Cheap Chinese drones may make US military hegemony unsustainable

(Originally published Aug. 8 in “What in the World“) Is the Axis of Evil using a Reagan strategy to break Pax Americana?

That’s the question starting to emerge as analysts contemplate the various conflicts into which Washington has been drawn and the alarmingly lop-sided costs of pursuing its policy of armed deterrence.

Students of history will recall that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan is credited with winning the Cold War by ending the longstanding U.S. policy of containing the Soviet Union and instead investing heavily in trying to win it: funding anti-Soviet insurrections in areas of the map that were marked in Communist red, as well as an ambitious missile defense program that was dubbed Star Wars by critics. Reagan’s gamble was that the Soviet political system was on the verge of economic collapse, and that, pushed to invest in defending its far-flung empire and military prowess, the USSR would collapse, and its global Communist empire would disintegrate. It did. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a product of that collapse, and his foreign policy is in large measure dedicated to reversing it.

Many analysts have seen U.S. strategy toward Ukraine under Pres. Joe Biden as something similar: goading Putin to invade a country where it was clear his military would become bogged down. The hope is that fighting on the frozen, muddy fields of Ukraine would not only deplete Russia’s military arsenal, but also its finances, and with them erode Putin’s domestic political support and ultimately drive him from power.

What has emerged instead is a stalemate in which Russia and its remaining allies—China, Iran, and North Korea—are using relatively low-cost technology to keep U.S. forces engaged on a variety of fronts that force Washington to keep spending record sums on relatively expensive military hardware just to stand still. The White House, Congress, and the U.S. public so far seem to have few doubts about the need to continue funding this effort. But the rising costs and growing debt required to fund them, and the resulting deficits have generated opposition among the Congressional Republicans who advocate anti-democratic reforms, including the re-election of a presidential candidate whose last tenure in the White House demonstrated that he doesn’t share the same commitment to maintaining U.S. global hegemony as his successor.

One of the most glaring examples is in the Middle East. After Hamas’ attack on Israel last Oct. 7 and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Iran’s various proxies in the region have banded together into a self-described “Axis of Resistance,” launching assaults not only on Israel directly, but on remaining U.S. forces in Iraq and on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Most of these attacks use small and relatively inexpensive drones and missiles. The U.S. responds with air strikes using much more expensive fighter jets, cruise missiles, and other precision-guided weapons.

Ten months since the war in Gaza began, the U.S. has been able to do little to stop them. As Politico points out, Houthi rebels in Yemen continue to harass ships sailing through the Red Sea to and from the Suez Canal on a near-daily basis. The U.S. Navy and its allies manage to shoot down most of the Houthi drones and missiles, but only by firing vastly more expensive air-defense missiles. In addition to the air-to-air missiles expended to blast incoming drones, the Navy has also fired more than 135 $2 million Tomahawk cruise missiles against Houthi positions in Yemen. Worse, the Houthis have forced the Pentagon to maintain a constant presence of U.S. naval forces in the Red Sea. The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier group recently replaced the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier group there, allowing to end an unusually long, nine-month deployment.

A similar situation has unfolded in the Pacific. Beijing and Pyongyang aren’t using cheap drones to engage and expend U.S. military power. Instead, North Korea has been firing increasingly advanced missiles into the Sea of Japan to demonstrate its hostility to the U.S. and its allies in the region as it pursues its ambition of developing nuclear weapons capable of creating the same kind of mutually assured destruction that ostensibly deters the U.S., China, and Russia from attacking each other. China, meanwhile, has been conducting ever-larger air and naval exercises around Taiwan, usually in response to any moves it interprets as encouraging the self-ruling island to declare its formal independence from China.

In response to these rising provocations from China and North Korea, the U.S. has beefed up its military deployments in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. The U.S. Navy also conducts “freedom of navigation” operations by air and sea through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.

Invading Taiwan would likely thrust China into a costly quagmire, not to mention a war with the U.S. that Beijing’s leaders have long recognized they would likely lose as long as the U.S. maintains the military superiority it now enjoys. So, whether these forward deployments are what is successfully dissuading it from invading seems unlikely.

U.S. Naval War College Prof. Jonathan Caverley argues in a new piece for Foreign Affairs that they are counterproductive. Instead of improving Taiwan’s security, they expose U.S. naval forces to potential Chinese missile attack. Were China to launch an attack against Taiwan or any other U.S. ally, China could ostensibly achieve much closer to home what Japan hoped to accomplish with its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941: destroy U.S. capability to launch a major counterattack against invasion.

