It's not just about manpower for their military. Their demographics are also going to ruin their economy, giving them less tax revenue that can be used for military expenditures.

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Ah, good article. Let me summarize for those who don’t feel like reading.

If every single tiny shred of CCP propaganda is true, and every missile works perfectly, and their ballistic missiles can reliably acquire, track, and destroy moving targets hundreds to thousands of miles away, and they leapfrog the US in operational experience (because they “learned from watching closely” after all!), and the entire killchain for these super-missiles remains intact and unmolested, oh and also they bomb Japan, Guam, and the US mainland with ballistic missiles (LOL), and if the US has no countermeasures to any of this so decides to just use carriers to Zerg-rush the Chinese coastline while holding their heads in their hands and crying…

…then the US military is toast! They’ll take Taiwan without a scratch for sure. You know this is true because an MIT professor and some loosely affiliated physicists in academia said so.

The US military fretting about new threats isn’t some slam dunk admission of helplessness. It kind of works the opposite way: rival announces new terrifying technology (e.g. impenetrable Russian cyborg armor), US panics and spends billions of dollars to develop, test, and field a countermeasure (e.g. the new MegaDeath 7000 Armor Annihilator rifle). Then it turns out that the scary rival technology was vaporware, and now the US has even more of an advantage. Rinse and repeat.

China isn’t Russia and is way better at building things. Presumably far less stupid and corrupt as well. But all of this is hypothetical and far too heavily weighted on comparing stats as if they’re the final arbiter. Yeah China is pumping out ships…and yet they don’t have enough trained fighter pilots to fill a single aircraft carrier. That’s cool they have 2000 hypersonic missiles. How many satellites or other assets do they have that are capable of tracking a warship in real-time to course-correct the missile during its flight? Etc. etc.

Nevermind that they have absolutely zero modern combat experience whatsoever. They’re good at oppressing their own population though, but look how that strategy worked out for Russia. Comparing trading cards stats is not especially informative here.

And this “general consensus” you keep mentioning. According to who? A few professors and a (likely) out of context quote from a war game? Pretty sure there was a war game where a Dutch fishing boat sunk every US carrier group too. (Paraphrasing but it was something similarly absurd). Wargames are not CS:GO matches where the goal is to see who is the most better. They have specific purposes to examine specific scenarios, and cycle through various hypotheticals to see what happens, often involving unrealistic constraints because they can result in interesting outcomes. The point is to learn, not to go “USA numbah one.” They should not be taken as proof of anything. Not least of all because all of the most interesting conclusions - as well as potential counters to hypothetical rival tactics - are usually classified. Therefore unavailable to trash-tier internet news sites.

The Chinese hypersonic missiles are like the F-35 all over again, but in reverse.

Yeah because those that benefit from increased military spending would never exaggerate, right? I would have trust what 8nsiders say about the US military might publicly. We are far ahead in technology than what the public is aware of.