David Gompert rightly points out that “Keeping Ahead of China Requires Investment in Military R&D” (op-ed, May 30). But the most important imbalance in China’s favor isn’t in technology, but capacity.

For example, China’s fleet is now bigger than ours. The Chinese have been engaged in a massive buildup of munitions while the U.S. military is dangerously low on the precision-guided munitions it would need in a conflict with a peer adversary.

In the 1980s, when the U.S. defense industry made major technological breakthroughs in areas such as stealth technology, we spent twice as much on procurement as we did on R&D. Now we spend almost as much on R&D as we do on procurement.

R&D spending has also been increasing at a much faster rate than procurement spending. Consider that over fiscal years 2021-23, R&D spending increased by $34 billion while procurement of ships, planes and munitions increased by only $18 billion.

R&D is important, and we’ll still do plenty of it, but new spending in the near term needs to be focused on buying larger quantities of weapons systems that already exist. The next war might not wait until the next-generation weapons are ready in the 2030s.