Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

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The US military manages to do both because it can afford to. Carrier fleets are pretty much required for global military force projection, something China isn't even close to have the capability to start thinking about at this stage.

The chinese military is way, way behind in pretty much all regards and even going for "disruptive tech" won't do them much good when they can't even manage to design/produce a working jet engine for their fighter jets that isn't complete garbage. They basically resorted to copying 1980s russian designed engines, but couldn't get the metallurgy right so they just imported them. You can't start to compare with the US military capability if even Russia can be much better than you at producing something as basic (in terms of military needs) as a jet engine

I've heard/read of that too, and remember having a cognitive dissonance when reading about a chinese company offering some very advanced metallurgy to german companies, some time not longer than a year ago. I can't find it anymore now, just https://3dprint.com/266401/formnext-pm-south-china-partners-... but it is not the same, just in a similar domain.

Right, any comparison would need to be done within the context of what they are optimizing for. China's priority right now seems to be securing the S. China Sea.

There's also nuclear weapons as a concern. I'm not sure we're quite talking mutually assured destruction, but we wouldn't want to go there. So far, nuclear deterrence has held up.

There's a lot of ways to fight a war. Conventional military technology likely wouldn't be involved on any battleground we would find ourselves on with China.

What about cyber capabilities?

For a hot war, China seems underequipped, but this doesn't seem the most relevant anyways.

Cyber and proxy war-like capabilities seem more important in this day and age. From what I can tell China leads in cyber capabilities versus the US. And they've been able to expand in the South China Sea without much retaliation so far, so maybe they're even doing alright on the other.

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