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The U.S. Is Falling Behind in an Arms Race That May Not Exist
This article was originally published in Real Clare Defense.
Despite Communist Chinese warning of the dangers of arms racing that I explored in a 2021 article, I have since come to the conclusion that the current Asian naval buildup does not match the instabilities and war-proneness of the conflict spiral model. This is despite the recent warning by U.S. Navy Chief of Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Paparo that China is frenetically outpacing the U.S. by six to 1.8 in warships, by 2 to 1.4 in submarines, and 120 to 90 in combat aircraft. The War in Ukraine and the social media assisted marginalization of the traditional left has dissipated much of the despair radiating from arms races and accidental nuclear war.
Thomas Rid, in his ground-breaking 2020 text Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation, based on extensive interviews and archival research of Soviet mass influence efforts, showed the conflict spiral arms race model to be a product of Cold War propaganda. The idea that wars are the result of the unintended accumulating tensions that accompany arms buildups, is an anti-militarist term that emerged among liberal journalists lamenting the high cost of the battleship race between Great Britain and Imperial Germany, in the lead up to the First World War. The concept re-emerged in the Anglosphere in the early-1920s and the mid-1930s as a corollary of the accusation of war profiteering, and it was then tied-in to the idea of imminent nuclear war from the 1950s.
The arms race concept achieved its apex in the late-1970s and 1980s in the largely Soviet-funded peace, disarmament, and nuclear abolitionist movement. Rid cites a reputable annual CIA cost estimate (given several chapters demonstrating highly competent CIA disinformation campaigns in Italy and East Berlin) of an astonishing $3 to $4 billion necessary for the KGB/GRU to have mobilized the millions of European and American agitators. Even if the CIA estimate is exaggerated by an order of magnitude, this author recalls 1980s activism vividly, and also the speed with which the movement lost its voice when the USSR’s funding for it collapsed. By comparison, another CIA study found little foreign influence affecting the anti-Vietnam War movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s.
That China has neglected promoting the concept of a conflict spiral arms race in U.S. social media, despite energetic cognitive warfare being conducted against Taiwan, is an easily predictable and typical myopia of nationalist regimes. Nazi Germany was itself influenced by the fears of unnecessary war when it signed the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement. Cold War Communist regimes, by their association with labor movements enjoyed much greater altruistic deference, but were also restrained, as evinced by Soviet allies that protested Moscow’s heavy handed tactics in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In contrast, Xi Jinping’s obstreperous territorial claims based on China’s anticipated but never achieved power-transition past the U.S., has crippled confidence in Beijing’s moral stature. One probable instance of China’s cognitive warfare against Taipei, which I sampled with a Taiwanese émigré the morning I wrote this article, used a Feng shui YouTube channel to publicize Washington’s purported pressuring of Taipei to buy U.S. weapons. However, Thomas Rid argued convincingly that Russia’s 2016 interference in the U.S. election was drowned out by the clamor of domestic voices, and therefore Beijing’s similar disinformation efforts on TikTok may have been similarly overwhelmed.
This author travelled across European and Central Asian USSR in 1987, and was amazed that while the Soviets played up the dangers of the nuclear arms race in the West, Soviet citizens with whom I spoke, had already been ideologically converted by the widespread images of the Western capitalist lifestyle. In a June 2023 research trip to Taiwan, equipped with my interview ethics certificate, I drove 3,000 km to every town of over 35,000 inhabitants, and was repeatedly told of the pervasive concern of an accidental and unnecessary war. Taiwanese believe, with some truth, that their more nuanced and submissive intercourse with Beijing is less likely to result in a war-provoking loss of face than Washington’s confrontational diplomacy.
Historically, the illusion of the spiral model was easily dispelled by the aggressive diplomacy of an adversary. By the July Crisis of 1914, the public in Great Britain had aligned with France’s preparation for war. The Spanish Civil War had begun to dissipate pacifism, and appeasement was fully dispelled in the West when Nazi Germany completed its occupation of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, and China’s persistent harassment of the Philippines’ South China Sea possessions and war rehearsals in Taiwan’s airspace, have compromised most sympathetic perceptions of Beijing.
Deterrence by Western and East Asian democracies depends not on alliances, which were always well established or easily reconstituted since the First World War, but by the collective action problem of agreeing to a common military defense burden. The 2014 seizure of Crimea and the February 2022 Ukraine War pushed the U.S. to insist on a 2 percent defense spending threshold, and then a rightward change of government in 2025 Germany raised that proportion to 5 percent. Only a few major countries, like Canada and Hungary, remain obstinate. In East Asia, security threats drove unilateral defense commitments in Japan, South Korea, and the U.S., which have since had positive follow-on effects in reluctant Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia. U.S. diplomatic missteps have led to missed opportunities in Indonesia and critical distractions in the Middle East and South Asia. AUKUS and the QUAD are thus not in themselves that important.
The current crisis is not the risk of a conflict spiral arms race provoking war, but of the increased risk of deterrence failure. The U.S. and its allies are being qualitatively overtaken by the PLAN (China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy) in shipbuilding, as indicated by the ship numbers of the IISS Military Balance between 2021 and 2025. China has not kept pace with 2021 predictions of its fleet reaching 460 surface vessels by 2030. However, it has dramatically closed the gap in decked missiles launchers, VLS (vertical launch systems) and TT-ASM (torpedo tubes able to launch anti-ship missiles), which taken together are crude but useful indicators of surge capacity of ASM (anti-ship missile) and SAM (surface to air missile) capabilities, though they undervalue carrier-based air power of the U.S. Navy in the deep oceans.
