Inside China, military analysts decry the sorry state of military leadership, training and doctrine. It's easier to build new weapons than it is to train and maintain troops capable of using them effectively. The Chinese are more concerned with that, while the U.S. Department of Defense wants to portray China as a formidable foe, in order to justify a large defense budget. ...
Peacetime soldiers in general, and Chinese ones in particular, develop a lot of bad habits, that translates into defeats early in a war. But in a world with nuclear weapons, the old Chinese strategy of fighting a long war and grinding down a superior (man-for-man) force, no longer works. If you use conventional forces, you strike first and fast, then call for peace talks before the nukes are employed. This situation does not work to China's advantage. Chinese generals are going through the motions of creating a well trained and led army, like many Western nations have. The Americans are particularly admired, with all their practical training methods and combat proven NCOs and officers. But China still has far too much corruption in their military establishment, and too little initiative and original thinking. Going through the motions may work in peace time, but not once the shooting starts.
And my response, as It always has been when they publish pieces like this, is to agree with their analysis that China can't take us on in a full-blown war (not for decades, even with our defense budget facing cuts, although cuts would at best make the price of victory higher for our forces).
But.
That isn't the whole story. China does not have to compete with us globally to be a threat to us. China is a threat if they can project power out 500 miles from their shore and beat us within that arc. The measure of Chinese power that can harm us can't be whether the Chinese can sail off of Los Angeles to fight us the way we must be able to fight off of Shanghai. And even inferior Chinese power can be massed close to their territory to gain a temporary edge over our forward deployed forces before we can reinforce those forces.
Further, I accept the description of Chinese military shortcomings. My other objection to the thrust of the piece is that China doesn't have to defeat American forces to inflict a defeat on us in east Asia. China's threat to Taiwan is growing and the only question is when their anticipated casualties fall to acceptable levels for throwing an invasion force across the Taiwan Strait.
All China has to do is delay our forces long enough with their anti-access capabilities while they win a war against other Chinese forces (Taiwanese) that probably have many of the same deficiencies as the mainland Chinese forces. I hope the Taiwanese are trained to standards closer to Western militaries rather than to China's, but I don't count on it being enough to prevail in a war.
The standard is not whether Chinese forces are a match for our forces. The standard is whether Chinese forces are good enough to defeat their target.
