Russia’s military campaign may have everyone’s attention but the U.S. Air Force is keeping one eye on China. Force Secretary Frank Kendall said yesterday that the U.S. military will retain its focus on China as the country’s top challenge. “The Biden administration is about to release its National Security and National Defense strategies,” Kendall said yesterday in his keynote address at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida. “I don’t want to get ahead of that process, but you can be confident that despite current events, the pacing challenge remains China.”
He said, “Russia and other threats will not be discounted. But China, with both regional and global ambitions, the resources to pursue them, and a repressive authoritarian system of government, will be our greatest strategic national security challenge.” Although the Ukraine invasion hasn’t prompted a wholesale reorientation of how the military views top potential threats, Kendall said the military needs to remember “great power conflicts could happen, and could do so at any time.”
U.S. Pacific Air Forces Commander Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the same conference, questioned China’s complicity in Russia’s war on Ukraine, while downplaying concerns that the East Asian nation may use the conflict to distract from a parallel invasion of Taiwan. “I’m watching [Chinese President Xi Jinping] like a hawk,” including through military surveillance assets, he said. “I haven’t seen anything so far, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t talked about it internally and doesn’t mean that they won’t try something.”
Wilsbach described Xi’s summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 4 as “suspicious” because of Russia’s repeated pledges that it would not attempt a military takeover.
