“China, China, China,” said acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to Pentagon leaders at a meeting regarding defense strategy in January, signaling a shift from the U.S. fighting insurgencies in Middle East to targeting an encroaching global superpower. Shanahan’s summary tells the tale of what a majority of the Defense Department’s 2020 budget will be dedicated towards.
The Pentagon head said the eastern nation “is aggressively modernizing its military, systematically stealing science and technology, and seeking military advantage through a strategy of military-civil fusion,” as reported by AP.
Therefore, the Pentagon’s proposed $718 billion budget is designed with countering China’s military momentum in mind.
In a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, however, much more time was dedicated towards hashing out the details of President Donald Trump’s proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall, which is being sought via a contentious national emergency declaration.
Regardless, the Pentagon is looking to spend around $25 billion on nuclear weapons in fiscal year 2020 in the effort to remain ahead of China’s small, but growing arsenal. Shanahan explained that China is currently developing a long-range nuclear bomber that would give the nation a capability that has been limited to just the U.S. and Russia regarding a three-prong approach to battle with land, air, and sea-based nuclear weapons.
The acting Defense Secretary also listed other Chinese military advancements that the U.S. must take seriously: hypersonic missiles, space-based weaponry, cyberattacks, and militarizing land features in the South China Sea.
This could be one of the explanations behind the early retirement of the USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier more than 20 years ahead of schedule. The Pentagon announced that the carrier’s mid-life refueling and overhaul, scheduled for 2024, may be cancelled and the ship instead retired as a cost-saving measure.
Although the fate of the carrier’s retirement is uncertain, if it were to be decommissioned, it would leave the carrier fleet at 10 ships, one below the legally-mandated level, and two below President Trump’s promise to increase the carrier fleet to 12.
Though, where the U.S. military will save money on naval warfare capabilities, they will spend even more on materiel support for operations in space. This includes designing and manufacturing measures defending U.S. and allied satellites against a potential Chinese attack, and building hypersonic missiles to stay ahead of similar measures developed by both China and Russia, shifting focus away from potentially less relevant assets in future armed conflicts.