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The senior naval officer in charge of America’s nuclear triad says current global tensions sparked by Russia’s war against Ukraine could be the opening act for a larger conflict the US must prepare for. In remarks at the Naval Submarine League’s 2022 Annual Symposium & Industry Brief, US Strategic Command commander Admiral Charles Richards said the Ukraine crisis “is just the warm-up”. “The big one is coming, and it won’t be long before we’re tested in ways we haven’t been tested in a long time,” he said. Mr Richard said the “deterrence level” of US forces against China – a major competitor and adversary – was “slowly sinking” because the Chinese had been able to develop and deploy more “capability in the field” at a faster pace than the their American counterparts. “As these curves continue, it doesn’t matter how good we are [operating plan] it’s either how good our managers are, or how good our horses are – we’re not going to have enough of them. And that’s a very short-term problem,” he said, though he added that American submarine power remains “perhaps the only true asymmetric advantage we still have over our adversaries.” In August, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday told the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation that the most significant obstacle to strengthening US naval capabilities is “an industrial capability that is limited.” Successive waves of base closures and defense budget cuts have led the US to close former state-owned shipyards and transfer more and more responsibilities to private contractors, leaving far fewer facilities capable of building or maintaining warships than were available during previous conflicts.
