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The US/allied theory of victory is mostly cope, rehashing the Cold War strategy of technological superiority to overcome numerical inferiority.
Only it's hard to retain technological superiority against a state with such a gigantic amount of STEM talent and a non-broken economic system ruthlessly prioritizing capital investment and technological superiority.
Plus numerical inferiority will be staggering. Chinese shipbuilding capacity is roughly 52-55% of world shipbuilding, roughly in line with their steel production. We're just not winning a naval war here, it's not going to happen. The little formation that circumnavigated Australia recently has roughly similar firepower (measured by VLS tubes) as the whole Australian navy - Australia is a useful ally for something like subordinating Papua New Guinea or clobbering sand people with special forces but we have negligible competence or firepower in a war of mass. South Korea and Japan are both heavily reliant on food/fuel imports and are de facto islands, they will struggle to sustain a long war against such a big power despite being somewhat serious. And we should assume a long war, all great power wars become long wars.
What stops China executing a full-court press over the Pacific, sweeping elan, training, tactics, fortifications and all else aside with numbers and production capacity just like the US did to Japan? Only temporary factors like the size of the US navy at present, incomplete Chinese autarky... But Chinese autarky is developing and the US navy is still shrinking!
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/02/the-u-s-navy-has-a-big-problem-shrinking-away-to-nothing/
What hope do we have when the biggest, strongest power in the bloc is withering away in peacetime!
The worst thing is that the Western world has decided that it's impossible for us to strike first, that's apparently unthinkably unsportsmanlike behaviour. Never mind that we have rapidly diminishing advantages in fleet tonnage, areas of technological superiority and training. We also have to concede the opportunity for the first strike, take another Pearl Harbour. This 'serious and thoughtful' blogger (clearly ex-military or otherwise initiated in these matters) wants to systematically eradicate Chinese military industry and academia but still refuses to consider a first strike: https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2018/10/china-war-setting-stage.html
The grand plan is to fight the final battle for world dominance with a shrinking fleet against a continuously growing industrial juggernaut... letting them pick the time and place for the final showdown? What have our thought leaders been huffing?
I lay the blame on lib-racism. If you go back and read The Rising Tide of Colour you will ironically find a much more measured and sophisticated analysis of world affairs from a white supremacist writing 100 years ago than soaks through in vibes and in media today. Stoddard believed that the Nordic race was the master race with innately superior martial qualities and yet he still concluded that the Chinese were a serious threat through numbers and sheer tenacity if nothing else. He made the hypothesis that even though European troops would be better at fighting, when it comes to long marches and enduring privations the Chinese could even the odds. And indeed we saw something like that in Korea where clever Chinese tactics, night marches and similar proved highly effective against firepower superiority.
Of course, caring about how tough one's soldiers are in forced marches is suited more for the world of 100 years ago than today. But the abstract logic of looking at the situation as it is rather than as we'd like it to be is rare indeed. Maybe the country that wins all the physics and chemistry olympiads is good at physics and chemistry? Maybe the people that produce so much of the world's manufactured products would be extremely tough to fight in wartime? Maybe the country that's producing the most robots will have highly efficient industry? Perhaps the country that makes the most drones will be advantaged in the drone age? None of this is an extraordinary leap of logic, yet everyone seems to miss it.
People assume that the Chinese fleet is all 'Chinesium', that the concrete can be punched through, it's all slave labour and cheap copying, all their figures are invented and surely they'll collapse soon to the property bubble... Maybe in this fantasy world it is reasonable to let them get in the first blow and control the sequence of events. But we don't live in the fantasy. We can't rely on the B-21 or NGAD showing up to save everything, NGAD may not even arrive at all. There are going to be Chinese equivalents produced at growing speed and numbers (as we are seeing this year) because they have a rich country with vast resources to tap. Meanwhile our resources seem to be shrinking away into the ether and we can't seem to beat Yemen or outproduce Russia. This bodes ill.
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