Eyck Freymann

And one significant implication of that is your ability to see and communicate across the battle space is really, really critical.

And especially as the range of our missiles and our drones has increased, that means that U.S.

aircraft and ships and submarines that could potentially strike targets in or around China can be zooming around across literally millions of square miles of ocean.

So to see these things, to target them, and then to deliver mass to a target to kill them is no easy feat.

And if the U.S.

can use cyber, counter space capabilities and so on to disrupt China's ability to see and communicate in those critical early hours, then it could potentially win a lopsided victory or vice versa.

And one of the implications of that is

If you're just counting ships or counting planes or missiles, you will miss the parts of the balance that are most important, that are actually qualitative, many of which can be augmented with AI.

And this is hard because it means when you're wargaming these things, if you don't have a clearance, you kind of have to make it up with these capabilities.

We don't know what the cutting edge of cyber is, for example.

Only a very small compartmented group of people within the national security establishment know all of the relevant capabilities.

But I just think that if China believed that they could defeat the U.S.

in a high-end war, they would be behaving more assertively.

They would be operating not just in the Taiwan Strait, but all around the region in a way that they're not yet.

It's a good wrap-up for the conversation, really.

The United States military has these godlike capabilities with special forces, with cyber, electronic warfare, in some senses the way our air defenses have performed, which is exceptionally, exceptionally well.

But while our military is very good at doing the operational military stuff, we are not succeeding at the strategic level because ultimately war is the continuation of politics by other means.

And our politics is susceptible to economic pressure in a way that our adversaries is not.

And if we don't get the message, if we don't take the wake up call and start working on our economic resilience and our credible ability to bear economic pain and supply chain disruptions and the rest, we will be unprepared on exam day because China has so many more capabilities

to impose economic pain on us and to micro-calibrate the character of that economic pain than Iran does.