At a ‘Threat Status’ panel hosted by The Washington Times, U.S. Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT), a member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, used his assessment of the battles between India and Pakistan as a proxy to indicate his belief that America might be losing the battle for technological superiority in warfare to global rival China.
According to The Atlantic‘s Josh Rogin, Sheehy said: “Pakistan appears to have won every engagement so far with Chinese technology against the largely Western technology used by India. That’s not good for us.”
The former Navy SEAL Sheehy also reportedly said China is no longer a “near peer competitor,” but rather a “peer to peer competitor” with the United States.
Fellow panelist Mark Lewis, CEO of Purdue University’s Applied Research Institute, said: “We sounded the alarm that we were in a race [ten years ago]. We’re still in a race and we’re falling further behind.”
Wow. Senator @TimSheehyMT: "Pakistan appears to have won every engagement so far with Chinese technology against the largely Western technology used by India. That’s not good for us.”
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) May 13, 2025
He says China is no longer a “near peer competitor,” but rather a “peer to peer competitor”…
As seen below on Fox News, Sheehy voiced his support of the Pentagon’s “sweeping transformation” including the firing of top brass (“we have 10-times more admirals than we need as far as ship count”). The congressman suggested that the overpopulated leadership ranks were to blame for China’s advancement relative to the U.S.
Sheehy said: “China builds ships 230-times faster than we do, so we have a structural challenge in our military industrial complex and that starts with the leadership. And in any organization, if you want to change it, you have to start at the top.”
Combat lethality and readiness – that should be the key focus of our military, and @POTUS and @SecDef are reorienting our armed forces to focus on just that.
— Tim Sheehy (@TimSheehyMT) May 7, 2025
There’s no second place in war. pic.twitter.com/xkZVSmuASr
Sheehy’s take is facing some criticism in the comments, where a number of observers assert that, while it’s true Pakistan is the beneficiary of Chinese tech, India is relying on Indian-built technology and Russian-built technology — and so the China vs. U.S. metric the senator draws from the Pakistan vs. India conflict isn’t perhaps an accurate one.
Kyiv-based journalist Jimmy Rushton, a self-described foreign policy/security analyst, writes that Sheehy’s extrapolation is “not even close to being accurate,” contending that of the “equipment used by the Indian military – the majority is domestically produced; the other main supplier is Russia or the Soviet Union.”
Not even close to being accurate, in regards to equipment used by the Indian military – the majority is domestically produced; the other main supplier is Russia or the Soviet Union.
— Jimmy Rushton (@JimmySecUK) May 13, 2025
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