Subject: Re: Overmatched: the U.S. military
I don't see us overmatched. 20 years in OEF and OIF hardened and vetted the troops - tactically, China is nowhere near as trained and lethal. Huge swaths of the Chinese armed forces aren't really professionalized. Now, if we did a force-on-force, all out battle, it wouldn't be pretty, but that is really not a likely scenario. We may be overmatched in the cyber/offensive cyber operations line of operations, but certainly not in blue water navy or nuclear triad.

All that said, projecting power is expensive and hard.

If it comes to it, and there’s a polymarket option to bet on the outcome, I’m betting on China quick, even with odds. I see us as desperately overmatched. While the US may have some assets worth noting, I have two major concerns:

One is that aircraft carriers are no longer what we think they are, because they are now vulnerable to a cheap and simple weapon: the drone swarm. Anyone who thinks China can’t turn its (newly minted) industrial might to producing hundreds of thousand of drones almost overnight isn’t living in today’s world. (I remember how the US did so at the outset of WWII, overwhelming Germany & Japan with sheer numbers of planes, tanks, guns, etc.) In a swarm attack you may kill a lot of them but *inevitably* some are going to get through, and all your fancy $36 billion jets are going to end up at the bottom of the ocean.

China now has what we *used* to have, an astonishing ability to produce, and produce they will if they decide to. They won’t even have the problems that FDR did trying to prepare the country for war, for them it’s just by dictat, and it’s done.

But my biggest reason for the bet would be simply your last line: “projecting power is hard.” It can be done, obviously, we did it in World War II (at tremendous national cost) and we did it in Iraq, and in Vietnam and Afghanistan with less happy outcomes. As for Taiwan, let me take you on a tour of jolly old England, circa 1940. Germany was sure they would overwhelm the undermatched British Air Force, but they we deficient in critical element: distance.

England had, what I have seen described as “a force multiplier”: distance. Britain was fighting over its own territory. English pilots who were shot down could parachute down and go right back up. German pilots who were shot down ended up prisoners. More to the point, because of the distance between French airfields and the targets in Britain - and the characteristics of German aircraft, they had but 10 or 15 minutes of “dwell time” over the targets. (The aircraft were not designed for distance, but for speed for “lightning war.”) On some runs, the fighters couldn’t even escort the bombers all the way to the targets, which made the big lumbering warplanes highly susceptible.

Now consider that Taiwan is 90 miles from China - with its almost infinite resources of land, production, and fuel, and is 7,000 miles from the US. Recall that Taiwan is small, but not tiny: it’s roughly the size of Massachusetts, so there’s lots of ocean and beaches, but not enough resources to sustain the population or its industry without tons of shipping, which could easily be blockaded if China chose to go that route.

Anyway, 1) distance and 2) industry. Yeah, we are majorly overmatched. I’m not even talking about the Pentagon’s inability to develop a weapons system that works (or is appropriate to the threat). Yeah, polymarket. I’ll make a bunch even as my country goes down the chute.