The Real Missile Gap
By Seth Cropsey
July 11, 2023
DoD photo by John Hamilton
The U.S. surface fleet is as essential to defeating China in a West Pacific war as it is vulnerable to the higher end of adversary capabilities. A combination of solutions is needed, both in the short-term and over time, to ensure the fleet’s operational capacity. To reinvest in a resilient, survivable fleet, the Navy should concurrently acquire proposed new counter-hypersonic capabilities like the Compact Agile Interceptor and gain multi-mission advantage by procuring the navalized Patriot PAC-3 MSE, particularly in light of defense industrial base limitations and the need to ensure the U.S. surface fleet retains multiple capacities.
The U.S. Navy is in the midst of a long-term readiness crisis that began around a decade ago. A combination of budget cuts, bureaucratic bickering, and a dearth of political skill has stressed the Navy perilously. A fleet too small for its current requirements is asked to take the lead in deterring or perhaps contesting a near-peer competitor, the Chinese Communist Party’s steadily advancing People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The PLA fields precisely the capabilities needed to disrupt the modern American way of war. The U.S. follows a textbook formula during large-scale military operations: it builds up forces in-theater in an allied country’s territory to ensure secure logistics, stages a large-scale scripted air campaign to disrupt and degrade enemy forces, and then executes a ground assault once the battlefield has been prepared. This worked for the U.S. in 1991, 2001, and 2003. It arguably works again in Ukraine. If it so wished, the U.S. can transfer to Ukraine any manner of advanced weapons, while Russia, for fear of escalation and lack of a long-range reconnaissance-strike complex, can do little to disrupt this.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/07/11/the_real_missile_gap_965286.html
