"This Ukraine crisis that we're in right now, this is just the warmup," Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said at a conference last week, according to the WSJ Editorial Board.

"The big one is coming. And it isn't going to be very long before we're going to get tested in ways that we haven't been tested" for "a long time."

According to Richard, things are getting worse.

"As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking. It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are," he said, adding "as those curves keep going," it won't matter "how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are—we're not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem."

Note that modifier "near-term." This is a more urgent vulnerability than most of the political class cares to recognize.