My caveats to your observations about the Chinese economy are that I am not sure that this recession or even depression will affect their military-industrial complex, in other words, they will still have an infrastructure that enables them to build up to ten ships to our one.
The second caveat is that in the nuclear age much of the game is not to actually wage war but to change the balance of power. That, for example, is why Iran wants the bomb in the Middle East, to topple American nuclear hegemony there and leave the Persian Gulf as vulnerable to Iran as it is to America. Likewise, the Chinese are building islands as launching pads for planes and missiles etc. for the same reason, to change the balance of power, to impose their will economically and politically on one of the world's most important shipping lanes.
Finally, we have the Chinese perspective on history as compared to ours and in their Long view a recession or even a depression is hardly a hickup. Our political system, our military-industrial complex, does not blind us entirely but it certainly leaves us shortsighted.
Here is that reply:
this I quite agree with your description of the modern aircraft carrier as a platform for projecting power. I would analogize it to the role of British gunboats in the 19th century.
We have a window until the Chinese can launch carriers which can hope to compete with ours. Meanwhile they are trying to change the balance of power by developing missiles with the ability of taking out aircraft carriers, thus neutering our advantage. We still have a window of time in this field.
My belief is that the Chinese will offer a credible threat, not a decisive threat, but a threat grievous enough to change the balance of power and compel a reassessment of strategy by the United States. Food for thought: if there is a dustup and three Chinese carriers are sunk for one American carrier, who won?
We should be building interlocking alliances with the smaller countries that ring China to the East and South encouraging them to supplement their forces, especially their air forces, using our carriers under an umbrella of land-based air power to project military force from a place of relative safety toward the Chinese. The Chinese must be confronted with a united front which somehow affects their vital interests. It will not do just to win a sea battle, China is vast with teeming population and can swallow setbacks and still carry-on. But it cannot sustain its ambitions if its sea lanes lanes are closed, depriving China of the commodities (and markets) it absolutely requires.
If China intends to keep the sea lanes open with aircraft carriers, they become extremely vulnerable to submarines etc. The equation which runs against us when we try to impose a perfect security system in the waters around China now reverses and favors us. Beyond their capabilities as gunboats, how does the aircraft carrier fit into a global strategic defense system? We can intimidate smaller countries with our aircraft carriers as China clearly intends to do but I do not think that we can intimidate the Chinese, nor they us, with aircraft carriers.
In the world to come the Chinese will be using aircraft carriers to say to Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Filipinos we have commensurate power with the Americans but the difference between us and America is we will use it and they might not. Can you trust an ally with your very existence which elects a series of Barack Obamas as commander-in-chief? Your only hope is to align yourselves with the future.
To counter this disruptive force, which we will also see in the Middle East, the United States must demonstrate that it will maintain military superiority and that it will use it. More, and perhaps most important, the United States must seize the window of opportunity we now have to move toward the next weapons system beyond the aircraft carrier in order to create a new paradigm which sets the Chinese and the Islamists back into the age of the gunboat.
