Brian Kerg
The United States desperately needs to plan for a long war in the Indo-Pacific region.
A troubling gap exists between US industrial capacity and the production requirements to sustain and win a war with China. While such assessments generally focus on shipbuilding due to the maritime focus of conflict scenarios, the same disparity exists in military platforms across all domains of warfare, such as aircraft, armor, ground-based air defense systems, and others. Defense analysis on these myriad gaps is abundant, but most evaluations are piecemeal in nature, focusing only on a single platform or domain, rather than taking a holistic approach to the problem.
This disjointed assessment is compounded by the lack of a rigorous analysis of the wartime manpower requirements to operate new platforms. Producing the ships, aircraft, and fighting vehicles to sustain a war against China—which would almost certainly be protracted—isn’t enough. The platforms must also be manned and supported. A guided missile destroyer, for example, requires a crew of more than 300 sailors. A single squadron of F-35B Joint Strike Fighters requires hundreds of maintainers, air controllers, fuelers, and other support personnel to remain operational. And while opening phases of a war with China would predominantly be an air and maritime fight involving ships, aircraft, and precision munitions, a long conflict fought for years would likely require nearly a hundred divisions of ground and amphibious forces from the US Army and Marine Corps.
No comments:
Post a Comment