Instead, Caverley argues, the U.S. should continue with part of its strategy for Taiwan, one developed in Ukraine: The Pentagon has been pursuing a “porcupine strategy” on Taiwan, supplying it with a massive arsenal of defensive weapons that allow it to fend off Chinese forces until the U.S. can come to its aid.

Ukraine’s plucky defenses allowed it to fend off Russian advances until U.S. weapons arrived. The U.S. has so far supplied Ukraine with $55.4 billion worth of increasingly sophisticated weapons. That has succeeded in bogging Russian forces down, but it has also bogged Ukrainian forces down. The result is a stalemate in which Russian forces control much of the Russian-speaking Donbas region and have established a broad land bridge to the strategically vital Crimea and the naval base at Sevastopol on the Black Sea.

U.S. weapons helped Ukrainian forces to regain some territory. But Biden’s gradualist approach to supplying them has meant that Ukraine never had sufficient firepower to drive the Russians out, while providing Russian forces time to adapt. They have now learned to jam the GPS signals that U.S. rockets and missiles rely on to target them. Russia has also been able to use relatively cheaper Iranian-designed drones, North Korean missiles, and older Soviet-era weapons that force Ukraine to deplete much more expensive U.S.-supplied air-defense missiles. Meanwhile, Ukraine is rapidly running short of a vital weapon with which Washington is powerless to re-supply it: Ukrainian soldiers.

Biden has still rejected Ukraine’s requests to use U.S. long-range Atacm missiles to strike Russian airbases inside Russia. Kyiv has adapted to these restrictions by developing its own home-made drones, with some reaching almost as far as Moscow. Ukrainian troops are even using drones for close air support in their latest incursion into Russia’s Kursk province.

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warn in a recent Foreign Affairs article that such drones, operated using artificial intelligence, pose a threat to U.S. hegemony against which America’s military is woefully unprepared. Milley, readers may recall, caused a kerfuffle in December 2022 when he said Ukraine couldn’t win the war without Putin’s downfall and instead suggested it negotiate.

Many argue that drones have already rendered helicopters obsolete on the battlefield. And while the U.S. military is contemplating providing U.S. fighter pilots with swarms of drone wingmen, China is reportedly building a dedicated drone carrier. Or as this newsletter put it in May:

Cheap, jury-rigged drones have become the AK-47s of modern combat… But efforts by the U.S. Navy and Air Force to modernize their arsenals with unmanned systems face opposition from the Pentagon and Congress, which routinely oppose retiring older vessels and warplanes to fund newer weapons systems. Congress views any decrease in the surface navy as a setback, and bigger, older ships typically support more jobs in local constituencies than cheaper, newer ones. The defense industry and its army of lobbyists, moreover, tends to favor larger equipment with bigger price tags and fatter margins.

Milley and Schmidt warn that the Pentagon, which has successfully lobbied Congress for longer weapons purchase contracts, “relies on ten-year procurement cycles, which can lock it into particular systems and contracts long after the underlying technology has evolved. It should, instead, ink shorter deals whenever possible.”

And thanks to a wave of consolidation in recent decades, the U.S. military relies on a virtual oligopoly of massive arms companies. As Milley and Schmidt write:

In 2022, Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman received over 30 percent of all Defense Department contract money. New weapons manufacturers, by contrast, received hardly any. Last year, less than one percent of all Defense Department contracts went to venture-backed companies, which are generally more innovative than their larger counterparts. Those percentages should be far more equal. The next generation of small, cheap drones are unlikely to be designed by traditional defense firms, which are incentivized to produce fancy but expensive equipment. They are more likely to be created as they were in Ukraine: through a government initiative that supports dozens of small startups.

The risk of using a vast, bloated military to defend a growing list of nebulous American strategic interests overseas against an ever-expanding list of threats by more nimble aggressors with cheaper, more effective weapons is that it becomes over-extended, creating gaps and vulnerabilities.

The other threat is domestic: how long will the public and Congress be willing to support the cost of doing so? The U.S. defense budget rose last year to a record $877 billion. While defense spending relative to the economy’s growing size has been declining, the U.S. government spends more taxpayer dollars on the military than it does on education, the environment, healthcare, housing, and transportation combined.

The U.S. under Reagan managed to spend the USSR into oblivion. But China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia may have found a way to get Washington to spend Pax Americana into its own historical dustbin.