China's newer ships are broadly equivalent to your own, with phased array radar, vertically launched ASMs, weighing 5000 tonnes or so, backed by the worlds largest shipbuilding industry. China's type 055 for example is every bit as good as anything anywhere, and their type 52 destroyers are on par with current american destroyers.
And over the next 10 years, they will be putting over 100 of them into the water, with new supercarriers under construction.
It's like you've never noticed the history of communist nations when it comes to building war machines. Here, let me illustrate that for you in meme format:
This is, of course, the memey version, but it is pretty much
exactly on point for the course of the entire Cold War.
And frankly, the only difference between the Cold War, and squaring off against the Soviets, vs squaring off against the CCP now?
The CCP are generally
even less competent than the Soviets.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/901984650015162388/1002814608979005470/1659159719119900.webm
I don't know if that's going to load properly, but it shows that the latest generation of Chinese rifles for their infantry are
so shit that at ranges of about 20 feet, bullets are tumbling and hitting targets
sideways.
American designs from the second half of the
1800's were past that kind of problem.
There is a
chance that the CCP's much vaunted massive military build-up is going to be much more formidable than what any other Communists have ever managed. So, in order to do due diligence, the USA and allies will treat the threat as legitimate, and will/has been working to counter the growth in Chinese military strength?
The more likely scenario though?
The leaks that Chinese aircraft carriers can't consistently do full take-off and landing cycles without damaging or losing aircraft are true. The fact that their military officers spend more time getting political indoctrination than actually learning how to fight wars results in them being exactly as incompetent as expected. The cultural suppression of initiative will make them just as ineffective as the French were during WWI, probably even less so. They have less than half as many of their vaunted J-20's ready to fly than they claim, and those that
can are only capable of 20 hours in the air before their engines (inferior substitutes for the intended engines that they
still can't mass produce) need a complete rebuild.
The institutionalization of lying within communist culture means that most privates are less capable than their Platoon CO thinks, and he's lying to his superior, who's lying to his, who's lying to his, and each General has a distorted picture of their training level and combat capability, which they then lie to the party about being even better to make them look good.
The human wave tactics that the PLA used (and got butchered for) in Korea won't work when crossing a chunk of ocean to get to Taiwan, and PGMs basically didn't exist during Korea, nor submunitions, meaning that they'll be even
less effective than they were back then.
At least as large a proportion of Chinese military hardware will not work or will not work properly, as has been seen with Russian hardware in Ukraine. Probably more.
These things are not
certain, but the track record of communist armies is
ugly.
Have you ever seen Enemy At The Gates? Seen how it (fairly accurately) depicts the Red Army as being so insanely poorly equipped that they would only give
every other man a rifle, before ordering them to charge prepared enemy positions, and using machine guns to slaughter those that tried to retreat?
Moving towards free markets between ~1990 and ~2015 has made China wealthy enough that their supply situations aren't that desperate, but the underlying institutional corruption, moral rot, and utter contempt for human life that resulted in those insane policies are all very much in place,
because the CCP is Communist.
The
most likely result of the CCP getting into a shooting war with the US is either them backing down and suing for peace
really quickly, or within the month their entire air force is shot down, and their entire navy is sunk.