Defense professionals highlight near-term threats to U.S. national security.
The United States isn’t prepared enough for a major war as threats of one grow due to new technologies, greater access to advanced weaponry for malign actors, and heightened geopolitical tensions, defense analysts and insiders say.
Security experts have called America’s current national defense strategy, which was written in 2022, outdated and say the country is dangerously underprepared for a direct conflict involving nations with robust security forces like China and Russia.
The RAND National Security and Research Division underscored this point in a 2024 report.
It stated current threats against the United States are the “most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”
The report also cited expanding partnerships between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as part of the reason why any conflict could escalate and drag the United States into a “multitheater or global war.”
It said a conflict of such a scale isn’t sufficiently accounted for in U.S. military planning.
Compounding this is the lack of preparedness of the U.S. military noted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
On its website, the agency states that two decades of near-perpetual conflict have eroded the readiness of America’s armed forces.
The GAO states that the U.S. military faces imminent challenges such as equipment modernization, maintenance, realistic funding, and service member fatigue.
In 2024, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) updated its 10-year outlook to reflect “increasingly perilous challenges” to military readiness in large-scale combat operations.
Reasons for this include rapidly evolving technology in warfare like artificial intelligence and the systemic challenge posed by China.
The report noted China is pushing to develop a “highly modern military capable of defeating the United States regionally and eventually globally in a joint, multidomain war.”
There’s also an understanding within the U.S. military of Russia as a political powder keg that could erupt into a conflict involving large-scale combat.
Outside the existing war in Ukraine, there’s growing tension between the United States and Russia’s armed forces in the Arctic, which poses the risk of direct military conflict, according to an article published by the U.S. Naval Institute on Dec. 25.
