‘The Atlantic’: The U.S. is on track to lose a war with China

Modern warfare is decided by production capacity and technological mastery, not by individual valor, ‘The Atlantic’ stresses.

In his address to generals and admirals late last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vividly described his vision of how wars are won. Soldiers and sailors are prepared to ship out “in the dead of night, in fair weather or foul, to go to dangerous places to find those who would do our nation harm, and deliver justice on behalf of the American people in close and brutal combat if necessary,” Hegseth said.

If Hegseth and other U.S. military planners think they are going to defeat China through ferocity in close combat, they are fooling themselves. The course of Russia’s war on Ukraine — which looks more and more like the prototype for wars of the near future — is being determined not by the valor or lethality of the average infantryman, but by the ability of Ukraine and its allies to inflict pain on the Russian economy, and to waste Russian battlefield and home-front resources through the manufacture of millions of drones, artillery shells, and long-range weapons systems. Such equipment is now being used to attack oil refineries, power plants, and other targets hundreds or thousands of miles behind the front lines.

Generations of military leaders in powerful nations have long made fundamental errors in thinking about what prepares a state to win a war. Many of those mistakes reflect what we might call a “battle-centric” understanding of conflict — an assumption that outcomes are determined by what happens when troops meet in the field. In this line of thinking, a war may turn on a decisive battle, often in the war’s early stages, in which one side suddenly renders the other’s position untenable.

In modern warfare, though, most battles are not contests for control of areas of immense strategic importance, and they almost never destroy equipment in quantities that determine the outcome of wars. Rather than deciding wars, individual battles reveal a war’s course by showing how different militaries are generating forces and adapting to changing conditions. Today’s wars are decided less by the military capabilities that each side has at the start than by the participants’ ability to generate new forces, adapt to new technologies, and work in coordination with allies.

The armies of 2025 now bear little resemblance to the armies of 2022. Initially, drones were mostly an afterthought, and both sides deployed tanks, armored personnel carriers, and in some cases massed infantry near the front.

These dynamics do not bode well for the United States in a long war with China. Right now, the U.S. has what appears to be the more capable military, and certainly the more battle-tested and technologically advanced one. It might inflict disproportionately higher losses on the Chinese at first. But because of its diminished production capacity, the U.S. would struggle to make up even a small part of the battlefield losses that it would inevitably suffer. China — which is as much the workshop of the world today as the United States was in World War II — could churn out replacement weaponry at an impressively quick pace.

Controlling shipping in the Pacific Ocean would likely be the first task for the U.S. military. But the U.S. mostly lacks a shipbuilding industry. In 2024, for instance, the United States built 0.1 percent of world ship tonnage, according to a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis; Chinese shipyards built more than 50 percent. The U.S. has allowed its shipyards to close and lost generations of shipbuilding-engineering expertise, and it now has hardly any experienced shipbuilding workers outside of a few shipyards that supply the U.S. Navy. It would have to re-create all this expertise, which would take years, before it could start producing ships at a fraction of Chinese output.

Shipbuilding is just one industry in which U.S. production would struggle to keep up. China, for instance, controls 90 percent of the world’s commercial-drone production, and supplies many of the components that are being put into both Ukrainian and Russian drones today.

American wealth helps only so much: States cannot simply throw money at a problem and create productive strategic industries in a short period. To compound the issue for the U.S., its allies are even less prepared militarily, and Washington is currently going out of its way to alienate them instead of fostering the cohesion necessary to deter or fight China.

Hegseth might well prefer to imagine that the valor of American soldier-warriors can overcome any other disadvantage, including a diminished military industrial base and fractured alliances. Instead of boasting about its superiority in hand-to-hand combat, the U.S. should be preparing its military for an onslaught of Chinese drones and a conflict that could last for years. Otherwise, it might win the opening battles — but it will probably lose the long war.

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