Pentagon Has Two Years to Prevent World War III

 

Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027. Whether he launches an invasion may depend on President Trump’s defense secretary. If confirmed by the Senate, Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s nominee, will have to confront the collapse of deterrence in Europe and the Middle East, resource constraints on Capitol Hill, recruitment challenges, and a deteriorating balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. The only way to promote peace is to go to war on day one—not with China, Russia or Iran but with the Pentagon bureaucracy.

The first task is to fix the U.S. Navy. America needs a maritime industrial base that can counter China’s. Pentagon requirements for building maritime assets involve too many uncoordinated stakeholders. The Pentagon establishes war-fighting requirements—such as the number of missiles on a ship—without regard to interdependent technical specifications such as that ship’s center of gravity. When those technical specifications aren’t tightly linked to war-fighting requirements, the mismatch can cause underperformance or unplanned costs and time. The Defense Department should return to the board model that served the Navy well until the 1960s. The Navy would have a forum of senior stakeholders with a chairman empowered to decide both requirements and specifications, ensuring that these work in harmony.

The Navy should also create an office focused on expediting the development and deployment of certain war-fighting technologies, similar to the Rapid Capabilities Office at the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force. The next secretary should insist on more flexible processes to deliver unmanned surface, aerial and underwater vehicles with speed and at scale. He must also work with Congress to help shipyards attract and retain talent.

Rebuilding the maritime industrial base can also help save Aukus—the security partnership between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.—which is in danger of stalling. Under the Aukus agreement, the U.S. Navy intends to sell Australia at least three Virginia-class attack submarines by the early 2030s. To realize this goal, the Navy needs to build more than today’s 1.2 hulls a year and shrink maintenance backlogs that have sidelined nearly 40% of the fleet. Addressing these challenges will demand consistent funding, which will come only if t