Blitzo said:
The US does not require victory to be one where China undergoes "regime change" -- the outcome of a war, whereby China does not have the ability to geoeconomically or militarily challenge the US outside of China's immediate periphery and territorial airspace and waters, for multiple decades going into the future, would likely be seen as satisfactory.
Just expanding on the response below.
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China's immediate periphery does include South Korea and Japan (including the Okinawa Islands)
So no matter what the US does, China can always build sufficient military forces (low-cost mines and missiles at a minimum) to credibly threaten a blockade of Korea or Japan. This will always challenge the credibility of any US security guarantee.
EDIT
On missiles, remember that China is "standardising around the DF-16/17 platform as an MRBM system, DF-26 as an IRBM system, and are procuring DF-100s as their GLCM system". China has a demonstrated ability to mass-produce these missiles at low-cost as per USAF statements below. Whilst the US could conceivably destroy China's missile production facilities, it should take less than 5 years to rebuild everything that was destroyed. And given the nature of missile production which is fairly straightforward, I would expect China to have rebuilt its missile forces in 5 years or so. The economy should easily be able to support this, which means China rebuilds a credible first-strike capability against airbases in Korea and Japan - like which exists today.
The US keeping China down so that it cannot geoeconomically or militarily challenge the US for multiple decades is not feasible, unless the US continually wages war to keep China poor. And that is a recipe for disaster.
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And consider the following thought experiment.
It would take less than 5 years for China to rebuild everything destroyed in a war.
But currently only 1.7% of China's GDP is devoted to the military.
In the aftermath of any US-China war, we could expect Chinese military spending to double to 3.4% of GDP, which is still slightly less than the US today.
So at that point, China has an economy the same size and which is spending twice as much on the military as compared to today.
If we look at destroyers, China currently has about 40 modern AEGIS-type destroyers in service and has demonstrated an ability to launch 10 destroyers in a single year back 2019 during peacetime. So China has recently demonstrated the capacity to build a replacement Destroyer fleet in as little as 4 years.
We see something similar with Chinese Frigates. I call it about 50 vessels with Frigate-level capability and missions.
In the year of 2021, 8 Type-054 Frigates were launched by a different set of shipbuilders.
So the Chinese Navy could receive a replacement Frigate fleet in as little as 6 years.
But remember that the Chinese military is spending twice as much as today, so they could actually sustain a destroyer and frigate fleet which is twice the size of todays. So in the following years, the Chinese Navy could trend to 80 Destroyers and 100 Frigates.
You can continue doing these sorts of analyses for the rest of the Chinese military and get similar conclusions.
So to repeat myself, the US keeping China down so that it cannot geoeconomically or militarily challenge the US for multiple decades is not feasible, unless the US continually wages war to keep China poor. And that is a recipe for disaster.
Chilled_k6 said:
Pulled the parts I thought were most relevant to the PLA with some big claims made by this American Air Force officer.
As well as the sheer speed with which Beijing is able to acquire new weapons, Holt contends, the Chinese are also operating far more efficiently. “In purchasing power parity, they spend about one dollar to our 20 dollars to get to the same capability,” he told his audience. “We are going to lose if we can’t figure out how to drop the cost and increase the speed in our defense supply chains,” Holt added.
