A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
“It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones. And it traces a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power,” the New York Times editorial said.
Photo: Reuters
The editorial said that US dominance in the Pacific two decades ago ensured its capability to defend Taiwan, as China had a small missile arsenal in 2005, which limited its threat to US forces.
Twenty years later, China boasts of missile capabilities that have the potential to destroy advanced US weapons before they come near Taiwan, the editorial said.
Newer forms of technology, doctrines and strategies show that they have become more effective against large conventional forces, with the editorial citing the Ukraine war, where Ukraine has used uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) to neutralize the Russian Black Sea Fleet, as well as the Ukrainian drone strikes damaging and destroying many of Russia’s heavy bomber fleet.
The editorial contrasted the costs of drone manufacturing in eastern Ukraine, “typically cost a few hundred dollars to make,” to the price to build the latest Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier at US$13 billion, and said that while aircraft carriers are superb against relatively weak countries such as Venezuela, they are vulnerable to other forms of attacks, such as hypersonic missiles.
Sweden’s Gotland-class diesel-powered submarine, in a 2005 war game, had landed multiple torpedo strikes against a US Nimitz-class carrier, which would have hypothetically sunk the carrier, the editorial said.
The editorial asked why successive US administrations adhered to the doctrine of relying on its fleet of super carriers and attendant carrier strike groups (CSGs), when drones, threats to undersea cables and Chinese malware seemed to define new ways of war.
Weapons procurement was limited to five major companies, the entrenched mindset of military commanders prevented innovation, and the prevailing view was that “bespoke, complex and wildly expensive” platforms were always superior, the editorial said.
Such a mentality meant the military was unable to obtain rapidly produced equipment in bulk, it said.
The US defense industry’s capability to produce artillery shells, ships, and aircraft at scale and speed has been lost, putting the US in danger of running out of essential munitions in a war against China, it added.
US defense spending should not focus on enormous new budgets, but instead should be more judicious in its investments, it said, warning that “traditional symbols of might risks shortchanging the true sources of American strength: relentless innovation, rapid adaptability and a willingness to discard old assumptions.”
The report was prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and was delivered to top White House officials in the past year.
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