Op-Eds

Originally published in The Washington Times. 

We hear often that, in order to bolster the credibility of U.S. deterrence against China’s aggression in the Pacific, we must urgently get to work restoring America’s defense industrial base. Absent from the discussion du jour is that maintaining deterrence toward China — that is, holding Beijing’s military aggression in check — will require more than getting factory assembly lines up and running again, as we did during World War II and the Cold War.

In fact, it will require a whole-of-government approach as well as enhanced cooperation and integration between the U.S. and its allies.

After all, the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and throughout the Middle East have taught us that victory on today’s battlefield will not be determined by who has the greatest weapons systems or stockpiles. It will be determined by the side that can produce the necessary weapons quickly and exercise command and control effectively to execute movement and maneuver. Therefore, it all comes down to who has the best access to accurate, timely information, made available by artificial intelligence systems and drone technology on the modern battlefield.

In their recent book, “The Arsenal of Democracy,” authors Eyck Freymann and Harry Halem argue that it will require the sustained will — what 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz termed one of the essential factors to victory in war — among the American people and political establishment to take the necessary steps to prevent war (and to win a war if deterrence fails). Congress certainly has a role to play in building on this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which took steps to reform our outdated acquisitions process, but a significant amount of work remains.

Over the past three decades, the U.S. defense industrial base has been neglected. Although there is no single reason for this, the combination of postwar restructuring in the 1990s and the U.S. military’s strategic shift to be able to fight low-intensity conflicts during the global war on terrorism has fundamentally changed how and which weapons systems are produced, as well as how the American warfighter is equipped and fights.

The numbers at face value are concerning. For example, the number of naval shipyards in use by China sits at 35, while the U.S. has only four. The problem neither starts nor ends with the size of our Navy or our capacity to repair and produce new ships. A hot conflict in the Indo-Pacific will certainly be determined by the impact of hypersonic missile technology, in which U.S. adversaries such as China and Russia have invested heavily in recent years, as well as the adoption and effectiveness of drone and artificial intelligence systems.

It’s clear, then, that any system that can deliver key information when it’s needed will play a major role in deterring China. Thankfully, the U.S. free market is capable of delivering groundbreaking systems like these into the hands of the warfighter, but the state of affairs when it comes to the Department of Defense’s acquisitions process remains a major hang-up.

The degree of bureaucratic red tape and out-of-date processes makes it difficult for U.S. startups to navigate the “valley of death” (the phase of the acquisitions process between prototyping and successful procurement). U.S. Indo-Pacific Command currently relies on the Pacific Deterrence Initiative to address the logistics and supply-line problems inherent to maintaining deterrence against CCP saber rattling, but it has become fragmented and bogged down because of a lack of focus. We should be considering a refocus on this second track to maintain deterrence by keeping our forces in the region well-supplied and well aware.

At the same time, we need to reevaluate how we can test drone systems on the homefront. Outdated Federal Aviation Administration regulations have hampered our ability to train with and test cutting-edge drone and counter-drone technology that could prove key to success. This will require consensus among U.S. policymakers and a unified vision between federal regulators and Congress to achieve a breakthrough.

Meanwhile, we must also look toward greater integration with our allies in the Indo-Pacific, particularly Australia, Japan and South Korea. Although the combined forces of the U.S. and our democratic allies in the Indo-Pacific afford us some parity in terms of overall force deployment against the PLA, we will not be able to fight a sustained conflict if we aren’t better integrated. We must be better integrated in terms of overall strategy and in terms of supply chains and the key resources, such as rare earth minerals, necessary to sustain a war effort.

Deterrence doesn’t require only producing large-scale weapon systems such as ships and planes. It also means hardening our supply chains and restoring our defense industrial base to get the modern weapons systems we need in the right place and in a timely manner. The first step we could take as a nation is to recognize how dire a threat is posed, having allowed our defense industrial base to languish. This means building a bipartisan consensus that puts U.S. national security, as well as global peace and stability, front and center.

Rep. Pat Fallon represents Texas’ 4th Congressional District. He is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.