Writing for the American Conservative this week, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts calls on Republicans to think more critically about defense spending.

Amid a ballooning national debt, Roberts says that "in my conversations with members of Congress in recent weeks, conservatives repeatedly mentioned their willingness to tackle the thorny challenge of military spending reforms." He adds that Heritage will soon "convene top experts in national security and defense to scrutinize the Pentagon’s budget, line by line."

Roberts also offers specific areas for savings.

He calls for Republicans to support a renewed base realignment effort to close military bases that are no longer needed. Seeking to keep the Pentagon gravy train running in their districts, many Republicans failed this test last time around. Roberts also notes that Congress continues to spend vast sums on equipment such as the Chinook helicopter that the military doesn't want or need.

I'd offer another example in the form of the most recent Defense Act's saving of the Littoral Combat Ship. In the event of war with China, these vessels would be useful only as a very expensive graveyard for American sailors. Republicans like Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL) and Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA) are wrong to support the ship only for reasons of cronyism.

Equally important, Roberts rightly notes that the defense industrial base is often failing to deliver on time and at acceptable cost . And he rightly demands more robust action to leverage Europe's sustained increases in defense spending. While there has been some recent positive action in this regard , more is needed. Roberts recognizes the top line: The U.S. military can no longer do everything, everywhere . At the margin, China must be the priority.

Still, Roberts could go further. This is best encapsulated by his reference of Heritage's most recent military readiness index and associated conclusion that "Our military is too outdated to fully protect American interests at home and abroad. We need a stronger military overall, and especially a force able to deter the rising threat of communist China and 21st-century threats."

Again, this focus on China is necessary and praiseworthy. Yet Roberts and Heritage overemphasize new technology as the key to defeating China.

Ultimately, what the U.S. military needs to deter-defeat China is not so much new technology per se, but weapons systems most effective for the near-term fight. The Marine Corps is the service branch leader in this regard, prioritizing amphibious mobility and lethality over heavy maneuver forces. But in any war over Taiwan, the U.S. military will face a far outsize scale of People's Liberation Army's air and naval forces. The U.S. thus needs more submarines and fewer aircraft carriers, and a lot more long-range missiles .

Critically, the China threat also requires U.S. aircraft and drones that can destroy a lot of PLA air assets before needing to rearm or refuel. Unfortunately, however, Heritage continues to push the F-35 fighter jet over the F-15EX as the superior means of waging this fight. Even though, that is, the F-15EX's greater range, higher weapons payload and lower lifetime costs make it plainly better suited to fighting the PLA . The F-35 might be a flying stealth supercomputer with superb sensors (at least when it's working), but that doesn't mean much if the jet can't destroy large numbers of enemy forces and needs to regularly refuel (tankers aren't stealth).

Again, China is the key. New technology is all good and well, but the military needs to maximize its readiness to fight today and tomorrow rather than in the mid-2030s. A major trade-off in the defense budget process centers on what the military needs to fight now, and what it wants to fight with in the future. Pushing Congress to make tough decisions, Roberts should reconsider technology as the key factor towards prospective victory.