While the U.S. military goes woke, the Chinese military is rapidly preparing for the next major war.
Major General Cameron Holt, who serves as deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, made the startling declaration that China is significantly surpassing America in the acquisition of new military equipment.
According to The Drive, Holt, during a speech in San Diego, said Beijing is obtaining equipment with “five to six times” greater speed than the United States.
In addition, China is apparently spending far less to acquire its equipment than America.
“In purchasing power parity, they spend about one dollar to our 20 dollars to get to the same capability,” The Drive quoted Holt as saying. “We are going to lose if we can’t figure out how to drop the cost and increase the speed in our defense supply chains.”
Holt was speaking at the Government Contracting Pricing Summit. He will soon step down from his current position, under which he is tasked with supervising the purchase of new weapons systems and providing logistics and operational support.
Holt pointed to several factors he claimed are setting America back, including the “slow and stodgy” budgetary framework that funds the acquisition of new equipment. But he argued that the resourcing system is the biggest issue.
“If we don’t change our resourcing system, none of the rest of it matters,” said Holt, adding, “If you just change the execution year flexibilities and modernize Congress’s oversight of it to be more patient.”
The Drive summarized Holt’s diagnosis of the problems with the resourcing system and his proposed solution:
The current model, however, has delays more or less built into it from the start, with a painfully slow process of getting budgets signed off for each phase of a program, from writing up a formal requirement all the way to sustainment and lifecycle costs. This means that, at any stage in a given program, those that control the budgets can intervene and potentially entirely change its direction — and speed — based on how they think funds should be allocated. So even if a weapons program, for example, makes rapid progress in its early stages, funding decisions further down the line can actually stop it from reaching the troops as quickly as it could.
And even if Congress is happy to allocate a certain amount of funding to a new program, the Pentagon retains the ability to move funds around, possibly hindering the potential of promising new developments in favor of continuing to throw money at legacy programs.
Instead, Holt advocates what he described as the “cash flow” model, which includes provision for some Pentagon movement of funds, but which seeks to ensure Congress retains more oversight over this process and has the option to intervene in a more timely manner.
For Holt, the current system served the country well during the Cold War but is ill-adapted to today’s fast-moving technological world.
The New American has reported on the growing ascendance of Communist China. According to U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Admiral John C. Aquilino, Beijing has fully militarized at least three of several islands in the disputed South China Sea.
The situation hasn’t been helped by America’s current leadership. Joe Biden’s decision making notoriously tends to empower China’s interests while weakening America’s.
In just one example from recent days, Biden sold a million barrels of oil from the nation’s strategic reserves to a Chinese state-owned firm where Hunter Biden is an investor.
OP India notes of Sinopec, the firm in question:
The Bidens and Sinopec have an older relationship. The private equity company BHR Partners was co-founded in 2013 by Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden. BHR purchased a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec Marketing in 2015. In 2017, Biden purchased a ten per cent stake in BHR through an LLC named Skaneateles, in which he is a lone owner.
But why should we worry about China outpacing us in weapons acquisition when we’re winning the war of social justice? While Beijing has focused on getting its armed forces combat-ready, our political class has prioritized using the military to fund abortions and “gender reassignment” and to get to the bottom of “white rage.”
If anything, given the tense global climate and the rate at which our enemies are leaving us behind, our military would do well to have more “rage” and less of whatever this is.
