Rogers to General Milley: We Cannot Keep Putting off Taking Action on Keeping Pace with China
Washington, DC,
June 24, 2021
U.S. Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, asked General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he is most concerned that China has gained, or may soon gain, an advantage against the U.S. The transcribed exchange is below: ROGERS: General Milley, as I noted in my opening statement, China already has a larger Navy, more troops, more missiles, and more hypersonics than we do. Where are you most concerned that China has gained or may soon gain an advantage against us? GENERAL MILLEY: Several areas. If you roll the clock back to 1975 and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese economy has risen at a rate of about 10%, down to 6-7% recently and it's projected to reduce a little bit more. But with that massive economy, with that massive amount of money, China has developed an extraordinarily capable military, they are not, to be clear, they are not currently superior to the United States military. But their aim, their object, is to be at least co-equal to, if not superior, and that is possible if we stood still, that would be possible in a certain amount of years. And, and I think that the area of cyber and space, those are two critical areas and subsurface submarines are a third area, all of which we need to watch. But there's also emerging technologies that are very concerning, things like hypersonics, a man machine interface, changing the relationship of men, or human beings to the machine, linking that to various very high powered computer systems. There's a wide variety of information technologies that they're working on. These are all concerning, and then I would throw in robotics and most importantly, is Artificial Intelligence. These are emerging technologies are going to hit in time and space, in the next 10 to 15 to 20 years max, and we, the United States need to be out front on all of them. Otherwise, we're going to be setting up future generations, for a very difficult situation relative to China. ROGERS: That's a great answer, and I agree that the real threat is down the road, but that's the point we can't put off, we can't keep deferring taking action on keeping pace with China because it's going to get us in a bad situation.
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