Either Kurt Schlichter has been perusing this blog or he’s simply observing the same things I am:
Nations famously tend to always try to fight the last war, and what America is preparing to do today with the newly assertive China is no exception. The problem is our last war was against primitive religious fanatics in the Middle East and China is an emerging superpower with approaching-peer level conventional capabilities and an actual strategy for contesting the United States in all the potential battlespaces – land, sea, air, space and cyber. America is simply not ready for the Pacific war to come. We’re likely to lose.
In Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein was dumb enough to choose to face a U.S. military that was ready to fight its last war. That last war was the Cold War, where the Americans were prepared to fight a Soviet-equipped conscript army using Soviet tactics. And Saddam, genius that he was, decided to face America and its allies with a Soviet-equipped conscript army using Soviet tactics, except fractionally as effective as the Russians. It went poorly. I know – I was there at the VII Corps main command post as his entire army was annihilated in 100 hours.
Chances are that the Chinese will not choose to fight our strengths. In fact, those chances total approximately 100{8378aafe0df5a8211310d3c8e9d482552a62e5d1e3375b859a1f05ab4de12dda}.
It’s called “asymmetrical warfare” in English. What it’s called in Chinese I have no idea, but Sun Tzu wrote about it. Don’t fight the enemy’s strength; fight his weakness. Strike where he is not. Spread confusion about your intentions; force him to lash out. It’s all there in The Art of War; it’s just not clear anyone forming our current American military strategy has read it. Maybe they would if we labeled it “Third World” literature and said checking it out would check a diversity box for promotion.
We seem intent on fighting not the enemy we face but the enemy we want to face. This is a rookie mistake. And we’ve built our strategy around that error.
The point about the way we have switched to the German strategy in favoring quality over quantity is a very good point too. The roles have changed; China is now in the place of the USA in terms of manufacturing capability that the US was vis-a-vis Germany and Japan in WWII.