China directs largest military build-up since 1930s Nazi Germany, expert warns, citing Pentagon report

"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 added. "Navies are much more difficult to build up. And we are way behind. And not only do we need to catch up, but we also need to modernize our nuclear weapons, and we need to put a lot of effort into missile defense." 

DeVore further detailed the Department of Defense's findings in its report, which summarized "military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China" in 2024. 

"They're massively building up their nuclear arsenal. We expect it to expand to at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, only five years from now. Probably going to be bigger than that," DeVore said Sunday. "The Chinese Navy, not by tonnage, but by numbers is now larger than the U.S. Navy. China has something like 250 times the ship building capacity that America does." 

China already has the largest navy in the world but is expected to expand from its current 370 ships and submarines to 435 by 2030.

The DoD assesses that 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." CDO incorporates emerging technologies, such as AI, big data, brain science, and neuroscience, the report says. 

"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," the report says. "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." 

The report says the PLA seeks to bring psychological pressure and fear on an opponent, assessing that using CDO to subdue the enemy without fighting "is the highest realm of warfare."