The American experience of the last four decades has been based on fighting asymmetric wars and engaging in air battles against inferiorly equipped opponents without a MIC of its own. Since World War II, the US has not faced an opponent with a military capability of its own. Even in the Gulf War, Iraq did not have a MIC to support its military. Furthermore, Iraqi resistance was a complete joke. When ground military planning was carried out, the expected losses were 25% to cross the Saddam Line. This never happened because the Iraqis did not put up any resistance.
And if we talk about air-naval warfare, the American experience is the same as China's, totaling zero experience. They have not fought a naval war since World War II.
What Ukraine and Russia demonstrate is the ability to learn and adapt as the war progresses. A state can start a war one way and end it completely differently from when it started. Captain Charles D. Marashian conducted a in 1982 trying to correlate factors that implied combat effectiveness; experience implied a greater chance of survival, but not of effectiveness.
Military forces require institutions, processes and procedures that can learn the right lessons from field experience and improve their performance. Research institutes can help systematize insights into superior doctrines and develop more lethal weapons technology. Scientists have observed that a major source of the German army's adaptability and lethality in World War II was partly due to its deliberate and thorough analysis of its post-action reviews and willingness to implement changes accordingly. This was evident in the Gulf War, because in that war, Iraqi officers, especially Iraqi air force officers, had extensive combat experience from several years of fighting in the war against Iran, while American pilots who participated in the Gulf War had mostly never engaged in aerial combat. Yet American forces fared better in aerial confrontations. So it seems that training and experience are effective but not things that can be quantified. Experience alone provides a short-term advantage.
Political aspects, for example, are absolutely vital, because military personnel who can operate on the front line with minimal interference from political authorities tend to demonstrate greater adaptability on the battlefield than those whose decisions are made for political reasons rather than operational ones.
In other words, there is a much greater balance between the US and China.
We have already seen that the war in Ukraine is producing operational changes in the PLA, there are several lessons learned that will be increasingly introduced to the Chinese military, thus keeping them ahead of the development of modern combat.
