Head of US Nuclear Forces Claims Ukraine ‘Just a Warmup’ for ‘Very Long’ Struggle With Russia, China
US Navy Adm. Charles Richard, the head of US Strategic Command, recently warned the US would soon face a protracted conflict with China unlike anything it’s faced before. Stratcom is responsible for handling the country’s nuclear weapons, as well as the suite of defensive and offensive information capabilities termed C4ISR.
“We have to do some rapid, fundamental change in the way we approach the defense of this nation,” Richard said at a Navy symposium last week.
“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” he said. “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 in a long time.”
Richard warned “the ship is slowly sinking” because China is fielding new capabilities faster than the United States, which will soon find itself outnumbered and outclassed on the battlefield.
“[I]t 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. And that is a very near-term problem,” Richard asserted.
The US is already behind China in the key field of missiles, with China fielding a generation of ultra-long-range cruise missiles, a bevy of ballistic missile varieties, and several varieties of hypersonic weapons for which the US has no equal and no answer.
However, the Pentagon is especially worried about what it fears was a fractional orbital bombardment system China tested last year, saying it is a part of China’s militarization of space. The US formed a separate Space Force in 2019, although its foundational doctrinal documents made clear that its goal was defending US space supremacy, not preventing the militarization of space.