Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten expressed to reporters yesterday the view that the evidence, including publicly available satellite imagery of new ICBM fields under construction, shows that China has abandoned its past policy of minimum deterrence. “You don’t need to develop the kind of capabilities they’re developing for a minimum deterrence. The work they’re doing on hypersonics, the work to fill out the triad, the work to build both a fixed-base ICBM program and a mobile ICBM program at the same time, to put ballistic missiles on bombers, to put ballistic missiles on submarines — you know, when you look at that structure, that is not a minimum deterrence model,” Hyten said. “What I worry about is capability. And if you’re a military officer, you have to worry about the capability and the possibility that an adversary will use that capability against you,” he said.
Overall, Hyten called the rapid rise of the Chinese military “stunning.” “The pace they’re moving and the trajectory that they’re on will surpass Russia and the United States if we don’t do something to change it,” he said. “We have to do something,” he added. Hyten apparently did not say what that “something” might be however.
Despite worries about China, Hyten still called Russia the greatest existential threat to the U.S.. “Russia is still the most imminent threat, simply because they have 1,500 deployed nuclear weapons, plus or minus, and China’s got roughly 20% of that,” he said. “So, you have to worry about Russia in the near term.”
