While I largely agree with Dr. Roberts that the widening U.S.-China military gap is no longer just a technology gap, it is a gap in industrial organization, I do not think the growing gap can be explained simply by saying that America’s privatized defense industry is greedy while China’s state-owned defense industry serves the nation. If that were the whole story, it would be hard to explain why the United States maintained the world’s most competitive military-industrial complex for much of the second half of the twentieth century. This is where my view departs from Roberts’. The deeper reason is that the two countries have diverged more fundamentally in the logic of how their defense industries are organized.
The first layer is strategic environment. China’s military task over the past twenty years has been to close capability gaps quickly in near-seas denial, regional sea control, air and missile defense, Rocket Force strike capacity, naval shipbuilding expansion, and preparation for intense conflict on its periphery. That naturally favors quantity, tempo, cost control, systems integration, and industrial replicability. The United States, by contrast, spent the past three decades sustaining global primacy. It became used to designing highly complex, multi-theater, alliance-centered, function-stacked platforms. The result is a system that too often loads every cutting-edge requirement into one platform and then loses control in execution.
The second layer is the industrial base, especially shipbuilding and manufacturing ecosystems. China’s strongest advantage does not come from being ahead in every frontier technology. It comes from the fact that behind its military production stands a vast civilian foundation in shipbuilding, steel, electromechanical systems, heavy industry, electronics, materials, and port logistics. That industrial depth gives China a scale effect and resilience the United States increasingly struggles to match.
The third layer is that the U.S. defense sector has become trapped in a model of extreme complexity, low production volume, long development cycles, and oligopolistic contracting. The United States can still innovate. The problem is that its innovation is often locked inside a system that is extraordinarily expensive, compliance-heavy, subcontracted, and politically fragmented. Once a project is dominated by a few prime contractors, and then shaped further by congressional district politics, multistate subcontracting, sustainment incentives, and audit burdens, the result becomes predictable: systems grow more intricate, costs rise, delivery slows, and course correction becomes harder.
The fourth layer is that China’s institutional advantage is not simply that the state can issue commands. It is that the feedback loop among the state, state-owned enterprises, local industrial chains, research institutes, and commercial manufacturing is much shorter. That allows faster iteration, faster scaling, and a more effective conversion of industrial capacity into deployable military capability.
What’s important is that CHINA, CAN & WILL, if ever needed, to make the US EXTINCT in LESS than 15 minutes with DF61 with 60 independently targeting nuclear warheads, flying at MACH50 atmospherically, absolutely undetectable and impossible to defend against, delivering an EXTINCTION EVENT on the US.
US CANNOT even get a single prototype hypersonic missile to work.
Beyond this ANY of China’s weapons is now technically SUPERIOR against any in kind weapons US possesses.
US is OBSOLETE because Americans CANNOT MAKE ANYTHING ANYMORE and it’s military strategy based on WW2 “power distance” has been demonstrated by the Iran war to be totally defenseless against hypersonic missiles.
A war with China would make the current Iran war “child’s play” in comparison.
I understand your broader point, and I agree with the core direction of it: the U.S. can no longer assume that military pressure on a major industrial and nuclear power like China would look anything like the wars it fought against weaker states over the past few decades.
China’s deterrent capability is real, and it has changed the strategic equation in a very serious way. Any direct war between the U.S. and China would be on an entirely different scale from recent U.S. wars, and many Americans still do not seem to fully grasp how catastrophic such a conflict could become.
That said, I would still be a little careful with very specific weapons claims unless they are clearly verified. The larger point does not actually depend on proving every technical detail. The more important reality is that China now possesses enough advanced missile, industrial, and nuclear capability to make any U.S. attempt at direct war extraordinarily dangerous and potentially unacceptable in cost.
So I think your core conclusion is fair: results matter, and the result is that the era of easy American military coercion against peer powers is over. But precisely because the stakes are so high, sober reasoning still matters too. In this case, reasoning is not the opposite of strength. It is what helps prevent catastrophe
1. Claimed (or even “demonstrated”) ranges and payloads are only a starting point. Actual capability of ANY system must include its ability to penetrate the defensive array of the target and its surroundings. Until this is actually tested, there are just too many unknowns to make confident predictions of system success on the battlefield.
