How America is losing its military supremacy to China
Beijing’s army boasts almost a million more troops than the US and has the largest navy in the world
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How America is losing its military supremacy to China
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Allegra Mendelson25 May 2025 8:28am BST
A video of Chinese President Xi Jinping reviewing a military parade at the Museum of the Communist Party of China in Beijing
A video of Chinese President Xi Jinping reviewing a military parade at the Museum of the Communist Party of China in Beijing Credit: Greg Baker/AFP
Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan, which the government in Taipei rejects, and has threatened to invade the island on numerous occasions. As a key arms supplier to Taiwan, former US president Joe Biden had said that the US would come to the country’s defence, but Donald Trump has refused to offer a clear position on the issue.
Mr Heath explains that China’s proximity to Taiwan gives it an advantage because Beijing would have immediate access to “all ground-based systems”. Meanwhile, the US would have “to project power from an ocean away”.
At the senate address in April, Mr Wicker noted that China is now “capable of denying US air superiority in the first island chain,” referring to the string of islands in the Pacific, which include parts of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Borneo. This means that China’s surface-to-air missiles are now capable of shooting down any US aircraft in the event of a war.
Washington has also sounded the alarm over China’s cyberwarfare capabilities. In a recent speech at a university in California, Gen Wickert said China had managed to infiltrate the US’s electrical grid and plant malware on SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, which monitor critical infrastructure like electricity, water and gas distribution.
“China has gained access to those systems and mapped them, and that is certainly concerning. It’s considered an act of war,” Gen Wickert told The Telegraph.
While it has come a long way in the decades since, the PLA continues to face significant challenges, which experts say have stopped it from reaching parity with the US.
For one, the US military is tried and tested on the battlefield, having fought in several conflicts around the world from Iraq to Afghanistan, while the PLA has not fought a war in decades.
China’s armed forces also struggle with integration. While the US military is a fully joint force, meaning the different services – from the air force to the navy – work closely together, the PLA remains disjointed.
Kitsch Liao, the associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, noted that the PLA’s readiness levels, which measure preparedness for active combat, are also lower than the US’s.
“If the US wants to bomb one site, they can assign one aircraft. They don’t need another aircraft on standby in case the jet breaks down. The US used to do this in the 1960s and China still has to do that,” said Mr Liao.
The US’s air force readiness for the last year was just over 60 per cent, which is “relatively poor”, according to Mr Liao, but China’s score, which is not made public, is believed to be even lower.
Imitate rather than innovate
China’s defence limitations stem in part from the PLA’s inherent structure as an extension of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Unlike militaries in the US or the UK, which are separate from any political entity, the PLA was established to serve the communist party and its primary objective today is to keep the party in power.
Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, explained that it would be equivalent to if in the US “the Republicans had their own army and the Democrats had their own army”.
Given the PLA’s role in the party, it often focuses its development on political issues rather than security concerns, as evidenced by its fixation on Taiwan, which does not pose any immediate threat to China.
The PLA is also hampered by its tendency to imitate rather than innovate. Rather than developing its own cutting-edge hardware, China relies on following closely behind its American counterparts, which makes it very difficult to match or overtake the US.
“They’re always one step behind because their methodology for catching up has been technology theft and acquisition,” said Mr Thompson.
