One analyst says that China is carrying out the largest military buildup since Nazi Germany in the 1930s, following a new Department of Defense assessment detailing Beijing’s efforts, which include weapon upgrades and psychological warfare.
In an article for The Federalist, Chuck DeVore, chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, cited the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress and warned that the US has spent $5.4 trillion on its war on terror and futile nation-building while the Chinese threat has grown. He asked Congress to support the incoming Trump administration’s plan to reallocate Pentagon funding to better emphasize naval strength, nuclear deterrent, missile defense, and logistics.
“China is engaging in an unprecedented military build-up that the world frankly hasn’t seen since Adolf Hitler in the 1930s,” DeVore, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, told “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
“Now the big difference there, is that he really focused on land power, which frankly is pretty easy to build up pretty quickly,” he claimed. “Navies are substantially more complex to build. And we’re terribly behind. Not only do we need to catch up, but we also need to modernize our nuclear weapons and devote significant resources to missile defense.
DeVore went into greater depth on the Department of Defense’s findings in its study, which reviewed “military and security developments involving the People’s Republic of China” in 2024.
“They’re massively increasing their nuclear arsenal. We estimate it to reach at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, which is only five years away. “Probably going to be bigger than that,” DeVore remarked on Sunday. “The Chinese Navy has surpassed the United States Navy in terms of numbers rather than tonnage. China has almost 250 times America’s shipbuilding capacity.”
The research describes how China has expanded its People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) arsenal to include 50 additional intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of striking the continental United States, bringing the total to 400. The DoD reports that China has installed 300 medium-range ballistic missiles and 100 long-range cruise missiles. Their arsenal already contains over 600 active nuclear bombs, with more than 1,000 expected by 2030.
According to the Department of Defense, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has the world’s largest arsenal of hypersonic missiles, including the DF-27, which, as DeVore observes, “are capable of evading U.S. missile defenses and targeting Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska.”
China already boasts the world’s largest navy, but it is planned to increase from 370 ships and submarines to 435 by 2030.
The 182-page DoD report also describes how the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), aims to “expand the reach of its influence operations around the world and seize information dominance on the battlefield” by researching and developing cognitive domain operations (CDO), which it regards as the “next evolution of psychological warfare.”
According to the Defense Department, CDO “blends previous PRC concepts, such as public opinion guidance and psychological warfare, with modern internet technologies and communication platforms and is designed to achieve strategic national security goals by affecting a target’s cognition to change the target’s behavior and decision-making.” According to the paper, CDO includes developing technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, brain science, and neuroscience.
“The goal of CDO is to achieve what the PLA refers to as ‘mind dominance,’ which the PLA defines as the use of information to influence public opinion to affect change in a nation’s social system, likely to create an environment favorable to the PRC and reduce civilian and military resistance to PLA actions,” stated the report. “The PLA probably intends to use CDO as an asymmetric capability to deter U.S. or third-party entry into a potential conflict, or as an offensive capability to shape perceptions or polarize a society.”
According to the study, the PLA aims to instill psychological pressure and anxiety in an opponent, claiming that utilizing CDO to conquer the adversary without fighting “is the highest realm of warfare.”