For China and the USA it is the AI and economic race that matters not any arms race
brian wang | May 28, 2017 |
The odds of China and the USA fighting a major war are very remote. There is the possibility over the next few decades of some small skirmish results from massive incompetence and miscalculation.
There would be no benefit for a war for either side.
The US decided not to fight Russia and China during the Korean War. Historical records from the Senate hearings on the Korean war show that the US decided against a wider Korean war because of 500,000 Russian troops, 85 Russian Submarines and Chinese military of that time.
Omar Bradley, the chairman of the joint chiefs, flatly rejected MacArthur’s call for a wider war. “In the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this strategy would involve us in the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy,” he said.
Other excised testimony revealed a fundamental reason for the administration’s reluctance to escalate in northeast Asia: There was precious little for the United States to escalate with. American air power, in particular, was stretched very thin. Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff, told the committee that Korea was already claiming a large part of America’s available air strength. “The Air Force part that is engaged in Korea is roughly 85 percent—80 to 85 percent—of the tactical capacity of the United States,” he said. “The strategic portion, which is used tactically, is roughly between one-fourth and one-fifth. The air defense forces are, I would judge, about 20 percent.”
Many Americans, and much of the world, imagined the United States had boundless military capacity. MacArthur had suggested as much, regarding air power, when he had told the committee that the U.S. Air Force could take on China without diminishing America’s capacity to check the Soviets.
Vandenberg wasn’t going to disabuse America’s enemies of such notions, but he needed for the senators to hear, behind closed doors, that this was far from the case. “I am sure Admiral Davis will take this off the record,” Vandenberg said, referring to the officer overseeing the excisions, who did indeed take his remarks off the record. “The air force of the United States, as I have said, is really a shoestring air force.” Vandenberg had used the phrase in open testimony; now he provided details. One small, intrinsically insignificant country—Korea—was absorbing an alarming portion of America’s air resources. “These groups that we have over there now doing this tactical job are really about a fourth of our total effort that we could muster today.” To escalate against China, even if only from the air, would be reckless in the extreme. “Four times that amount of groups in that area over that vast expanse of China would be a drop in the bucket.”
China with a backward military after WW2 and a China still fighting a civil war was deemed to be too much of a problem.
Now China has hundreds of nuclear weapons and will rapidly have clearly the second strongest military in the world.
China can shoot down American satellites and make it difficult for the US to wage precision war.
It would also be the wrong type of war.
The USA and China should be focused on efforts and investments to strengthen their own economies and advancing key technologies for the future like Artificial Intelligence.
The USA and China should be cooperating to advanced the world economy and technology.
