China has numerical and possibly tech advantage over US military, top Marine says

xizhimen · Nov 5, 2021

China has numerical and possibly tech advantage over US military, top Marine says

by Joel Gehrke

November 04, 2021 08:14 PM

China will not just have more people — it also may have better technology should a war with the United States break out, according to the general who leads the Marine Corps .

The bleak assessment from Marine Corps Commandant David Berger came Thursday amid increasing Chinese belligerence. But Berger did offer some hope that the U.S. might yet have some military advantage against the world's most populous nation.

“It may not be true, but I assume that, in the future, we will not enjoy a technological advantage or a numerical advantage,” Berger said. “So if we don't have those two, then it comes down to the individual intellectual edge that we need, which is what we have to bank on.”

That foreboding has spurred Berger to attempt a revision of the Marine Corps composition and positioning as he anticipates a need for older and more skilled Marines deployed throughout the Indo-Pacific in advance of any conflict. And the outcome of that crisis could depend on whether U.S. forces, up and down the chain of command, can outthink an adversary that has claimed advantages enjoyed by the U.S. in previous major wars.

“You need to be prepared with a capable force, I think, to match what they may throw at you, but the mistake would be matching symmetrically head on head, exclusively,” he said. “We need to find the gaps, create the gaps.”

The ominous appraisal of China’s vast and growing military capacity was echoed by U.S. officials throughout the second day of the Aspen Security Forum. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, for instance, acknowledged the “significant threat” posed by the fact that China has 17 shipyards that are turning out new warships at a pace of 20 per year over the last two years, Defense Department officials are scaling back their ambition to add more than 50 ships to the U.S. Navy.

“It's not just about the number of ships — it's about the capacity that they bring, the capabilities that they bring to the table, the lethality that they bring,” Del Toro said. “we obviously want to be able to build the most modern ships that we can, right, while maintaining some of the legacy ships that we have to be able to fight the conflict should it present itself in the next two to three years, for example.”

China’s military upgrades have been designed with the goal of defeating a “strong enemy” — a term Pentagon officials regard as a “euphemism” for the United States.

“With a force that totals approximately two million personnel in the regular forces, the PLA has sought to modernize its capabilities and improve its proficiencies across all warfare domains so that as a joint force it can conduct the range of land, air, and maritime operations as well as space, counterspace, electronic warfare (EW), and cyber operations,” the Defense Department’s observed this week in an annual China Military Power report. “In 2020, the PLA continued to make progress implementing major structural reforms, fielding modern indigenous systems, building readiness, and strengthening its competency to conduct joint operations.”

Those improvements point to “the challenge of logistics in a contested environment” that could make it difficult for American forces to move from the U.S. to the Indo-Pacific in the event of a conflict and also interrupt U.S. efforts even to provide supplies to the forces already present, according to Berger.

“It could be through cyber, offensive cyber actions, it could be in another way,” Berger said. “But we assume they will try to make it very difficult for us to logistically sustain a very distributed force. We're going to do the same to them. We're not going to make it easy for them. Any adversary, you're gonna make it very difficult for them.”

That assessment of threats accounts in part for Berger’s desire to make a career in the Marine Corps more attractive to Marines who are contemplating a departure from the force.

"We have to keep the talent,” Berger said. “The way that we’ll operate will be much more distributed, much more dispersed, which means each individual leader has to be able to make decisions at a higher level than they do today. In other words, the decisions that a lieutenant colonel makes today, I think, entirely feasible in six, seven, eight years a captain will be making the same decisions. Why? Because they'll have the capability, and we will train them to a higher level and they'll have the repetitions, the maturity, to make them.”