2. Discussion of hardware capabilities misses the key point of operator proficiency under fire. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about HIMARS or fighter aircraft, combat proficiency is a significant factor. PLA training has dramatically improved in recent decades, but the last time the Chinese military faced hostile fire was the 1979 border war with Vietnam. A 25-year-old soldier or pilot in that conflict is now over 70 years old.
3. Finally, orders of battle and weapon system capabilities need to take into account where and when they would need to be employed. Here, China has the significant advantage of planning for scenarios along their coastline and near-offshore. In the meantime, how long does it take to redeploy a carrier battle group or MEU to the region?
The most important factor is the human capital. China has the human capital to support the national agenda while America is dependent on immigrants. 40% of America's post grads degrees are awarded to international students. 87.5% of the numbers are to Chinese students. It's even more important when the Chinese students are the best.
I agree that human capital is one of the deepest layers of this competition, and probably more important in the long run than any single weapons system. China’s strength is not just that it has more engineers or scientists in absolute terms. It is that it can mobilize a very large pool of technical talent in a more nationally coordinated way around industrial priorities, infrastructure, manufacturing, and strategic technologies.
At the same time, I would phrase the U.S. side a bit more carefully. America does rely heavily on immigrant talent, especially in advanced research and STEM. Temporary visa holders accounted for about 37% of U.S. science and engineering research doctorates in 2018–2021, and foreign-born workers made up 43% of doctorate-level scientists and engineers in the U.S. workforce in 2021. That is a real structural dependence. 
But I would avoid saying 40% of all postgraduate degrees go to international students, or that 87.5% of them are Chinese students. The official numbers are lower and more mixed than that. In fall 2021, U.S. institutions enrolled about 433,500 nonresident postbaccalaureate students, while total postbaccalaureate enrollment was about 3.2 million. And Open Doors reports that Chinese graduate students were about 122,778 in 2023/24, roughly 24% of all international graduate students, not anything close to 87.5%. 
So I think the stronger version of your argument is this: the U.S. still has an extraordinary ability to attract global talent, which remains a major strategic advantage. But that advantage also reveals a vulnerability, because America’s advanced research system depends heavily on foreign-born talent, while China is increasingly able to generate, retain, and direct more of its own high-end human capital at scale. That matters not only for science, but for manufacturing depth, state capacity, and long-term strategic competition.
The numbers you mentioned saw a 40% drop due to the tension between China and America. Many Chinese students are staying home because Chinese University are getting better than the West and are cheaper. The recent Chinese international students are becoming more 2nd tier students who can't get into a Chinese university.
the J-20 fighter is far superior than F-35 in speed, range, firepower and radar tech: Mach 2 vs. Mach 1.6 top speed, 2,000 km combat radius vs. 1,000 km, flight ceiling 66,000 feet vs. 50,000 ft, PL-15 air-to-air missiles (range up to 300 km) vs. AIM-120D (max range 180 km), and GaN AESA radar vs. GaAs radar (one generation ahead). the F-35s delivered in Lot 17 and up to Lot 20 (2027) are expected to be radarless, since the older radar doesn't fit with the new nose of the jet. Lockheed uses gym weights in the nose to balance the jet. It is flyable but blind.
J-20 is a twin engine heavy air superiority jet vs. F-35 a single engine multirole jet. So F-35 is not even in the same weight class as J-20. F-22 is a better comparison but it suffers from dated technology (radar, sensor fusion, avionics from the 1990s) and production long halted.
Chinese PCL-191 is far more powerful than HIMARS in range and firepower. it is a much larger, heavy-duty 8x8 platform compared to the lighter 6x6 US system. If it fires 370mm guided rockets, the max range is 370 km, with 750 mm Fire Dragon missile, the max range is 500 km. In comparison, HIMARS max range for rockets is 90 km, for ATACMS is 300 km. PCL-191 also has far larger payload and caliber.
US-defense industry serves the pockets of its private stakeholders only, whereas the Chinese one is state-owned and truly serves the country's defense-purposes ...
