Question: Which statement most accurately reflects the military balance between China and the United States—and the likely outcome of any conventional war that might erupt?

1. America's technologically superior forces trump China's and the United States would be the clear winner today.
2. China is rapidly closing its technology gap with America so that over time, the likely winner will be more and more difficult to predict.
3. If China's economic growth continues to outpace America's, China will produce far greater numbers of weapons, and at some point, sheer quantity will likely trump any remaining American technological superiority.
4. In a regional conflict, China need not have a superior military force to win.
5. All of the above.

America's military position relative to that of China bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the most memorable quotes of the great baseball pitcher Satchel Page: “Don't look back, something might be gaining on you.”1

Here, while it is certainly true today that the American military is the technologically superior fighting force, China is rapidly closing that gap. Moreover, China is closing that gap not through innovation in its own right but rather through a wide-ranging campaign of intellectual property theft—primarily, but not exclusively, from the US military itself.

As we documented in earlier chapters, this campaign includes a highly sophisticated combination of cyberespionage, traditional spycraft, and the reverse engineering of foreign arms purchases. The Pentagon's rapidly deteriorating relative advantage is being further accelerated by the ongoing offshoring of much of America's production to China and the collateral transfer of many “dual use” technologies to the Chinese military.

Consider that as a result of its cyberespionage, China can now field fifth-generation fighters comparable to that of the United States—with such fighters being the linchpin of air dominance in the skies of Asia. At the same time, China can now produce a dizzying array of “Designed in America” drones while China's cyberwarriors have also stolen what author Bill Gertz describes as the “the heart of the American navy”—the Aegis battlement-management system.2

As for China's old-fashioned, Russian-style cloak-and-dagger spycraft, it has led to the acquisition of much of the technology that drives and guides those growing legions of ballistic and cruise missiles now aimed at American ships, forward bases, and cities. Perhaps the most unsettling fact here is that these missile arsenals with Chinese characteristics are far superior in numbers to those of the United States, if for no other reason than because of the restrictions faced by America in its disarmament treaties with Russia.

And speaking of Russia, as we have also previously discussed, China now ably defends its air spaces with Russian systems that are the best in the world. Through the acquisition of yet more “dual use” technologies from “friends” of America like Australia, France, and Germany, China can also now deploy virtually undetectable conventional diesel-electric submarines and advanced helicopters along with a growing fleet of extremely deadly cruise-missile-equipped catamaran boats.

Here, former Pentagon analyst Michael Pillsbury philosophically reflects on America's waning qualitative edge:

The old way of thinking used to be: “American technology is by far the world's best. Our ships, our fighter aircraft, our missiles have circuit and communications capabilities that no one can touch for twenty years.” That was all true. It wasn't a mistake to think that way. The problem is that as the controls on our technology have loosened, the basis of our military superiority has been slowly transferred, sometimes by espionage and illegal means, but often just by direct sales. At the same time, we've also cut our own defense research and development budget so that we've eaten our seeds, as some military officers like to say. What this means is that the very discoveries that made us have the best satellites, the best radio communications, the best encryption, and the best fighter planes are now gone.3

To this grim assessment, Brookings Institution scholar Michael O'Hanlon adds:

The nature of the technologies we are buying and building today make it easier for the Chinese at any plausible level of military spending to threaten our assets in the Western Pacific. And we can try to build missile defenses and we can spend ten times as much on missile defense as they spend on offensive weapons; but the offense still has a bit of an advantage in this kind of competition. So even if we keep our defense budget bigger than theirs, the shifts in technology are going to make it hard for us to operate in the western Pacific with impunity the way we've become accustomed to.⁴

On top of all this—and providing perhaps the biggest question mark at the end any hubris-laden American claim of perpetual military superiority—there is the potentially decisive role that China's rapid economic growth may eventually play in any future combat scenario. Indeed, if China's growth simply continues to outpace that of the United States at current rates, at some point its sheer military mass should be able to simply overwhelm the technologically superior forces of the United States—recall yet again Josef Stalin's astute observation that “quantity has a quality of its own.”⁵

To understand the problem that Chinese mass poses for US naval force projection in Asia, let's return to the Aegis battle-management system. This system is built around a high-powered radar system that can track incoming threats from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. Aegis, as its Greek name signals, is quite literally the digital shield for America's aircraft-carrier strike groups in the Asia-Pacific.

According to US Naval War College professor Toshi Yoshihara, China's clear strategy to defeat Aegis—and thereby gain control of key battle zones like the Taiwan Strait—is to simultaneously swarm supersaturation salvos of antiship ballistic missiles, sea-skimming cruise missiles, and high-altitude hypersonic missiles, with each coming at Aegis-equipped ships from different directions and different vectors. Under such an onslaught, even the vaunted Aegis shield is likely to shatter.6

In reflecting upon the ultimate military balance in Asia, it must finally be noted that America's biggest foe may not be China per se but rather simply the “tyranny of geography.” To put it most starkly, Asia is seven thousand miles away, and no combination of forward basing, aircraft-carrier strike groups, and long-range bombers is likely to offset the intrinsic ability of a successfully modernized and well-equipped Chinese military to fight on its home turf with nearby supply and logistics lines—even if that military remains the technologically inferior force.

Unfortunately, these are all truths that, like the name of the villain in the Harry Potter series, few in Washington policy circles dare speak. In fact, there are very good political reasons for this “see no Chinese evil” perspective.

For starters, neither the White House nor Congress wants to publicly acknowledge that a rising China is steadily closing the military gap. Such an acknowledgement would require action at a time when the American public is war weary and the budget situation is already dire. Indeed, to acknowledge the rising China threat would be to force uncomfortable “guns versus butter” budget choices in a political system already sharply polarized.

At the same time, it is far more popular for both US politicians and our military leaders to beat their chests and extol the superiority of the American military than to acknowledge a possible relative decline. To do otherwise would serve little purpose other than to further embolden China's salami-slicing tactics in the East and South China Seas—and perhaps on the Indian subcontinent.

Finally, the myth of a perpetual American military superiority also fits in well with the narrative favored by commercial interests in the United States that rake in large profits from the China trade. In this narrative, which is particularly popular in America's financial press and amongst the cable-news narrative grinders, China is a “friend” that only seeks to peacefully trade with the United States.

Never mind that many of these same commercial interests—Boeing, Caterpillar, GE, General Motors, and so on—are willingly transferring “dual use” technologies to China in exchange for the right to operate on Chinese soil. Of course, the “dual” in the “dual use” description means that these American technologies inevitably find their way into weapons pointed at US soldiers, sailors, and pilots.

At the end of the day, if the correct answer to our lead question of this chapter regarding the rapidly shifting military balance between the United States and China is indeed “all of the above” as the facts we have discussed would seem to suggest, this sobering reality brings us right back to a Mearsheimer future in which the more China sees itself gaining on the US military, the more likely it is to press its hegemonic agenda in Asia. Of course, part and parcel of this agenda will be a collateral attempt by China to push the reigning US hegemon out of Asia.

It follows from these sobering observations that our next two questions necessarily must be: (1) How really vulnerable are America forces in Asia to China's asymmetric weapons and growing military might, and (2) against the backdrop of any such vulnerability, what might be the best strategy to deal with a Chinese attack on American ships, planes, and forward bases in Asia? It is to these questions we now turn to in the next several chapters.