Key members of the Trump administration are shaping to confront China in the South China Sea. Last month Donald Trump tweeted: “Did China ask us if it was OK … to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” Trump is clearly irritated by Beijing’s behaviour and senior members of Trump’s team are also expressing deep concerns.
Work would add to the list of Marines in Trump’s administration. A retired colonel, he served 27 years as a field artillery officer before leaving active duty in 2001. He became an influential Washington defense analyst, serving as a senior official with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Of President-elect Trump’s tweets since winning the election, the one drawing the greatest criticism may well be his comment last week that the United States “must strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” The next day, his critics went downright ballistic when the president-elect reportedly made the off-camera statement: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” The partisans at the Ploughshares Fund and their paid-for “echo-chamber” colleagues across the disarmament community
The Defense Department defines readiness as the military’s ability to execute the national security strategy of the United States. By that standard, the Navy has continued to satisfy most of the maritime force requirements of combatant commanders. However, meeting those demands in the face of a shrinking fleet has resulted in deferred maintenance, aging ships, and worn out personnel. Without significant changes to the fleet’s size, operational tempo (OPTEMPO), or maintenance budget, the Navy will be at risk of suffering a precipitous drop in readiness in the years to come.
It also helps fund continual improvements to keep up with the threat, said retired Navy submariner and strategist Cdr. Bryan Clark. “Spreading out the R&D spending over the entire program also implies the Navy believes it will continue doing R&D throughout [Ohio Replacement Program] construction,” Clark said. “Since the program will take about 15 years to build, it is likely new threats and capabilities will emerge, [and] sustaining robust R&D investment throughout the program will enable the Navy to incorporate new technologies into the ship, which could then be backfitted into completed SSBNs.”
A report released last month by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) calls for the incoming Trump administration to initiate a major escalation of the US confrontation with China over the South China Sea. It is written by Ross Babbage, a former top-level Australian defence and intelligence official. Entitled “Countering China’s Adventurism in the South China Sea,” the report is highly critical of the “failure” of the Obama administration “to counter China’s territorial expansion in the South China Sea.” It speaks on behalf of militarist layers of the American defence establishment who have already been pressing for tougher action against China.
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