Adm. Charles Richard, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, used a press conference at the Pentagon yesterday to hype up the alleged threats from Russia and China, particularly on the nuclear side. “Our competitors have continued to develop both nonstrategic and strategic capabilities in an effort to outpace us,” he said during his opening remarks. “And we are going into a very different world. The — we are on a trajectory for the first time in our nation’s history to face two peer nuclear-capable competitors who have to be deterred differently, and we’re working very hard to meet that challenge.
“I think we all know the threat that Russia poses to us, modernizing strategic, conventional, space, counter-space, cyber, they’re developing hypersonics, and their gray zone actions,” he went on. “And it’s not only what they’re developing, it’s what they’re doing.”
Then Richard turned to China. “China’s similar, right? I think you all have seen the recent China military report,” he said. “I think it’s an excellent explanation in terms of what China’s overall strategy is, and explains the why behind the things that we see them doing, particularly in my mission sets. Again, looking to — we like talking about the fact that they’re going to double their stockpile by the end of the decade.” Richard claimed that China “in particular is developing a stack of capabilities that, to my mind, is increasingly inconsistent with a stated no-first-use policy.”
