[Column] China’s moment in the western Pacific is nigh

Following the US midterm elections, a grand narrative of American failure is playing out — a chain reaction of political dysfunction that weakens the US military, fueling fears that America could lose in its competition with China.

 The first link in that chain is the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

 On Tuesday, just one week after the midterms, a resolution to impeach US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was blocked in the House of Representatives by a vote of 211-204.

 The resolution was shunted to the House Judiciary Committee following a frantic push by Republican leaders. The affair left Congress even further divided, with no pretense of patching over differences.

 In an angry early-morning briefing at the Pentagon, Hegseth declared that he was “being attacked not for losing conflicts with our enemies, but for winning them.”

 A longstanding convention in American politics — that national security transcends partisan divisions — had crumbled. Hegseth and US President Donald Trump have refused to take the bitter medicine of the Republican Party’s trouncing in the midterms.

 Political gridlock had already been severe, of course.

 On June 24, the White House requested US$87.6 billion in supplemental funding from Congress. But the House rejected the US$67.1 billion earmarked for the Pentagon. According to the Congressional Budget Office, actual war costs amounted to just US$42.3 billion, while the rest was intended to replenish the Pentagon’s coffers.

 Next year’s Congress is likely to go a step further. When they take control, Democrats are determined to declare the military campaign in Iran illegal and investigate possible war crimes by Trump and Hegseth.

 Funding for the war has effectively been cut off, yet Hegseth refuses to stop the fighting. Instead, he brags about a “historic military victory” while raiding the military’s coffers to keep the war going.

 According to the Pentagon’s inspector general, at least US$33.4 billion of funding for the war has come from the training and maintenance budgets. The Pentagon has even requested permission to divert another US$4.3 billion from shipbuilding and R&D.

 The Navy complains that operations in Iranian waters have left it with an US$8 billion shortfall.

 Field exercises have been canceled one after another; advanced weapons development has ground to a halt; even facility maintenance has been cut back. Joint exercises with allies have also taken a hit, echoing Hegseth’s own acknowledgment that training would be the first casualty of a cash crunch.

 The result has been a rapid degradation of US military readiness.

 The breakdown began with Air Force pilot training. To be certified as combat-ready, a fighter pilot is supposed to fly nine or 10 sorties a month. But now they are averaging barely one for non-deployed jets.

 The mission-capable rate of the F-35 workhorse has fallen below 50%, with only 1 in 4 aircraft capable of performing the full range of missions.

 Below the waves, things are hardly better.

 Of the US Navy’s 49 nuclear-powered attack submarines, 19 are sidelined because of a maintenance backlog.

 The Navy has 11 aircraft carriers on paper, but only about eight are actually operational. The USS John C. Stennis, for example, is 14 months behind schedule on refueling and other work.

 The number of destroyers available for immediate deployment has fallen to just a quarter of the fleet. Maintenance on key warships, including the USS Donald Cook, has been pushed back to next year, with 18 scheduled maintenance projects scrapped outright.

 Few people could be more pleased to see this series of self-owns than Chinese President Xi Jinping, who must assume that China’s moment in the Pacific is drawing nigh.

 Without China even lifting a finger, advanced semiconductor technology is smuggled into the country through honey traps even as the US depletes its own military capabilities in the Asia-Pacific.

 Five of 10 Aegis destroyers assigned to the 7th Fleet in Yokosuka, Japan, have been redeployed to the Middle East. With the western Pacific’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier also heading to the Persian Gulf, American carriers have effectively vanished from Asian waters.

 Crew on the USS John Finn, a guided-missile destroyer, have already been at sea for 14 months and are now being told they cannot return until 2027.

 US military publication Defense One reports that when US Central Command demanded the continuing deployment of 17 destroyers through 2029, dismayed Navy officers called the proposal “insane.”

 But the problem goes beyond a simple shortage of ships. The very premise of America’s strategy for defending Taiwan has imploded.

 Until now, when the Pentagon and US think tanks have held war games imagining a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, they have assumed that US forces could be immediately deployed to repel China along the first island chain.

 But the forces needed for an immediate response to a Taiwan contingency are no longer available. Furthermore, the munition stores and surveillance systems needed to defend US bases across the Pacific have been seriously compromised.

 Analysts increasingly suggest that even if the war with Iran ended today, bringing the US military back to full strength would take years — perhaps as long as a decade.

 Even so, Trump and Hegseth keep trucking down the highway to failure. Xi could hardly ask for better allies.