Head Of U.S. Strategic Command: War In Ukraine Is Just Warmup

The big events are coming.

In the ninth month of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is already clear that the war in Ukraine is just a warmup.

According to the WSJ, such a statement was made by the head of the strategic command of the U.S. Armed Forces, Charles Richard, who is convinced that a big crisis is coming.

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said Admiral Charles Richard. “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 for a long time”.

It is stated in the material that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the fading power of America’s military deterrent, a fact that too few of our leaders seem willing to admit in public.

“As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are.” Sinking slowly is hardly a consolation. As “those curves keep going,” it won’t matter “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,” says the head of the US Strategic Command.

Admiral Richard noted that America retains an advantage in submarines—“maybe the only true asymmetric advantage we still have”—but even that may erode unless America picks up the pace “getting our maintenance problems fixed, getting new construction going.” Building three Virginia-class fast-attack submarines a year would be a good place to start.

According to the material, the news last year that China tested a hypersonic missile that flew around the world and landed at home should have raised more alarms than it did. It means China can put any U.S. city or facility at risk and perhaps without being detected. The fact that the test took the U.S. by surprise and that it surpassed America’s hypersonic capabilities makes it worse. How they lost the hypersonic race to China and Russia deserves hearings in Congress.

“We used to know how to move fast, and we have lost the art of that,” the admiral added. The military talks “about how we are going to mitigate our assumed eventual failure” to field new ballistic submarines, bombers or long-range weapons, instead of flipping the question to ask: “What’s it going to take? Is it money? Is it people? Do you need authorities?” the Admiral noted.

The article claims that until China invades Taiwan or takes some other action that damages U.S. interests or allies, the U.S. can do nothing about it.