At a deeper level, the real issue is not which system is abstractly superior. It is which state machine is better adapted to the kind of war preparation this era demands. The post-Cold War American defense system was built for overwhelming technological superiority, global forward deployment, alliance support, and sustained low-intensity warfare. It was optimized for expensive, complex, expeditionary, information-dominant power. China’s defense system was built for industrial rise, regional denial, large-scale platform replication, and sustained military expansion under cost constraints. It was optimized for quantity, tempo, construction capacity, and systems pressure.
Today, competition in the Indo-Pacific increasingly looks like preparation for high-intensity industrial war. The question is no longer who can build the single most expensive weapon. It is who can, over five- and ten-year horizons, keep producing larger numbers of platforms that are advanced enough, maintainable enough, and deployable at scale. Under those conditions, China’s system holds the structural advantage, while the weaknesses of the old American model are becoming more exposed.
“Today, competition in the Indo-Pacific increasingly looks like preparation for high-intensity industrial war. The question is no longer who can build the single most expensive weapon. It is who can, over five- and ten-year horizons, keep producing larger numbers of platforms that are advanced enough, maintainable enough, and deployable at scale. Under those conditions, China’s system holds the structural advantage, while the weaknesses of the old American model are becoming more exposed”
In a near- or medium-term conflict, the US is out-manufactured. I don’t see this changing
Most of US "advanced" weapons are already near obsolete or useless with the exception of its submarines, as demonstrated in Ukraine, the Red Sea (Houthis) and recently in the Persian Gulf, Israel.
Tanks are easily taken down: US, British and German tanks were easily destroyed in Ukraine and now in Southern Lebanon.
US Aircraft carriers were forced to retreat in the Red Sea by the Houthis and in the Persian Gulf by Iran.
Patriots and THAADs have been easily taken down in Ukraine and basically useless in Israel.
And Iran, with so little economic resources, has already taken down an F-35 and rendered Israel's hyper touted Iron Dome and similar air defense systems near useless.
One of those floating, tax eating, monstrosities needs to be deep sixed by a hypersonic missile so the incredible hubris of tRUMP, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth is given a reality check. I would feel almost as sorry for the sailors who go down with it as I would for the innocents in Gaza who’ve been slaughtered by the Zionists.
The US military can really “intervene.” This is fundamentally a question of national political will, and the military can (at best) only offer its best advice.
The notion that the USN can sail into the South China Sea with two or three carrier-strike groups as a survivable, viable, war-making threat is risible in the extreme. Destroyers with the Aegis missile-defense systems installed would be no match for not just the Chinese hypersonic anti-ship missile suites, but massive drone attacks as well. And those pricey carriers would hit the seabed within minutes/hrs of actual combat.
Hope there are some realistic war-planners in and outside the Pentagon, such as RAND, McKinsey, et al counseling against military suicide vis-à-vis the PRC/PLA.
Pakistan used Chinese air defense system against india during OP sindoor (may 2025) their crucial airforce bases like Nur khan got destroyed ,( HQ-9B surface-to-air missile and JY-27A radar ,PL-15 air-to-air missile reportedly malfunctioned, J-10C and JF-17 Block III fighters, manufactured in China, were deployed throughout the operations.)
before that their chinese defense system failed to intercept brahmos missile in 2022.
same pattern was observed during other crisis around the world,
US has sold during Iraq war and still sells military equipment with no encryption and the same radio frequencies on all units sold across multiple countries
US will never sell you better military tech than it has, so your always behind buying US tech.
Also F35 and Stealth is defeated by same tech as in a remote control 💀💀💀💀
I get the impression we're comparing apples and oranges when contrasting the USA and China.
In the sense that the USA armed forces of today is a relic of another era of tech. They were created on a blue print which evolved during the Cold War (basically unlimited funding to face an existential adversary) and then post-1991 glided forward, with a reorientation towards special forces and mostly small/short duration conflicts (besides the two wars in Iraq) as evil bogeymen in the form of "terrorists" were created (goat and camel herders with rifles for the most part) and slaughtered, adversaries against whom they had enormous asymmetrical conventional arms advantages (which as we're seeing with Iran today, the perceived dominance of the USA's ability versus a regional power, is greatly diminished).