Since 2021, China has only added 16 blue-water ships to a total of 293 platforms (primarily 7 Type 055, 10 Type 052D mod, and 10 Type 054A), but this translates into a dramatic 50 percent increase of VLS equivalents to 6,712. This does not include 80 coastal craft totalling almost 600 VLS. According to Larry Bond and Chris Carlson’s forthcoming Harpoon V 2025 Annex on Taiwanese vessels, the electro-optical sensors of these Houbei patrol craft in typical Formosa Straits weather, outranges the Electronic Security Measures range of Taiwan’s Jin Chiang low-observability corvettes and Cheng Kung frigates, a critical weakness only fine grained wargaming can reveal. We can also see parallel investments in drone warfare suggested by insights learned in the Russia-Ukraine War, the air warfare lessons from the 2025 India-Pakistan aerial exchange, and experiments in amphibious technology.
In the same time period, the U.S. has added only 4 platforms (183 to 187) and has slid to only 10,272 VLS equivalents, despite considerable efforts in network centric warfare and the development of a series of new longer ranged missiles. Japan’s MSDF has added seven vessels for a fleet total of 85, and increased its VLS from 1,680 to 2,000. Taiwan’s navy has added six Ta Jiang corvettes, increasing its VLS equivalents by 50 percent to 632, and a total fleet of 75. In the same period, Australia saw its fleet shrink by one vessel and a commensurate VLS total to less than half of Taiwan’s. No calculations were made for Canada considering the Herculean political effort that will be needed to get their navy to deploy in harms way in the Pacific. It is presumed the ROKN will be entirely occupied by the DPRKN. Although China is outnumbered by 2-to-1 in VLS equivalents, its air force is more than capable of offsetting much of the allied advantage along the East Asian littoral, and the democratic air forces deployed in Taiwan, Luzon, Okinawa and Kyushu, Guam, and on carriers.
In my 2024 Mahanian study for the Combat Modelling group at the Trevor Dupuy Institute, I recommended against any risky early attempt by the U.S. to seek a showdown with the PLAN near China’s littoral, given the likelihood that any initial move to invade Taiwan will likely be an attempt at a carrier ambush, like the 1942 Battle of Midway. I found that 28 percent of states defeated in decisive naval engagements seek peace within the year because of political shocks, something Washington has never experienced and is not immune to (U.S. CVs were absent during the Pearl Harbor raid).
Furthermore, these figures need to be interpreted within China’s strategic objectives. The PLAN’s current trio of carriers are inadequate for challenging U.S. oceanic sea control, the key to great power status. The trio will be far outmatched into the 2030s, when compared to the closer naval balance between the German High Seas Fleet in its 1915 bid to challenge the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet in the North Sea. This is problematic, because in every war scenario, China will face an immediate U.S. maritime blockade. Like Japan during the Second World War, the PLAN is neither equipped to reciprocate a war against Western maritime commerce with submarines and long-range bombers operating from foreign bases, nor able to determine the timing of the decisive or attritive battle(s) that U.S. Admiral Paparo promised would accompany the eventually U.S. fight to retake Taiwan.
Nor does China have the requisite nuclear escalation dominance to make its conquest of Taiwan a fait accompli. China’s trio of carriers are most likely designed for patrolling the South China Sea and protecting Beijing’s fleet of Jin class SSBNs, in what must be the least defensible nuclear bastion on the surface of the planet. If Beijing trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin, part of the Jin fleet may be relocated to the Sea of Okhotsk to counter a U.S. conventional operation to sink these boats. A war over Taiwan will almost certainly involve nuclear saber-rattling to achieve or resist war termination, especially if there is ever a stalemate on Taiwan’s beaches.
In my 2024 Mahanian study, I found that it is historically rare for amphibious operations to be conducted without total sea control, although many critical conquests were achieved under these risky circumstances, such as the German seizure of Norway in 1940, and the 1982 Falkland Islands War. Given the approaching date of 2027 when Xi Jinping called the PLAN to be ready for an invasion of Taiwan, his calculus may evolve into a gamble for resurrection. University of Virginia Professor Dale Copeland in his 2015 Economic Interdependence and War, showed that in 1914, Imperial Germany decided for war against Great Britain despite their mutual trade dependence. Similarly, China’s economy was catching-up to the U.S.’s GDP, but then fell back dramatically due to Covid and U.S. tariffs: the Chinese-to-U.S. GDP balance in trillions in 2020 was $15-to-$20, $20-to-$25 in 2022, and $19-to-$30 in 2025, with a rapidly closing window of opportunity for Beijing to act on Taiwan. Both Putin and Xi are worried by long-term trends in demography, ecology and food supply, economic deceleration caused by product cycle stagnation, and western liberal influence that are eroding the legitimacy of their respective regimes.
Xi is likely deterred by his explicitly stated fear of the alleged U.S. practice of entrapping and bleeding its political adversaries, such as with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in the Iran-Iraq War, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, and Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Like Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, who sought to preserve Germany’s fleet to strengthen post-war negotiations, rather than send it for a last desperate attack (as Japan did in 1944), Xi may come to see the PLAN, the protector of the Communist Party rather than China, as key to the preservation of his status in the Politburo. He may fear the political repercussions of the abrupt sinking of the PLAN, in a manner similar to the Qing Dynasty’s 1895 loss of the Beiyang fleet during the Sino-Japanese War. A PLAN fleet-in-being inadequate to break a U.S. blockade, but expensive and politically salient to Beijing, may ultimately be held hostage by the U.S. and its allies.
Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University and the author of Militarization and War (2007) and Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer of the 3rd Field Engineer Regiment from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11. He tweets at @Ju_Sp_Churchill.
