Don’t let the battlefield optics fool you: America’s overall national security has been harmed

In a single year, the United States has attacked seven countries — Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Assembling a third of U.S. overseas warships and about 375 military aircraft, the United States struck, for a second time in eight months, a weakened Iran, initially to force another nuclear “deal”, then “freedom” for the Iranian people, and now rationales that seem to change from moment to moment.

The first Trump Administration broke America’s word in 2018, tearing up the nuclear accord signed with Iran three years earlier — despite having surprise inspections of its nuclear facilities with 24/7 camera “eyes” and acoustic/vibration/heat “ears” inside so Iran couldn’t cheat. Crippled by new Trump 45 sanctions, Iran returned to enriching uranium a year later.

This administration’s new “deal” replicated the discarded accord, with additional demands for physical dismantlement of the buildings, limiting ballistic missiles, and no funding of regional proxies.

Before we struck Iran again, U.S. special regional envoy, Steve Witkoff, said President Donald Trump was “curious” why Iran hadn’t “capitulated,” given the threat of military strikes.

But as Ukraine demonstrated when denying the administration’s demand to trade its territory for a “deal” with Russia — which also broke its word about not attacking Ukraine after it surrendered its nuclear weapons — nations are realists, and unlike Charlie Brown, don’t trust Lucy’s promise not to pull the football away again.

In addition, our having spurned American alliances, eight regional nations — from the United Kingdom (allowing its base on Diego Garcia to be used only for defensive purposes) to Saudi Arabia — barred America from using airspace above, and our bases on, their territories for the Iranian strikes. Now the shoe is on the other foot: with swarms of low-tech, slow speed, low-to-the-ground Iranian drones breaching U.S. air defenses — killing U.S. soldiers, damaging operations centers and embassies — an unprepared America has asked Ukraine for its interceptor drones, advisors and detection technology that it has developed against Russia’s similar drones.

More, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly expressed some concern about how a sustained operation would impact the military’s depleted state of critical munitions — raising a fundamental question: How is our nation’s overall security?

The answer? It is not well.

In the administration’s recent National Security Strategy, deterring China ranks first, after defending our homeland. But Caine seems worried about our readiness to do so, having exhausted critical munitions on lower priorities. His implicit warning: You better know how Iran will end, before you begin … in particular, if there’ll be sustained operations.

Meanwhile, playing the long game, China has adhered to Gen. Sun Tzu’s dictum, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war.” As a result, the U.S. Navy no longer commands the seas in the Western Pacific, and the U.S. military has lost every highly classified Pentagon wargame in recent years.

With no U.S. military capability to intercept China’s 600 hypersonic conventional missiles (maneuverable speeds to Mach 10 — 10 times the speed of sound), U.S. ships and Air Force bases ranging out to Hawaii are completely vulnerable. Woefully, America has no hypersonic missiles. And U.S. munitions are exhausted within a few days.

Since war is now as much about algorithms and data as troops and weapons, Sun Tzu’s concept of “sabotage from within” is evidenced by the U.S. military losing access to its networks almost immediately during recent wargames. The Pentagon’s Defense Science Board bluntly stated it has no confidence any major military weapons system using cyber capabilities is secure.

A major reason for that lack of confidence is that America outsourced our national security to China. For example, Chinese servers on our Aegis warships were removed due to reported Trojan Horses — chips placed within automated systems — dormant until China sends them malicious malware. And recently, the Pentagon moved to remove Chinese rare earth magnets from America’s most sophisticated aircraft — the F-35 — concerned that the software attached to them could “phone home” for damaging code, while other magnets were made to fail.

Today, nearly 45,000 Department of Defense suppliers are based in China, producing essential parts such as semiconductors for the B-2 bomber and the Ohio-class submarine carrying nuclear ballistic missiles. Last year the Government Accounting Office (GAO) highlighted the “serious national security implications for [the Defense Department] not even knowing where components of the goods it procures are manufactured.”

And then there’s the forewarning of Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader, in 1992: “The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths.”

It’s been a while since America had a national leader who understood the broader global and domestic implications of Deng’s words as President Bill Clinton presciently did.

When assigned to the National Security Council in November 1994, I was responsible for the development and oversight of the Clinton administration’s annual national security strategy. Each one, in Clinton’s words, “did not set objectives for separate and distinct foreign and domestic policies, but rather for economic and security policies that advance our interests and ideals in a world where the dividing line between domestic and foreign policy is increasingly blurred.”

Clinton asserted that national security was now to be affected and defined by almost anything — market economics to terrorism, cyber to trade — at home and abroad.

Take Deng’s warning. After Trump backed away from tariffs of 145% on China, Xi left in place a key retaliatory policy: no rare earths or their magnets would be sold to the U.S. military — nor any country using them for parts supplied to our military.