China on the other hand is gearing itself up to face an existential adversary and is devoting unlimited funding (who knows what their black budget is), building up and aiming to surpass the USA. Realistically or reasonably it will aim for anything between equal to 3x size just to be able to deter aggression towards it (An invasion and occupation force would need to be obscenely big). And it's doing so by reproducing the advanced (and not so advanced) versions of existing conventional weapons of its adversary.
Which brings us back to the USA.
When the B2 bomber was rolled out during desert storm in 1991, it had already been in service for nearly a decade (since '83 or '84). This means production started in the 70s, prototypes were around in the 60s and planning on paper could reasonably have started in the 50s. The B2 (and the F15/F16) represents the pinnacle of pre-91 tech (pound for pound, the f35 Is shit), it was created to bomb Moscow, it was created to carry nukes not conventional ordinance.
So then we can take, as a data point, all these R&D failures (you mentioned; it's all public info, and there's a lot more) of the USA over the past two decades.
So how could the USA realistically screw over the challenger to its crown?
Well for starters it could promote it's adversaries to continue researching vectors and producing obsolete tech. The USA has an unlimited money printer: a projected spend of $2 trillion on paper is a lot of economic activity and the results can be mediocre and that's ok if the objective is to misdirect the attention of your adversaries.
This is what I think is going on.
Realistically the days of occupying countries is over. Afghanistan and Iraq had tiny populations compared to the bigger power blocs/powers.
There was a recent episode of the Shawn Ryan podcast, which has a discreetly high probability of being softcore modern propaganda outlet, where an ex Delta force commander was talking about drone testing in the winter of 2024 (remember all the UFO stories?), stuff like mothership drone carriers and the like.
Then we have Ukraine as a data point (leaking into Israel, Lebanon and Iran), and the emergence and primacy of drones on the battlefield, AI, but also ground based autonomous weapons (I even saw a video of Dutch troops training with mini robot tanks in 2024!). Large scale infantry is still important, but specialist assault units are more important than large scale mechanized infantry (which have become porcupines to withstand incessant attacks of small FPV drones).
Another good data point is the lack of known missile production by the USA.
I honestly think the USA has some superb next gen tech ready to go, which they'll unveil only if push comes to shove with a peer competitor. Until then they'll squeeze the old tech for what it's worth.
I think proof of this concept is Russia's oreshnik. The nutcracker is new tech in terms of being hypersonic (and if Chinese university students can create hypersonic missiles, I'm sure the USA MIC knows how to do the same, they're just pretending to be incompetent), but it's actually old tech, it's the new pinnacle of old tech (medium range ballistic).
I've heard and read wild stories about hidden Russian tech. To be clear it's all sci-fi. Directed energy and Tesla originals. But realistically, neither Russia nor the USA (nor China) have any incentive to bring out next gen or different paradigm tech until a conflict between them starts. Like the discombobulated weapon special forces used to liquidate Maduro's bodyguards.
While I largely agree with Dr. Roberts that the widening U.S.-China military gap is no longer just a technology gap, it is a gap in industrial organization, I do not think the growing gap can be explained simply by saying that America’s privatized defense industry is greedy while China’s state-owned defense industry serves the nation. If that were the whole story, it would be hard to explain why the United States maintained the world’s most competitive military-industrial complex for much of the second half of the twentieth century. This is where my view departs from Roberts’. The deeper reason is that the two countries have diverged more fundamentally in the logic of how their defense industries are organized.
The first layer is strategic environment. China’s military task over the past twenty years has been to close capability gaps quickly in near-seas denial, regional sea control, air and missile defense, Rocket Force strike capacity, naval shipbuilding expansion, and preparation for intense conflict on its periphery. That naturally favors quantity, tempo, cost control, systems integration, and industrial replicability. The United States, by contrast, spent the past three decades sustaining global primacy. It became used to designing highly complex, multi-theater, alliance-centered, function-stacked platforms. The result is a system that too often loads every cutting-edge requirement into one platform and then loses control in execution.
