Decoupling, Reshoring and Restoring US Defense

Austin Bay on Apr 23, 2025

In a column published June 12, 2019, I wrote, "I think 50 years from now, historians will argue that between 2000 and 2016, communist China decided to target America as an adversary ... Beijing saw America in retreat and entertained visions of global dominance."

Examples of American retreat: 1) continuing to offshore manufacturing industries, including pharmaceuticals; 2) downsizing its navy (regarded as secondary in an era of The War On Terror); 3) running huge annual deficits to finance ever-expanding social welfare programs; and 4) major universities promoting outright anti-American socio-propaganda "studies" (e.g., Diversity, Equity, Inclusion racism) that amounted to domestic psychological warfare undermining American morale and key institutions. Oh, yes, the Marxist DEI frame tale claimed America was utterly flawed from the beginning. That lie definitely hampered military recruitment and harmed U.S. military morale.

My column used 2000 AD as the start point of China's slow "corrosion offensive" against the U.S., but Chinese Communist Party dirty dealing dates back to the 1990s, when America began losing critical production capacity -- think of Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" of jobs going to Mexico.

In the 1990s -- often in the name of environmental protection -- the U.S. began ceding mining and refining of vital mineral resources to unreliable foreign states. Beijing quickly dominated the "polluting" rare earth refining industry. Electronic and digital devices rely on rare earths. Around 2010, some savvy observers noticed America was vulnerable to a rare earths embargo. You have to wonder if Save The Earth enviro-activists received Chinese financial support. The Soviet Union bankrolled Western anti-nuke activists during the Cold War.

The COVID-19/Wuhan virus pandemic exposed the fragility and flaws of globalized medical and pharmaceutical supply chains. In 2020, Beijing mulled denying the U.S. drugs and medical gear.

My bottom line: Beijing wages a war to dominate the world. In pursuit of that goal, the Chinese state has weaponized every technology, media and means of personal and organizational interaction.

Over the last 25 years, I have argued "Unrestricted Warfare" (published by the People's Liberation Army in 1999) is a deadly intellectual guidebook CCP leaders are using to defeat the U.S. and establish a Chinese-mandated international order.

When authors Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote "Unrestricted Warfare," both men were People's Liberation Army Air Force colonels.

Chapter 2 discusses full-spectrum warfare. Its title in English: "The War God's Face Has Become Indistinct." My interpretation: In China's long war with the U.S., cheap goods, a staggering trade imbalance, weather (spy) balloons transiting U.S. airspace, grade school and college curricula, crooked media, open border immigration and lawfare gimmicks are weapons that degrade American capabilities.

Chapter 2 lists several types of warfare that China can use to attack and harm the U.S. without risking a military counterattack -- can't risk a nuclear exchange, must avoid a conventional clash, so win by degradation.

The authors love Drug Warfare. Pushing drugs obtains "sudden and huge illicit profits by spreading disaster in other countries." In 1999, it was a speculative option based on China's experience in the Opium War. 2021 to 2024: During the Biden administration open borders era, fentanyl savaged American society. Beijing's proxy militia delivery system for fentanyl? Mexican criminal cartels.

What to do?

Michael Brown is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for Security and Technology. From 2018 to 2022, he served as director of the Department of Defense's Defense Innovation Unit. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Empty Arsenal of Democracy," Brown wrote a hard truth, with China threatening U.S. allies and Russia "menacing eastern Europe's NATO members ... The odds that the United States might have to fight in a great-power war are higher today than at any point this century."

Unfortunately, the U.S. "is not ready for such a conflict," despite possessing sophisticated weaponry and soldiers "second to none." The U.S. "has low stockpiles of munitions, its ships and planes are older than China's, and its industrial base lacks the capacity to regenerate these assets." The Ukraine War has forced militaries to relearn "the lessons of both world wars: major conflicts can still turn into slugfests, and industrial capacity is decisive."

Brown concludes, "The government will have to expand the U.S. defense industry itself, which has become so concentrated that firms have become less cost competitive, resulting in higher prices for many weapons systems."

Four years ago, I argued two words describe the solution to America's manufacturing and resource vulnerabilities: decoupling and control. Decoupling means separating U.S. supply chains from those of our adversaries. "Control of production" means build it yourself.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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