Well, the whole "China growing into an economic juggernaut and emerging superpower" thing took us by surprise, so we've been playing catch up in a lot of ways. I don't think I need to impress upon the folks here how mind bogglingly stupid and expensive the GWOT was, nor how deeply we got settled in to the new COIN paradigm. As a result, at least from a military perspective (since that's where I can offer the most insight), we've been stuck trying to patch holes in our military rather than being able to proactively shape and improve it. Right now, the PLA has a number of "freebies" we're addressing, and the overall pace and scale of the PLA's modernization has been affording new ones faster than we can take away old ones.
This is, in part, why much of our procurement strategy, emerging doctrine, threat assessment, and public-facing releases have been so defined by "countering" PLA capabilities, rather than creating or refining our own. LRASM was basically "Holy shit they have a Navy! We need something NOW to remedy that!" for instance. EABO, and to a slightly lesser extent ACE/ACO, was similar, but more along the lines of "Holy shit they have a good navy! Oh no, they also have an Air Force! With a conventional ballistic threat on top of it! We need a CONOP to even survive that environment!"
Since we got such a comparatively late start on things, and since the PLA has kept up such an enviable tempo of modernization, we just won't see those reactive efforts fully bear fruit until the 2030s. Once we get ourselves to where we need to be, both in terms of force structure/posture, as well as the supporting procurement and defense-industrial/technological base, we'll be in a much better position to start trying to win, rather than our current scramble to prevent us losing.
On the non-military side of things, that's a whole can of worms that I'd rather not get into too much. I've been fairly clear about my disdain for politicians, having dealt with far too many of them, so it's where I guess I'll cast much of the blame. Creatures with the sole purpose of pandering to arbitrary clumps of uninformed people, put into positions of power based on how well they can score in a divisive, meaningless, glorified popularity contest compared to their doppelgänger on the other (arbitrary) team, are obviously not in their positions on account of their merit.
But again, whole can of worms.
Depends on what you mean by "professional" discourse to be honest. Within our actual DOD circles? I'd say it's fairly sensible. Most of the people I work with are smart enough to recognize how precarious our situation is, and we usually treat the PLA with due respect in our internal work. The public-facing side of things is substantially worse. As I've mentioned, policymakers often hold some pretty laughable positions on the topic, and our uniformed politicians (once you hit big boy Officer ranks, promotion requires senate approval, meaning all our O-5s and above are congress critters to at least some degree) have a knack for making regrettable statements when they speak on the subject. Despite this, in their professional duties, they're usually willing to listen and learn from our reports and briefings, with the caveat that some do exist who don't want to hear news that they don't like.
Once you get into the think tank hellscape, or worse, the op-ed/"defense journalist" cesspool, things take even more of a nosedive. The China threat is kind of a unique one, in that it's the first time we've ever had a real toe-to-toe adversary who we not only weren't culturally familiar with, but who managed to sneak up on us. As a result, we have a horrifically out of touch set of civilian "China Experts," almost all of whom built their careers by understanding the Cold War era PLA, and who typically come from a talent-pool that played second fiddle to its Soviet-focused counterpart.
The delightfully synergistic effects of such outdated "authorities" on the topic, the fact that the PLA actually was pretty nonthreatening back in their (seemingly recent, to an uninformed reader) professional heyday, and the fact that China (unlike the Soviets or Germans or British or any of our other major historical adversaries) is a pretty poorly understood nation by most Americans (with an unfamiliar culture, an unfamiliar history, and an unfamiliar language), results in mistaken, outdated, and deliberately misleading publications being written about the PLA (often lambasting flaws which have been remedied for years at the time of writing), being the primary point of reference for a general public that lacks any sort of "baseline" understanding of the topic, that doesn't have much of the respect that comes from familiarity, and that will devour every last article written about how the Bad™ is stinky and dumb and gonna lose.
Overall, perhaps "sub-optimal" would be a diplomatic way to put it.
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