The second layer is the industrial base, especially shipbuilding and manufacturing ecosystems. China’s strongest advantage does not come from being ahead in every frontier technology. It comes from the fact that behind its military production stands a vast civilian foundation in shipbuilding, steel, electromechanical systems, heavy industry, electronics, materials, and port logistics. That industrial depth gives China a scale effect and resilience the United States increasingly struggles to match.
The third layer is that the U.S. defense sector has become trapped in a model of extreme complexity, low production volume, long development cycles, and oligopolistic contracting. The United States can still innovate. The problem is that its innovation is often locked inside a system that is extraordinarily expensive, compliance-heavy, subcontracted, and politically fragmented. Once a project is dominated by a few prime contractors, and then shaped further by congressional district politics, multistate subcontracting, sustainment incentives, and audit burdens, the result becomes predictable: systems grow more intricate, costs rise, delivery slows, and course correction becomes harder.
The fourth layer is that China’s institutional advantage is not simply that the state can issue commands. It is that the feedback loop among the state, state-owned enterprises, local industrial chains, research institutes, and commercial manufacturing is much shorter. That allows faster iteration, faster scaling, and a more effective conversion of industrial capacity into deployable military capability.
Reasoning is NOT important.
What’s important is that CHINA, CAN & WILL, if ever needed, to make the US EXTINCT in LESS than 15 minutes with DF61 with 60 independently targeting nuclear warheads, flying at MACH50 atmospherically, absolutely undetectable and impossible to defend against, delivering an EXTINCTION EVENT on the US.
US CANNOT even get a single prototype hypersonic missile to work.
Beyond this ANY of China’s weapons is now technically SUPERIOR against any in kind weapons US possesses.
US is OBSOLETE because Americans CANNOT MAKE ANYTHING ANYMORE and it’s military strategy based on WW2 “power distance” has been demonstrated by the Iran war to be totally defenseless against hypersonic missiles.
A war with China would make the current Iran war “child’s play” in comparison.
RESULTS count more than REASONING.
I understand your broader point, and I agree with the core direction of it: the U.S. can no longer assume that military pressure on a major industrial and nuclear power like China would look anything like the wars it fought against weaker states over the past few decades.
China’s deterrent capability is real, and it has changed the strategic equation in a very serious way. Any direct war between the U.S. and China would be on an entirely different scale from recent U.S. wars, and many Americans still do not seem to fully grasp how catastrophic such a conflict could become.
That said, I would still be a little careful with very specific weapons claims unless they are clearly verified. The larger point does not actually depend on proving every technical detail. The more important reality is that China now possesses enough advanced missile, industrial, and nuclear capability to make any U.S. attempt at direct war extraordinarily dangerous and potentially unacceptable in cost.
So I think your core conclusion is fair: results matter, and the result is that the era of easy American military coercion against peer powers is over. But precisely because the stakes are so high, sober reasoning still matters too. In this case, reasoning is not the opposite of strength. It is what helps prevent catastrophe
Have you noticed how LITTLE results now matter to Western politicians?
Three minor points:
1. Claimed (or even “demonstrated”) ranges and payloads are only a starting point. Actual capability of ANY system must include its ability to penetrate the defensive array of the target and its surroundings. Until this is actually tested, there are just too many unknowns to make confident predictions of system success on the battlefield.
2. Discussion of hardware capabilities misses the key point of operator proficiency under fire. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about HIMARS or fighter aircraft, combat proficiency is a significant factor. PLA training has dramatically improved in recent decades, but the last time the Chinese military faced hostile fire was the 1979 border war with Vietnam. A 25-year-old soldier or pilot in that conflict is now over 70 years old.
3. Finally, orders of battle and weapon system capabilities need to take into account where and when they would need to be employed. Here, China has the significant advantage of planning for scenarios along their coastline and near-offshore. In the meantime, how long does it take to redeploy a carrier battle group or MEU to the region?
The most important factor is the human capital. China has the human capital to support the national agenda while America is dependent on immigrants. 40% of America's post grads degrees are awarded to international students. 87.5% of the numbers are to Chinese students. It's even more important when the Chinese students are the best.
