Even as the aftermath of AUKUS continues to play out, the Biden Administration is continuing to pursue its bilateral confrontation against China. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall used the occasion of the annual meeting of the Air Force Association to demand that Congress allow the service to retire old aircraft so that it can better fight China. “While America is still the dominant military power on the planet today, we are being more effectively challenged militarily than at any other time in our history,” he said. “We are in a national, strategic, long-term competition with a strategic adversary.”
China’s advances in military and space technologies and the implications for U.S. national security composed the dominant theme in Kendall’s address to a large audience of active-duty service members, government civilians, and defense contractors, reported Space News. He said China’s military modernization is focused on long-range precision-guided munitions, hypersonic missiles, and space and cyber weapons.
“I have had the opportunity to catch up on the intelligence about China’s modernization programs. If anything, China has accelerated its pace of modernization,” Kendall said. There is “strong evidence” that China is pursuing silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and satellite-guided munitions to strike targets on Earth and in space, he said. Kendall told reporters that recent revelations about China’s nuclear programs that have been reported both publicly and in classified intelligence present “the most disturbing developments in nuclear proliferation I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
“I have one request of the Congress: help us to focus on the one fight — the strategic competitive fight — we must win,” Kendall said. “We will not succeed against a well-resourced and strategic competitor if we insist on keeping every legacy system we have,” he said. “Our one team cannot win its one fight to deter China or Russia without the resources we need and a willingness to balance risk today to avoid much greater risk in the future.”
He offered to work with Congress on retiring fleets of older aircraft, but signalled that the service could return to a more aggressive approach, where it will push lawmakers to approve the retirements of “aircraft that we no longer need and that do not intimidate China.”