Special to WorldTribune.com

Bill Gertz, Washington Free Beacon

China’s development of precision weapons and other advanced capabilities has undermined U.S. military superiority, the Pentagon’s senior weapons developer told Congress on Wednesday.

“We’re at risk and the situation is getting worse,” Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, said. Kendall singled out China’s military buildup as a major worry, noting that in 1994 the communist state was assessed by U.S. intelligence agencies to be a backward military power, but one that would be more advanced in 10 or 15 years. …

“No one observed more carefully the dominance that we demonstrated in 1991 than the Chinese,” Kendall said, referring to U.S. precision arms capabilities, stealth forces, and ability to conduct wide area surveillance. “And what I’m seeing [now] in foreign modernization, again, particularly China’s, is a suite of capabilities that are intended, clearly to me, at least, to defeat the American way of doing power projection, [the] American way of warfare when we fight in an expeditionary manner far from the United States,” Kendall said.

The U.S. military’s use of what Kendall termed “high-value assets” such as satellites for targeting and communications, aircraft carriers, and foreign U.S. air bases are now targeted by the Chinese and others with precision weapons, especially missiles.

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