China is developing its military capabilities at a “stunning” pace and may soon “surpass” the United States, a top U.S. general said on Thursday.
“The pace they’re moving and the trajectory that they’re on will surpass Russia and the United States if we don’t do something to change it,” the outgoing Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Hyten said on Thursday.
The admission comes after last week’s revelations that China successfully tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile. The missile, which is several times faster than a ballistic missile, may be able to evade U.S. air defense systems, the UK newspaper Financial Times reported.
On Thursday, Gen. Hyten admitted that the U.S. missile program lagged behind the Chinese one. Beijing conducted several hundred hypersonic missile tests compared to just nine carried out by Washington so far.
Communist China is poised to be the world’s dominant military power if Washington fails to act, the general said. The general urged the U.S. defense planners to “focus on speed and reinserting speed back into the process of the Pentagon.”
The Voice of America reported Gen. Hyten’s worrying remarks:
It is only a matter of time before China’s plan to replace the United States as the world’s preeminent military becomes reality, a top U.S. general warned, calling on the Washington and its allies to speed efforts to counter Beijing’s bid for dominance.
General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Washington’s second-most-senior military officer, called the rapid rise of the Chinese military “stunning.”
“The pace they’re moving and the trajectory that they’re on will surpass Russia and the United States if we don’t do something to change it,” he told the Defense Writers Group on Thursday, responding to a question from VOA.
“We have to do something,” he added. (…)
“All the hypersonic weapons they’re building, all of the nuclear weapons they’re building, are not meant for their own population,” Hyten said of China. “It is meant for the United States of America, and we have to assume that, and we have to plan for that.”
Hyten expressed confidence that for now, America’s own hypersonic program is more advanced, though he raised concerns that even that could be changing.
“In the last five years, maybe longer, the United States has done nine hypersonic tests,” Hyten told reporters. “The Chinese have done hundreds.”
“Single digits versus hundreds is not a good place,” he said.
While the U.S. and its European NATO allies have been busy imposing woke gender and cultural norms across their armed forces, Communist China has raced to weaponize outer space and dominate the seas on Earth.
But recent remarks by top Pentagon officials show that they might be waking up to China’s growing military threat.
Earlier this week, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff described China’s hypersonic missile test as a near “Sputnik moment,” a reference to the Soviet satellite launch of 1957 that changed the dynamics of the Cold War. “What we saw was a very significant event of a test of a hypersonic weapon system, and it is very concerning,” Gen. Mark Milley said.
China’s massive military build up is part of the Xi Jinping regime’s strategy of global economic and military domination.
In February 2021, the Chinese Communist Party-run parliament unveiled a centralized economic plan to surpass in U.S. in 15 years. “By the end of that road map, in 2035, China sees itself replacing the U.S. as the world’s largest economy,” the Japanese business daily Nikkei reported.
The Communist regime wants to be the world’s leading military power before its dreams of economic world domination come to fruition. Beijing is pressing head with a massive military modernization plan to be executed by 2027.
The plan has brought the regime to the cusp of dominating the oceans. Beijing now possess the world’s largest navy in terms of ship numbers. Beijing “has the largest navy in the world, with an overall battle force of approximately 350 ships and submarines including over 130 major surface combatants,” the U.S. Defense Department’s 2020 military assessment said.
China’s Hypersonic Missile Launch Close to a ‘Sputnik Moment,’ U.S. General Says
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