Exactly. There's no comparison.
I agree that human capital is one of the deepest layers of this competition, and probably more important in the long run than any single weapons system. China’s strength is not just that it has more engineers or scientists in absolute terms. It is that it can mobilize a very large pool of technical talent in a more nationally coordinated way around industrial priorities, infrastructure, manufacturing, and strategic technologies.
At the same time, I would phrase the U.S. side a bit more carefully. America does rely heavily on immigrant talent, especially in advanced research and STEM. Temporary visa holders accounted for about 37% of U.S. science and engineering research doctorates in 2018–2021, and foreign-born workers made up 43% of doctorate-level scientists and engineers in the U.S. workforce in 2021. That is a real structural dependence. 
But I would avoid saying 40% of all postgraduate degrees go to international students, or that 87.5% of them are Chinese students. The official numbers are lower and more mixed than that. In fall 2021, U.S. institutions enrolled about 433,500 nonresident postbaccalaureate students, while total postbaccalaureate enrollment was about 3.2 million. And Open Doors reports that Chinese graduate students were about 122,778 in 2023/24, roughly 24% of all international graduate students, not anything close to 87.5%. 
So I think the stronger version of your argument is this: the U.S. still has an extraordinary ability to attract global talent, which remains a major strategic advantage. But that advantage also reveals a vulnerability, because America’s advanced research system depends heavily on foreign-born talent, while China is increasingly able to generate, retain, and direct more of its own high-end human capital at scale. That matters not only for science, but for manufacturing depth, state capacity, and long-term strategic competition.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/innovation-lightbulb-not-just-attracting-retaining-international-stem-students
International students make up almost 50% of all STEM post grads in the US.
https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/estimating-the-number-of-chinese-stem-students-in-the-united-states/
https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Feldgoise_Zwetsloot_Table_2.png
The numbers you mentioned saw a 40% drop due to the tension between China and America. Many Chinese students are staying home because Chinese University are getting better than the West and are cheaper. The recent Chinese international students are becoming more 2nd tier students who can't get into a Chinese university.
the J-20 fighter is far superior than F-35 in speed, range, firepower and radar tech: Mach 2 vs. Mach 1.6 top speed, 2,000 km combat radius vs. 1,000 km, flight ceiling 66,000 feet vs. 50,000 ft, PL-15 air-to-air missiles (range up to 300 km) vs. AIM-120D (max range 180 km), and GaN AESA radar vs. GaAs radar (one generation ahead). the F-35s delivered in Lot 17 and up to Lot 20 (2027) are expected to be radarless, since the older radar doesn't fit with the new nose of the jet. Lockheed uses gym weights in the nose to balance the jet. It is flyable but blind.
J-20 is a twin engine heavy air superiority jet vs. F-35 a single engine multirole jet. So F-35 is not even in the same weight class as J-20. F-22 is a better comparison but it suffers from dated technology (radar, sensor fusion, avionics from the 1990s) and production long halted.
Chinese PCL-191 is far more powerful than HIMARS in range and firepower. it is a much larger, heavy-duty 8x8 platform compared to the lighter 6x6 US system. If it fires 370mm guided rockets, the max range is 370 km, with 750 mm Fire Dragon missile, the max range is 500 km. In comparison, HIMARS max range for rockets is 90 km, for ATACMS is 300 km. PCL-191 also has far larger payload and caliber.
Isn't it strange that most Westerners who know that can't believe it?
living in ignorance is a bliss
US-defense industry serves the pockets of its private stakeholders only, whereas the Chinese one is state-owned and truly serves the country's defense-purposes ...
Surprise, surprise, outcomes differ ... 🤣🤣🤣
Apparently, only 30% of the new $1.5 trillion defense budget is spent on defense!
😵😵😵 ???
A-MA-ZINGGG !!!
Where then, are the 1.040 billion going ???
"Office expenditures", as Mr. Chan is suggesting ??? ... 🤔🤔🤔
It is well know that in the US, office expenditures are very high. Ref the Clinton Foundation.
