyards, where there is a shortage of engineers, electricians, pipefitters, shipbuilders, and metalworkers. In 2024, the U.S. Navy announced that the first Constellation-class guided frigate would be delayed by at least a year due to labor shortages.
The author also points out that a year before the United States entered World War II due to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt urged his fellow citizens to
“build everything we need to boost the military as quickly as possible.”
