Brent Sadler says it’ll take a generation to rebuild US Navy, catch up with growing Chinese threat

Brent Sadler, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, says it was refreshing to hear Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth discuss the urgent need to rebuild the Navy at his confirmation hearing today. “It’s not a problem you can solve in just a couple years. It’s going to take a generation to build back 30 years of basically neglect in this post-Cold War era to really catch up with the Chinese,” he says. “We’ve lost that edge. We’re barely able to deter them as they are acting with this very bellicose and high confidence increasingly across the Asia Pacific.”