What is the balance spent on?🤔
Bribes, according to many. There must be a website devoted to this issue?!
At a deeper level, the real issue is not which system is abstractly superior. It is which state machine is better adapted to the kind of war preparation this era demands. The post-Cold War American defense system was built for overwhelming technological superiority, global forward deployment, alliance support, and sustained low-intensity warfare. It was optimized for expensive, complex, expeditionary, information-dominant power. China’s defense system was built for industrial rise, regional denial, large-scale platform replication, and sustained military expansion under cost constraints. It was optimized for quantity, tempo, construction capacity, and systems pressure.
Today, competition in the Indo-Pacific increasingly looks like preparation for high-intensity industrial war. The question is no longer who can build the single most expensive weapon. It is who can, over five- and ten-year horizons, keep producing larger numbers of platforms that are advanced enough, maintainable enough, and deployable at scale. Under those conditions, China’s system holds the structural advantage, while the weaknesses of the old American model are becoming more exposed.
And this gap is likely to widen, not narrow.
Washington's inattention, even cluelessness, is alarmng.
“Today, competition in the Indo-Pacific increasingly looks like preparation for high-intensity industrial war. The question is no longer who can build the single most expensive weapon. It is who can, over five- and ten-year horizons, keep producing larger numbers of platforms that are advanced enough, maintainable enough, and deployable at scale. Under those conditions, China’s system holds the structural advantage, while the weaknesses of the old American model are becoming more exposed”
In a near- or medium-term conflict, the US is out-manufactured. I don’t see this changing
Most of US "advanced" weapons are already near obsolete or useless with the exception of its submarines, as demonstrated in Ukraine, the Red Sea (Houthis) and recently in the Persian Gulf, Israel.
Tanks are easily taken down: US, British and German tanks were easily destroyed in Ukraine and now in Southern Lebanon.
US Aircraft carriers were forced to retreat in the Red Sea by the Houthis and in the Persian Gulf by Iran.
Patriots and THAADs have been easily taken down in Ukraine and basically useless in Israel.
And Iran, with so little economic resources, has already taken down an F-35 and rendered Israel's hyper touted Iron Dome and similar air defense systems near useless.
Isn't it weird to see how long an entire nation can deny reality?
I still have my doubts that the Zumwalt can actually float.
The Peter Principle apparently applies to Empires. They tend to rise to a level of incompetence, and then remain there.
Sad for us, but not for ROW>
Very good reporting.
Thank you for sharing.
One of those floating, tax eating, monstrosities needs to be deep sixed by a hypersonic missile so the incredible hubris of tRUMP, Vance, Rubio, Hegseth is given a reality check. I would feel almost as sorry for the sailors who go down with it as I would for the innocents in Gaza who’ve been slaughtered by the Zionists.
If the US military doesn't intervene, the US is finished.
The US military can really “intervene.” This is fundamentally a question of national political will, and the military can (at best) only offer its best advice.
❤️👍💯
‘Propaganda’ means ‘spreading,’ so you’re correct, I’m spreading information. It’s easily verifiable, too.
The notion that the USN can sail into the South China Sea with two or three carrier-strike groups as a survivable, viable, war-making threat is risible in the extreme. Destroyers with the Aegis missile-defense systems installed would be no match for not just the Chinese hypersonic anti-ship missile suites, but massive drone attacks as well. And those pricey carriers would hit the seabed within minutes/hrs of actual combat.
Hope there are some realistic war-planners in and outside the Pentagon, such as RAND, McKinsey, et al counseling against military suicide vis-à-vis the PRC/PLA.
Pakistan used Chinese air defense system against india during OP sindoor (may 2025) their crucial airforce bases like Nur khan got destroyed ,( HQ-9B surface-to-air missile and JY-27A radar ,PL-15 air-to-air missile reportedly malfunctioned, J-10C and JF-17 Block III fighters, manufactured in China, were deployed throughout the operations.)
before that their chinese defense system failed to intercept brahmos missile in 2022.
same pattern was observed during other crisis around the world,
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/op-sindoor-exposed-pattern-of-failures-underperformance-by-chinese-weapons-systems-report/articleshow/121251371.cms
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/from-operation-sindoor-to-venezuela-how-chinese-weapons-radars-keep-failing-explained/articleshow/126412700.cms
Pentagon $2.5T failed audit tells all
US has sold during Iraq war and still sells military equipment with no encryption and the same radio frequencies on all units sold across multiple countries
US will never sell you better military tech than it has, so your always behind buying US tech.
