Comparing War Readiness Between China and the US
It is hardly an exaggeration to say a military conflict is a high probability event between China and the US in the coming decade. There are flash points in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and the East China Sea.
Rhetoric from the American officialdom and media clearly signals the US plans to militarily confront China and stop its economic, trade, and technological developments. Its fleets of ships and airplanes are constantly circling Chinese shore. It is mobilizing its lackeys in the region to fight on its side.
Mutual hostility is at the point for war to break out.
This won’t be a WWI type of sleepwalking into a war. Everyone knows a showdown is coming.
How ready are China and the US in the coming war? What outcome should we expect in such a confrontation absent a nuclear exchange where everyone loses and life on earth is over?
I think there are at least 5 areas to investigate in comparing the two countries’ preparedness for war and predicting the likely outcome –
1. Capacity to sustain a high intensity warfare
· The Ukraine war and the Middle Eastern conflicts have shown that modern wars between peer belligerents will be long, bloody, expensive, and above all, highly dependent on war production and logistics.
· China has a 3 to 1 advantage versus the US in overall industrial capacity and an unquantifiable advantage in surge capacity. China’s share of global manufacturing output is 35% vs. 12% for the US. China has idle or mothballed capacity for almost all major industrial products from steel to electronics to vehicles to ship building to drones.
· Such capacity advantage applies to the defense industry.
· Much of Chinese industrial capacity is state-owned and can be easily mobilized for defense production. All major defense firms are state owned and produce for purpose, rather than profit.
· China’s cost, speed, and scale advantages in industrial production are not in dispute while the US suffers from well-documented cost and production schedule issues in its military industrial complex.
· It’s safe to say China enjoys the same pole position in its capacity to sustain a long war as the US enjoyed in WWII. China has an overwhelming industrial superiority that the US has never experienced with any adversaries in its history.
2. Geography and military posture
· The war will be fought in China’s shores or near abroad – possibly Japan and the Philippines. Much of the action will happen in a radius that can be covered by Chinese intermediate range missiles and land-based bombers and fighters.
· The nearest US territory will be Guam, 4,800 kilometers away. The US does have military bases in Japan, Korea and the Philippines. But these countries will take the risk of being bombarded by China if they allow these bases to be used against China. It’s unclear how they will choose despite the hawkish rhetoric expressed in their pledge of allegiance to the US. One can talk tough now but act quite differently when facing certain destruction.
· In essence, the war will be one between a landed fortress and an expeditionary air and maritime force. For most of the history of war, ships lose to fortress.
3. Military doctrines and capabilities
· The US military has never stopped fighting after WWII. There are a number of embedded assumptions in its military doctrines from that experience:
i. Technically inferior enemies with weapons like IED
ii. Uncontested battle field
iii. Low intensity warfare where you can evacuate wounded and safely retreat
iv. Safe sanctuaries in rear bases where resupplies are unthreatened
v. Immunity from counter attacks, especially US homeland
vi. Quantitative and qualitative superiority in weaponry and training
vii. Intelligence asymmetry from ISR platforms, space-based assets, and signal intelligence
viii. Politically weak opponents with low morale and lack of general support from the population
· None of these US military assumptions apply in a war with China and will be a liability rather than asset. The muscle memory of the US military will be deadly to itself in the coming war.
· Chinese military doctrines have been honed for the last 70+ years around territorial defense and Taiwan reunification. The explicit mission of the PLA is to ensure the success of a war in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.
· The specific war doctrine for these scenarios is called Anti Access Area Denial (A2AD). The essence is to deny enemy access to the theater of war and inflict unacceptable losses for any intervention.
· The A2AD system is composed of –
i. A large arsenal of cruise and ballistic missiles, many with hypersonic capabilities
ii. Space-based intelligence and munition guidance assets
iii. Manned and unmanned air, ship and submarine assets
iv. Networked warfare focused on Informationization and intelligentization
v. In short, a high tech system of systems war fighting technologies and capabilities
· These assets bear no resemblance of anything the US military has fought against before.
· China also brings to the battle no presumptions about the enemy and their capabilities since the Chinese military has been peaceful for over 40 years. Despite the lack of experience, the upside is such a military will adapt to changing war environment more rapidly and adjust its strategies and tactics under the circumstances. There is no bad habits or assumptions to unlearn.
4. Will to fight
· One often overlooked aspect of war is the will to fight. It comes down to why the military is putting their lives on the line. In a peer to peer situation, the party that can endure the most pain for the longest will prevail.
· China is fighting for its territorial integrity and its national pride. It has the collective will of the population firmly behind it. The US is fighting to maintain its hegemonic rule in an imperialist adventure. The pain threshold of its society is much lower. Put it bluntly, China is much more casualty tolerant than the US will ever be in a war at China’s door step.
· Cost of failure calculation differs completely. For the Chinese, losing a war is an existential threat. No government can hope to retain its legitimacy if it backs down from a war when the barbarians are at the gate. For the US, it’s just a chess board move in the “great game”. Losing a war in Taiwan or SCS is a setback but doesn’t represent an existential problem.
· The late Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew summarized the stakes well – “China will fight a second time, a third time until it wins when it comes to Taiwan and will never give up”. Can the US say that about its commitment?
5. Track record
· I have always found it puzzling how track record is a big part of evaluating the potential fit and likely success of a job candidate while the pundits seldom even mention it when talking about wars
· The US has a very spotty track record in wars after WWII despite having a military budget that dwarfs the rest of the world. It practically lost every war except the 1991 first gulf war against Iraq.
· Interestingly, China was the first country that broke the US string of military successes when China pushed the US back from the Yalu River to the 38th Parallel and fought the US and its allies to a standstill in the Korean peninsular in the early 1950s. McArthur was forced to resign from the defeat.
· China did that when it had to send a poorly equipped peasant army after 4 years’ bloody civil war. China’s GDP in that time was less than 5% of the US, which was at the pinnacle of its military and economic power after WWII.
People will do well to remember that the coming war between China and the US won’t be the first time the two confronted each other on the battle ground.
When you consider the capacity for war, the geography, the will to fight, the military doctrines and the two countries’ track record against each other, it is an easy bet who will prevail in the next war.