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U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Saturday that the U.S. is at a critical juncture with China and needs military power to ensure that U.S. values, not Beijing’s, set global norms in the 21st century.
Austin’s speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum capped off a week for the Pentagon focused directly on China’s rise and what that might mean for America’s place in the world.
On Monday, it released an annual China security report that warned Beijing could have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, but did not spell out how China would seek to use them.
Austin was on hand Friday in a dramatic nighttime display as the public got their first look at the B-21 Raider, the military’s newest and highly secretive stealth nuclear bomber, designed to best deal with Rapidly developing cyber, space and nuclear power Beijing’s prowess.
Austin said on Saturday that China “is the only country that has the will, and increasingly the ability, to reshape its regional and international order to suit its authoritarian preferences.” “So let me be clear: we’re not going to let that happen.”
The Pentagon is also concerned about Russia and remains committed to arming Ukraine while avoiding escalation of the conflict into a U.S.-Moscow war, he said at a forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
“We’re not going to get drawn into Putin’s wars,” Austin said.
“The coming years will define the terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China. They will shape the future of European security,” Austin said. “They will decide whether our children and grandchildren inherit a world of open rules and rights – or whether they face emboldened dictators who seek to rule by force and fear.”
Still, of the two nuclear threats, China remains the greater risk, Austin said.
In response to this growth, “we’ve adjusted our budget like never before to meet China’s challenges,” Austin said. “In our imperfect world, deterrence does come from strength.”
The bomber is part of an ongoing overhaul of the nuclear trinity that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost $1.2 trillion through 2046.
It includes the Raider as the backbone of the Trinity’s future air spur, but it also requires the modernization of the nation’s silo-launched nuclear ICBMs and its fleet of nuclear submarines.
The Department of Defense, which has the largest discretionary budget of any federal agency, could receive as much as $847 billion in the 2023 budget if Congress passes the current appropriations bill before the end of this legislative session.
However, defense advocates argue that modernizing and keeping up with China is still not enough because most of the spending is on military personnel. The CBO estimates that about a quarter of the defense budget is spent on personnel costs such as salaries, health care and retirement accounts.
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