Also F35 and Stealth is defeated by same tech as in a remote control 💀💀💀💀
Food for thought.
I get the impression we're comparing apples and oranges when contrasting the USA and China.
In the sense that the USA armed forces of today is a relic of another era of tech. They were created on a blue print which evolved during the Cold War (basically unlimited funding to face an existential adversary) and then post-1991 glided forward, with a reorientation towards special forces and mostly small/short duration conflicts (besides the two wars in Iraq) as evil bogeymen in the form of "terrorists" were created (goat and camel herders with rifles for the most part) and slaughtered, adversaries against whom they had enormous asymmetrical conventional arms advantages (which as we're seeing with Iran today, the perceived dominance of the USA's ability versus a regional power, is greatly diminished).
China on the other hand is gearing itself up to face an existential adversary and is devoting unlimited funding (who knows what their black budget is), building up and aiming to surpass the USA. Realistically or reasonably it will aim for anything between equal to 3x size just to be able to deter aggression towards it (An invasion and occupation force would need to be obscenely big). And it's doing so by reproducing the advanced (and not so advanced) versions of existing conventional weapons of its adversary.
Which brings us back to the USA.
When the B2 bomber was rolled out during desert storm in 1991, it had already been in service for nearly a decade (since '83 or '84). This means production started in the 70s, prototypes were around in the 60s and planning on paper could reasonably have started in the 50s. The B2 (and the F15/F16) represents the pinnacle of pre-91 tech (pound for pound, the f35 Is shit), it was created to bomb Moscow, it was created to carry nukes not conventional ordinance.
So then we can take, as a data point, all these R&D failures (you mentioned; it's all public info, and there's a lot more) of the USA over the past two decades.
So how could the USA realistically screw over the challenger to its crown?
Well for starters it could promote it's adversaries to continue researching vectors and producing obsolete tech. The USA has an unlimited money printer: a projected spend of $2 trillion on paper is a lot of economic activity and the results can be mediocre and that's ok if the objective is to misdirect the attention of your adversaries.
This is what I think is going on.
Realistically the days of occupying countries is over. Afghanistan and Iraq had tiny populations compared to the bigger power blocs/powers.
There was a recent episode of the Shawn Ryan podcast, which has a discreetly high probability of being softcore modern propaganda outlet, where an ex Delta force commander was talking about drone testing in the winter of 2024 (remember all the UFO stories?), stuff like mothership drone carriers and the like.
Then we have Ukraine as a data point (leaking into Israel, Lebanon and Iran), and the emergence and primacy of drones on the battlefield, AI, but also ground based autonomous weapons (I even saw a video of Dutch troops training with mini robot tanks in 2024!). Large scale infantry is still important, but specialist assault units are more important than large scale mechanized infantry (which have become porcupines to withstand incessant attacks of small FPV drones).
Another good data point is the lack of known missile production by the USA.
I honestly think the USA has some superb next gen tech ready to go, which they'll unveil only if push comes to shove with a peer competitor. Until then they'll squeeze the old tech for what it's worth.
I think proof of this concept is Russia's oreshnik. The nutcracker is new tech in terms of being hypersonic (and if Chinese university students can create hypersonic missiles, I'm sure the USA MIC knows how to do the same, they're just pretending to be incompetent), but it's actually old tech, it's the new pinnacle of old tech (medium range ballistic).
I've heard and read wild stories about hidden Russian tech. To be clear it's all sci-fi. Directed energy and Tesla originals. But realistically, neither Russia nor the USA (nor China) have any incentive to bring out next gen or different paradigm tech until a conflict between them starts. Like the discombobulated weapon special forces used to liquidate Maduro's bodyguards.