Arms Buildup: A senior weapons developer tells Congress that Beijing's massive defense buildup, emphasizing precision-guided and other advanced weapons, has placed the U.S. and its shrinking military at serious risk.
'I am very concerned about the increasing risk of loss of U.S. military technological superiority," Frank Kendall, deputy undersecretary for acquisition, said Wednesday. "We're at risk, and the situation is getting worse." He was testifying before the House Armed Services Committee at a hearing on the subject of defense and technological change.The Chinese were paying attention to U.S. military dominance in the early 1990s after we won the arms race and the Cold War, he said. And they watched and analyzed our ability to project overwhelming power in Desert Storm after Iraq invaded Kuwait. "No one observed more carefully the dominance we demonstrated in 1991 than the Chinese," Kendall observed.
China quickly went to work on its own power projection capabilities and what is called asymmetrical warfare, the ability to disrupt an enemy's war plans without necessarily matching them tank for tank or ship for ship. Kendall says he became "alarmed as soon as I started seeing technical intelligence reports on China's modernization programs.
"What I'm seeing," he went on, "is foreign modernization, again particularly China's, in a suite of capabilities that are intended, clearly to me at least, to defeat the American way of doing power projection, (the) American way of warfare when we fight in an expeditionary manner far from the United States."
Among China's advanced weapons systems are:




















