Members of the military wait for U.S. President Donald Trump to arrive for a meeting convened by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Quantico, Virginia, U.S., September 30, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

In an extensive piece published Monday morning, the New York Times editorial board warned that President Donald Trump's military spending push will "magnify our weaknesses" in the face of a Chinese military that is already poised to outmatch its capabilities.

The piece cited a "multiyear" assessment of the U.S. military's capabilities against China in the event of an armed conflict over Taiwan, dubbed "Overmatch." China has reportedly set plans to invade and take full control of the island nation by 2027, and in the past, U.S. leaders from all sides of the political spectrum have pledged to protect it in such an event.

Based on the report's findings, the editorial board said that a Biden-era security official "paled," realizing that for "every trick we had up our sleeve, the Chinese had redundancy after redundancy." Trump's Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also previously observed that in war game exercises conducted with China, the U.S. loses "every time."

The Trump administration is pushing for a $1 trillion increase in defense spending in 2026, but the NYT board warned that "much of that money will be squandered on capabilities that do more to magnify our weaknesses than to sharpen our strengths," on account of the military focusing too much on expensive weapons that are too easily countered.

"The [Overmatch] assessment shows something more worrying than the potential outcome of a war over Taiwan. It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones," the editorial board's piece explained. "And it traces a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power."

The U.S. military's push for expensive hardware sets it up to be the most effective, primarily, "if you want to go to war with a relatively poor, weak country like, say, Venezuela." When put up against other advanced military powers with more inventive investments, it falls short.

The NYT board ultimately called for the U.S. miliary to "reinvent itself" with new ways of thinking and investing resources, blaming decades of traditional thinking in Congress and the Pentagon for the current predicament.

"Ultimately, a stronger U.S. national security depends less on enormous new budgets than on wiser investments," the piece continued. "Spending heavily on traditional symbols of might risks shortchanging the true sources of American strength: relentless innovation, rapid adaptability and a willingness to discard old assumptions."

Whether or not the Trump administration is up for this remains to be seen.

"Mr. Trump and his administration have received the latest warnings of the Overmatch brief," the piece concludes. "The need for change is urgent. The question is whether we will do so in time."