As 34,000 U.S. companies left the U.S. defense industry since 2001, the Department of Defense has come to use more than 200,000 suppliers throughout the world, many using rare earths. The F-35 alone has almost 2,000 providers from a dozen countries.

Today, 1,900 different U.S. weapon systems use rare earth minerals, 80% controlled by China — including 99.9% of the six heavy rare earths that U.S. military systems are most reliant upon. Chinese control is not just about mining. Countries, including the United States, ship 70% of their minerals to China for processing and 90% for refining — which only China has developed the technology to do in some instances. Then America re-imports its finished product as components for Minuteman III ballistic missiles to Arleigh Burke-class destroyers — until now.

Underscoring Caine’s concern about the military’s poor state of critical munitions is the first example of the looming — and imminent — national security crisis regarding China’s ban on rare earths.

Raytheon was contracted to increase Tomahawk missile production from 60 to 1,000 missiles per year to replenish missile stocks by 2033. But because of China’s exclusive chokehold on a rare earth, samarium, Raytheon was being forced to stop production last year. Three European allies — which I know, as a fellow warrior alongside them in war, have not been “ripping us off” — worked together to provide the limited supply they’d stockpiled since the 1970s to resume production, for a while more.

Today, America is “whistling past the graveyard” about future production of our most critical weapons systems. And time matters as then-CIA Director William Burns made clear in February 2023, that President Xi has instructed the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military leadership, “to be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan.”

Vladimir Lenin’s quote — “The capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with”— may be apocryphal, but it’s reality today that Communist China has stopped selling the materials we need to hang them.

China’s digital and rare earth mineral incarceration of the world extends from space — where the Commander of SPACECOM called China’s arsenal of space-based weapons “mind-boggling” — to key civilian infrastructure targets on which the Defense Department depends so that U.S. forces could be prevented from even getting to the forward fight altogether.

America must decouple its national security from China’s factory floor. But when Clinton said, “foreign and domestic policy are now two sides of the same coin,” he meant what Sun Tzu foresaw: “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

Take, for instance, the 129 worldwide port projects that involve Chinese operational control, construction, full or partial ownership, critical investment, and long-term leases. Cranes and other operational equipment’s software — like those purchased for U.S. West Coast ports — is controllable from China.

America must decouple its national security from China’s factory floor.

While prioritizing peacetime logistics for Chinese exports and imports, this port incarceration also provides geopolitical leverage during crises — much as the U.S. Navy’s sea control once did.

Similarly, 40% (of U.S.) to 75% (of European) utility solar farms all purchased from China are considered hackable because of their reliance on inverter technology with remote access devices.

To a large degree, China’s current pace of war is the speed of light through cyberspace, leaving U.S. forces blind and deaf while most forces are steaming at 30 knots, taking weeks (if they survive) to arrive at the fight. This is because the Defense Department remains centrally focused on metrics of “capacity” — how many planes, armored vehicles, ships — rather than “capability” from cyber to sensors and munitions.

Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Vern Clark, for whom I worked, was a noted exception. Not maintaining his transformational change from force structure (capacity) to force posture (capability) is what drains U.S. readiness today.

Today, if Iran’s fishing boats drop mines to close the Straits of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy has four 40-year-old minesweepers with outdated technology, one squadron of 40-year-old helicopter minesweepers being decommissioned, as well as a handful of unmanned surface vehicles to deal with it.

Caine’s concern about striking Iran to “force a deal” were correct — partly. The full concern is: how does a “second tier” military halt a future deal from being forced upon us? Such as during a pandemic or trade war, when nearly 700 U.S. medicines have their precursor chemicals sourced solely from China cut off?

While a doctoral student at Harvard University in economics and government/foreign affairs, I read John F. Kennedy ‘s book, Why England Slept, analyzing Great Britain’s unpreparedness for World War II, written while he was a student there. After that, through numerous operational deployments, including war, and assignments on the Navy and Joint Staffs, at the National Security Council and in Congress, I came to wonder “why America slept” regarding China.

Today, dangerously, too much time has passed to best address rare earths, cyber warfare, port control, etc. Yet it can be done with the correct national leadership … but regaining our national security faces rising obstacles: China has surpassed the United States in new patents, spending on university and government research, high-quality scientific papers published, and leadership in materials science, engineering, chemistry and computer science — four critical areas responsible for 60% of cutting-edge research.

And it is this advancing technology — from artificial intelligence to quantum computers — that must be the very foundation of our future prowess.

Finally, the U.S. military’s ability to project future power across — and through — the globe relies critically upon trusted partners and allies.

This future battlefield is one that will be fought through connection — digital and otherwise — with global comrades-in-arms that we trust.

In this second Trump administration, we have forfeited too many of those.

Joe Sestak is a retired Navy vice admiral, a former U.S. representative for Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District, who served on the House Armed Services Committee, and onetime director for defense policy of the National Security Council staff.