I know Jim Rogers has predicted many times that showdown for world power & resources is inevitable but what do you think?
If I was responsible for the current state of the People's Liberation Army & Navy I'd be getting pretty ambitious, too, for fear of having my neck shortened. Go spend some time with their troops & sailors; you'll feel a lot better about the U.S. military.
The DoD and the CIA spent decades enhancing the Soviet Union's scariness by at least 25% in order to be "adequately" funded to meet the threat. Although the forces were humongous, the quality of the individual units' technology and training lagged the U.S. by at least a generation. Defectors repeatedly confirmed that the most difficult thing to counter about the U.S. military was a commander's discretion to ignore the tactical doctrine and to improvise independent operations. They couldn't figure out how to deal with that ambiguity and they certainly couldn't implement it in their own armed forces.
It's the same today with China. There's a lot of them but they're more big than scary. One of their mach jet pilots couldn't even stay out of the way of a P-3 lumbering along on a straight & level flight at a couple hundred knots near Hainan-Do a few years back, and PLA's training simulators & software are at about the level of a Pentium running the last decade's video games. (Lenovo has a lot of catching up to do...) Their submarines make U.S. submariners reminisce about the good ol' days of the 1970s Russians, and the Australian diesel submarine combat systems are finally at a level where they can kick U.S. submariners' butts whenever they want to-- let alone the HAN class.
Spouse used to escort international VIP senior officers around the Thai-sponsored COBRA GOLD exercise. A couple of years included PRC officers, who were forever trying to take cell-phone pictures and surreptitiously overhear conversations or record events. Eventually the escort officers were told to "let 'em take what they want" and the linguists reported constant refrains of the Mandarin equivalents of "Holy &^$%, how can we do this?!?" and "Ruh-roh"...
Last year the U.S. Navy brought three battle groups together near Guam for maneuvers. It was the largest collection of U.S. ships & aircraft since the Vietnam war. PACOM specifically invited senior PRC officers of all their services to ride the carriers and observe the exercise. They even ignored the Chinese cell-phone cameras and told them about everything that was occurring in the command centers.
Two things amazed/scared the heck out of the PRC:
1) Much of the exercise was being run by junior officers in their 20s and executed by enlisted in their 20s & 30s without much senior-officer supervision. (Yeah, what we military see as suffocating seniors was, in the eyes of the PRC, a dangerous decentralization & lack of oversight.)
2) The entire air exercise, as well as the air-war tasking for both BLUE & ORANGE forces, was being run by joint staff at Hickam AFB in Hawaii. The fact that real-time data was being shoveled between those two locations for the entire exercise was the subject of much muttered Mandarin. They also weren't very happy about the way that the carriers could seamlessly pick up the job if the satellites dropped offline.
The PRC officers were much impressed by round-the-clock and night-flight ops, too. I don't think they're going to tell their bosses about it, though, because they don't want to kill themselves trying to implement it.
No one in the U.S. or China wants a war. They want to buy all our Treasuries and force us into bankruptcy, while we want to sell them MTV and iPods. I think the Treasury can run the printing presses faster than we'll run out of customers...
