Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News
While the United States is still, on balance, technologically superior to other militaries, the People’s Republic of China and Russia are finding ways to eclipse America in several areas, causing concern for military officials and the general public alike.
Wednesday, a Department of Defense public information officer told attendees at an electronic warfare conference that China and Russia have invested heavily in an array of technologies that they use to hinder the United States’ satellites and other defenses that rely on electromagnetic radiation.
“Our adversaries know how important this technology is to us,” Kelly Fletcher, performing the duties of DOD’s chief information officer, said at the Association of Old Crows 58th Annual Symposium and Convention in Washington. “We know we have some vulnerabilities, and our adversaries know about them, and they’re going to try to take advantage of them. What really makes me concerned most, frankly, is that there are probably vulnerabilities that we don’t know about and that our adversaries are trying to find.”
Recently, Gen. David Thompson of the Space Force warned the U.S. was behind both China and Russia in terms of hypersonic missiles. One day ago, Thompson revealed that attacks on U.S. satellites by lasers, radiofrequency jammers, and cyber attacks were now a near daily occurrence.
Additionally, China has ramped up its efforts to develop more sophisticated hypersonic weaponry, missiles that would be difficult for the U.S. defenses to detect, a move that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin decried Thursday following a meeting with South Korean officials.
“We have concerns about the military capabilities that the PRC continues to pursue, and the pursuit of those capabilities increases tensions in the region,” Austin told the Associated Press. “We’ll continue to maintain the capabilities to defend and deter against a range of potential threats from the PRC to ourselves and to our allies.”
According to a recent survey conducted by the Ronald Reagan Institute, 52% of Americans view China as the greatest international threat the U.S. faces; this is a marked increase from 2018, when only 21% of Americans held this view. However, the same study found that Americans’ confidence in the U.S. military has waned significantly over the past several years as well.
The challenges are not lost on the Department of Defense. Earlier this week, the DoD released its findings from its annual Global Posture Review, one of the department’s means of assessing how the nation’s defense assets are deployed.
In this report, the DoD announced it would continue to work with allies in the Indo-Pacific, particularly Australia and South Korea, to prevent against attacks from China and North Korea. Additionally, it will permanently station an attack helicopter squadron and artillery division in South Korea. These entities had been in South Korea on a rotational basis.