News that China is building a 100,000-strong Marine Corps signals the Communist state wants a boots-on-the-ground operation ready to land on enemy soil, Jed Babbin, deputy undersecretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush told Newsmax TV.
"Certainly its neighbors have to be worried about that," Babbin told host Steve Malzbergh on Monday's "America Talks Live."
"If the Chinese are going to do things like model their Marine Corps [after] nations like ours and like the British, they're probably going to have it as a kick-in-the-door force.
"That's the force that you would land on an enemy's soil and have the invasion go from there. So they're probably waving a big stick . . . at Japan, at Taiwan, by doing all of this."
See Steve Malzberg on Newsmax TV: Tune in beginning at 12 PM ET to "America Talks Live" — on FiOS 615, YouTube Livestream, Newsmax TV App from any smartphone, NewsmaxTV.com, Roku, Amazon Fire — More Systems Here
The South China Morning Post reported Monday that China plans to increase the size of its marine corps five-fold, from 20,000 personnel to 100,000.
The move is intended to protect China's territorial waters as well as its interests throughout the world, the news site said.
Babbin told Malzberg that China has many capabilities that "we've pretty much ignored for many years."
"We've got the North Korean thing, but the Chinese are a really big, big problem, and this is the kind of thing that we're going to have to deal with one way or the other, and we're not going to want to go to war with them," he said.
"So there's a lot of other things that we can do, but we've got to be prepared. Right now we're not. There's a whole raft of things we can talk about in terms of strategic and tactical advantages we could gain that we're giving up to the Chinese right now."
China has come under criticism from its Asian neighbors and from the U.S. for the construction of man-made islands in disputed waters it claims as its own. Satellite images have shown what experts believe is military activity on the islands.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.