China has established an unassailable lead, and they
did it the easy way-—by stealing American know-how.
BTTT
that’s on technology.
But the industrial capacity and shipbuilding capacity, that is not particularly new technology. China is on a construction spree which is like the USA in WW2 - for example a new shipyard in 5 months.
I have read that between the time China joined the World Trade Organization and 2017 or so, the number of factories moved from the USA to China was at least 50,000. They were handed the technology on a silver platter. When it came time to produce artillery shells to compete with Russia, the USA was just not capable of keeping up.
Our whole entire military focus was shifted from high intensity combat with a near peer adversary to supporting endless bush wars against ignorant savages embedded in civilian populations armed primarily with Ak-47s, light machine guns and RPGs.
We choose to fight these guys with expensive, high tech smart weapons that drained our military with massive sustainment costs to the almost total detriment of our ability to wage a high intensity war against a near peer adversary.
This freaking insanity culminated in the ruinous Obama 2012 Budget Sequestration debacle that saw pretty much every major non F-35 weapons development and procurement program get put on hold and headed for ultimate cancellation.
Draconian funding cuts allowed acquisition of only direct combat expenses for things like bullets , bombs, fuel and MREs . Even spare parts and maintenance were cut as far as practical.
All the while China was using an amazing espionage program to steal our weapons design and development technology wholesale and then used our stolen weapons technology to copy or reverse engineer our most advanced technology weapons capability and to implement the programs that we were canceling. Granted, we have a lot of black military programs that prevent us from knowing all that we have but our aging convemtioal forces are increasingly obsolete and wearing out.
Worse - they were designed to fight the Cold War do not reflect the capabilities needed to dominate the modern battle field .
Worst of all, our military warrior culture has been woosiefied with a risk aversive, liberal anti warrior ethos mind set and DEI focused reduction in basic standards.
How does not matter.