More from the OpEd ...

... Recent American defense strategy has been based on the optimistic assumption that we will have to fight only one war at a time. But the closer cooperation among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea make a coordinated attack more likely, meaning we may have to fight three or four regional wars simultaneously.

- - - The weak U.S. industrial base has hollowed out American resilience. China's shipbuilding industry has a capacity more than 230 times that of the United States. When experts recently conducted war games with China, the United States ran out of long-range anti-ship missiles within three to seven days.

- - - The Chinese are building gigantic amphibious landing craft of the sort they would use for an invasion of Taiwan. They have developed a powerful microwave weapon that has the intensity of a nuclear explosion and can disrupt or destroy electronic components of our weapons systems. H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser, recently said, "I think China is laying the groundwork for a first-strike nuclear capability against the United States."

- - - In 2023, the RAND Corporation issued a report on U.S. military "power and influence." Here's how it opened: "The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available to accomplish those tasks."

Now, if you are holding a hearing for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues. Or you might come up with other serious questions: How do drones change war fighting? How will artificial intelligence alter the nature of combat? How do we shift from a defense policy built around counterterrorism to a policy built around nation-state warfare? If you're a Democrat trying to sink a nomination, you would think you'd want to ask substantive questions on life-or-death issues like these in order to expose the nominee's ignorance and unpreparedness. ...