US Military Nuclear Commander Warns America Is Falling Behind China

Navy Adm. Charles A. Richard, the commander of US Strategic Command, issued an unusually blunt warning on Wednesday, saying that China's nuclear threat was a "near-term problem", The Daily Mail reported.

"As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking," Richard said. 

"It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are," he said. 

He said the military was encumbered by red tape, slow to react, and at risk of being dramatically outspent and outmaneuvered by its adversaries.

"As those curves keep going, it isn't going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are — we're not going to have enough of them," he said, adding, "And that is a very near-term problem." 

He added that the country needed to regain the dynamism and can-do spirit of the 1950s and 60s. 

"This Ukraine crisis that we're in right now, this is just the warmup," he said, addressing the Naval Submarine League's annual gathering in Arlington, Virginia.

"The big one is coming. And it isn't going to be very long before we're going to get tested in ways that we haven't been tested a long time," he said.

Richard, who has led Stratcom since November 2019, is in described by the Pentagon as being "responsible for the global command and control of US strategic forces to meet decisive national security objectives".

As such, his job is to provide recommendations to the President and Secretary of Defense on the military capacity necessary to keep the US safe, and fulfill its strategic aims.

Richard said the current thinking was outdated - and Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear sabre-rattling showed that an urgent reassessment was overdue.

"We have to do some rapid, fundamental change in the way we approach the defense of this nation," he said.

"I will tell you, the current situation is vividly illuminating what nuclear coercion looks like and how you, or how you don't stand up to that," he said.

He said America's rivals, such as China, are making dramatic strides in military innovation - posing a threat to the US.

Richard said the only bright spot was America's underseas capabilities, with the US submarine fleet.

The admiral served on multiple submarines before rising to command Submarine NR-1 - then the US Navy's only nuclear-powered, deep-submergence submarine.

He went on to be named Director of Undersea Warfare at the Pentagon, and command the fleet based in Norfolk, Virginia.

"Undersea capabilities is still the one ... maybe the only true asymmetric advantage we still have against our opponents," Richard said.

"But unless we pick up the pace, in terms of getting our maintenance problems fixed, getting new construction going," he said.

"If we can't figure that out we are not going to put ourselves in a good position to maintain strategic deterrence and national defense," he added.

Richard, who graduated from the University of Alabama in 1982, said the United States had "lost the art" of rapid response to new threats.

He noted that, 60 years ago, America's military was more agile, resourceful and innovative.

"We used to know how to move fast, and we have lost the art of that," he said, giving as an example the invention of the AGM-28 Hound Dog cruise missile, which entered service in 1960.

"The Air Force went from a request, almost written on a napkin," he said.

"They figured out in the late 1950s that the Soviet integrated air defense systems were getting to the point that the B-52 just wasn't going to make it in, and we needed a thing called up 'cruise missile," he added.

"And so, they envisioned what a standoff weapon looks like," he said.

The US military was able to deliver the Hound Dog cruise missile in just 33 months.

"We had two squadrons of B-52s equipped with this 800-nautical-mile Mach two-plus, one megaton nuclear warhead with accuracy that was really good for its day, hanging off the wings of B-52s in less than three years," he said.

"This weapon was so cool you could actually turn the engines on, on its cruise missiles on your wings, to give you additional thrust on takeoff," he added.

He continued, "We have got to get back into the business of not talking about how we are going to mitigate our assumed eventual failure."

He said the policy makers needed to "flip it to the way we used to ask questions in this nation, which is: What's it going to take? Is it money? Is it people? Do you need authorities? What risk?"

"That's how we got to the Moon by 1969. We need to bring some of that back," he said, adding, "Otherwise, China is simply going to outcompete us, and Russia isn't going anywhere anytime soon."