A draft copy of the new National Defense Industrial Strategy says American companies can’t build weapons fast enough to meet global demand.
America’s defense industry is struggling to achieve the kind of speed and responsiveness to stay ahead in a high-tech arms race with competitors such as China, an unreleased draft of a new Pentagon report on the defense industry warns.
The first ever National Defense Industrial Strategy, which is set to be released in the coming weeks by Pentagon acquisition chief William LaPlante, is meant to be a comprehensive look at what the Pentagon needs in order to tap into the expertise of small tech firms, while funding and supporting traditional companies to move faster to develop new tech.
As it stands now, the U.S. defense industrial base “does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale,” according to a draft version of the report, obtained by POLITICO.
China is imitating the US Munro Doctrine, in which the US largely succeeded in excluding the European Great Powers from the Western Hemisphere by the end of the 1800s. China is trying to do the same in their neighbourhood. In this analogy, the South China Sea is China’s Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.
However, it will be exponentially more difficult for China to achieve local hegemony given that they are surrounded by other industrialized nations on home soil who clearly see the threat and don’t want to become subjects of an authoritarian state.
The lesson that the US learned from WW1 and WW2 is that authoritarian states are very dangerous and the US cannot isolate itself from world events.
The lesson the US is learning from “winning” the Cold War is that global hegemony is corrupting and dangerous in terms of domestic politics.