Trump’s 2020 Pentagon budget aimed on countering China

US President Donald Trump’s reported $750 billion military budget for the 2020 fiscal year revolves around what acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan deems as national security threats posed by China.

The US has been using its $716 billion 2019 budget to fight a number of wars in the Middle East region while seeking to match Russia’s pace in developing a range of new strategic weapons.

However, Shanahan made his priorities clear on January 3- his first day in office- when he told reporters that his first concern was “China, China, China.”

He doubled down on this stance during a testimony in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which has been considering the proposed Pentagon budget.

“China is aggressively modernizing its military, systematically stealing science and technology, and seeking military advantage through a strategy of military-civil fusion,” he wrote in his prepared testimony to the panel.

“We’ve been ignoring the problem for too long,” he told a senator.

The Pentagon chief presented a comprehensive list of recent Chinese military advancements including hypersonic missiles as well as space programs that could enable the country to fight wars in space.

He also accused Beijing of “systematically stealing” technologies developed by the US and its allies and militarizing land features in the South China Sea, repeating long-standing US allegations that have received a lot more attention under Trump.

The budget asks for spending $25 billion on expanding America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons next year to stay ahead of China, even though the total number of nuclear warheads in China’s possession is far smaller that America’s.

Shanahan claimed in his testimony that China was developing a nuclear-capable long-range bomber that puts the country next to the US and Russia as the only countries that could launch nuclear weapons from air, sea and land.

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He is not the first Pentagon chief to worry about China as many of his predecessors have promoted what was regarded during the administration of former President Barack Obama as a “pivot” to the Pacific to curb China’s growing influence in the region.

Shanahan said he viewed China’s growth as a far more urgent problem than his predecessors.

China not the primary threat

Experts, however, think Shanahan and other military officials in the Trump administration are inflating threat.

“I do think it’s worth asking what exactly is threatening about China’s behavior,” Christopher Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told the Associated Press.

He said while China was a security threat to some degree, Washington needed to focus on more important non-military problems such as cyber attacks targeting American commercial networks.

 “I still don’t believe the nature of the threat is quite as grave as we’re led to believe,” he said. “They tend to exaggerate the nature of the threat today.”

During his time as deputy defense secretary to Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, Shanahan put together a new national defense strategy that listed China as the most pressing problem.

“As China continues its economic and military ascendance, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy, it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future,” the strategy document says.

Perhaps this is why the Trump administration has been spending billions of dollars to form a space force as a new branch of the US military while heavily investing on the development of space defense systems and hypersonic missiles.

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