China’s chokehold over U.S. military supplies leaves the West at the mercy of Beijing in the event of an all out war, a former army general has warned.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, retired U.S. Army Major General John G. Ferrari said he had ‘grave concerns’ about the America’s ongoing reliance on China to equip its military.
Chinese manufacturers are deeply embedded in U.S. defense systems, providing critical technology and raw materials used in everything from air-to-air missiles to fighter jets.
General Ferrari, who served as a deputy commander for NATO in Afghanistan, admitted that Beijing could cripple America’s ability to arm itself by cutting off supply lines.
‘If we were in a war with China and it stopped providing parts, we wouldn’t be able to build the planes and weapons we needed,’ he said.
His stark warning comes amid growing fears of a military confrontation with China over Taiwan.
The former general, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, added: ‘We need to start to prepare our supply chains now for a potential war.’
No quick fix
A startling report released earlier this year revealed Chinese firms have a stranglehold across 12 critical technologies that are vital to US national security, including nuclear modernization, hypersonic and space technologies.
The study, which was carried out by data analytics firm Govini at the request of the Pentagon, delivered a damning indictment on the American armaments industry.
‘U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self,’ the report said.
‘Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states.’
Perhaps most worryingly, Govini found that more than 40 per cent of the semiconductors that sustain Department of Defense (DoD) weapons systems are now sourced from China.
Advanced semiconductors are crucial components of missile guidance systems, cyberware and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
It has sparked fears that Beijing has been left with an array of tools to sabotage American defenses, from planting defective chips into air-to-air missiles to embedding spyware into DoD systems.
Ferrari, however, warned there was no quick fix.
‘You can’t just turn around on a dime because the [manufacturing] capacity doesn’t exist here,’ he said.
He added that it could take 10 to 15 years for the U.S. to disentangle itself from China.
But the former general, who was also a strategic planner for a Combined Joint Task Force in Iraq, hit out at Washington for being slow to react.
‘We’re into our third administration of trying to solve this problem. The Obama administration sounded the alarm, but they didn’t know what to do about it.
‘The Trump administration went hard at the problem with tariffs and trade restrictions.
‘Then Biden has come in and built upon that. We now have something of a bipartisan consensus.
‘But we are still not pushing hard enough. With both Trump and Biden, you hear “America First”. I don’t believe that’s a good solution.
‘It should be “Buy Allies”, because the U.S. does not have the capacity to solve the problem on its own.’
The Biden administration has been criticized for its sclerotic response to the crisis, with experts citing a mealy-mouthed ‘non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms (PMT)’ to provide $162million in federal funding to support the onshoring of semiconductor technology as demonstrating a lack of urgency on the matter.
General Ferrari has also said that the recently passed 2024 National Defense Authorization Act ‘barely affects’ the timeline for eliminating the Pentagon’s dependence on China.
Driven by profit
The DoD has long known that US supply chains are dominated by Chinese manufacturing.
In 2012, the Senate Armed Forces Committee found that counterfeit parts from China were being integrated into several critical systems, putting national security at risk.
These included AI capabilities in the Air Force’s Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft, the Navy’s Integrated Submarine Imaging System, and the Army’s Stryker Mobile Gun.
A decade later, the Pentagon suspended deliveries of its flagship F-35 fighter jets after it was discovered that they contained a component made with a banned Chinese alloy.
The Air Force eventually resumed supplies after determining that the parts wouldn’t affect safety, but the scare underlined concerns about how the complexities of the military supply chain could allow Beijing to slip in defective parts or spyware undetected.
The US built up its reliance on Chinese manufacturing during an era of relative harmony between the two nations following the 1990s.
American contractors were encouraged to do business with China, which was able to offer cheap manufacturing and ready access to raw materials.
But defense officials have become increasingly uneasy about the integration of supply chains in the wake of increased tensions with Beijing.
Yet the DoD’s reliance on Chinese equipment has continued to grow. Between 2014 and 2022, American dependence on Chinese electronics increased by 600 per cent, according to Govini.
Courtney Manning, senior research scientist at the nonpartisan American Security Project, said the trend has been ‘driven by profit’.
‘American defense contractors have obtained extremely lucrative contracts that are hard to break out of,’ she told DailyMail.com.
‘They are given a lot of agency and who they’re able to work with. For many of them, sourcing their components from China or Taiwan is a lucrative way to get their high tech needs met without spending a fortune on manpower here in the US.’
No alternatives
But contractors have pointed to a dearth of domestic options, with U.S. manufacturing in terminal decline.
Jeff Ferry, chief economist at the non-profit Coalition for a Prosperous America, said drone manufacturers were desperately but largely unsuccessfully seeking American components.
‘There’s possibly a few hundred parts that go into a drone,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘The majority of them are made in huge volumes in China.’
Drones run on lithium, a mineral China has a monopoly on.
Semiconductors, meanwhile, require materials, including gallium, arsenic, and neon – much of which are produced in Russia, China, and Ukraine.
The US does not produce gallium and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine halved the world’s supply of semiconductor-grade neon.
The war in Ukraine has exposed widespread problems in the American armaments industry.
U.S. weapons inventories have fallen to perilously low levels after sending Ukraine billions of dollars of military equipment and supplies.
But defense companies are not equipped to replenish them rapidly.
A study by think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies has said the conflict in Eastern Europe has highlighted how quickly the U.S. military would run out of munitions in a potential conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.