WHILE China is swiftly expanding its military capabilities, the
United States still far outspends China when it comes to two important metrics:
total spending and spending as a percent of gross domestic product or GDP, said
Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, in his best-selling book Crouching
Tiger.
At the same time, China’s military spending over the past 10 years was only about 2 percent of its annual GDP while the US is close to 4 percent. “America vastly outspends China” is frequently used to discount any possibility of an emerging China threat.
“It is an argument, however, that must be tempered by more than a few critical considerations. First and foremost, any direct comparison of total military expenditures is, in and of itself, likely to be highly misleading. While the US military must project its force globally, China focuses primarily on regional force projection in Asia,” Navarro said.
“To put this in a weapons context,” Navarro said, “American taxpayers may foot the bill for 10 active aircraft carriers. However, only several of these flattops are ever on patrol in the Asian theater at any one time. As a second consideration, one dollar of defense spending in China goes much farther than one dollar of defense spending in the United States.
“Why is this so? For starters, Chinese military personnel earn wages and benefits far less than their American counterparts. In addition, it is demonstrably cheaper for China’s factories to churn out weapons systems—and it is not just cheap labor driving this production cost advantage.
“It’s also the lack of any meaningful environmental controls or worker protection—yes, the air and water in China are filthy and the factories are very dangerous, but it is a lot cheaper to manufacture everything from autos and home appliances to missiles and submarines.
“As an added boost to China’s cost advantage, there is also this uncomfortable truth: China does not have to spend anywhere near as much on military research and development for new weapons systems. One key reason is the vaunted ability of Chinese hackers to steal the latest weapons designs from both the Pentagon and private-sector defense contractors.
“Another reason is that China quite illegally reverse engineers much of the foreign technology it buys. On this reverse-engineering front, Russia, not America, has been “China’s biggest victim. After Russia sold China its advanced Sukhoi Su-27 fighter, China proceeded to clone it—and then immediately began selling discounted versions of the jet on the world market, squeezing Russian sales.
“In a laugh out loud moment, when they were accused of also replicating the Sukhoi Su-33 aircraft carrier-based fighter, China’s unintentionally comical defense was that its J-15 clone of the Sukhoi was actually better than the original. That’s indeed true—and that’s one of the problems facing opponents.”
According to Navarro, China not only can steal foreign technology, it can improve upon it, as well. For all these reasons, it would be wrong to derive much comfort from the fact that Chinese military expenditures appear to fall far below that of America.
This is particularly true since the spending trends are likely to cross in the not-too-distant future as China’s GDP growth continues to significantly outpace that of the US and as America’s economy continues to perform below historical levels.
In fact, when one looks more deeply at the defense-expenditures puzzle, it should not be reassuring at all that China is using much less budget each year to successfully grow its military.
Indeed, the economic ease with which China’s military is rapidly expanding raises this next—and quite sobering—question: Will China eventually be able to do to America what America did to Kaiser Germany in World War I, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War?
That is, will China be able to use its superior manufacturing might to defeat America on the battlefield?
In thinking historically about the strategic implications of China’s rise and growing size, consider this: At the start of World War II, the combined economies of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were only half the size of the US.
If for no other reason than the sheer weight of its factories and work force, America thereby held the strategic high ground. In fact, the statistical correspondence between economic power and military might in World War II was startling.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.