Eyck Freymann

The U.S.

Navy is spread out.

China has more aircraft available.

China has more missiles and drones.

But the hard thing about doing what we would call a net assessment about a naval war is that air and naval wars just work differently from land wars.

We know this from history.

In land wars, you've got lots and lots and lots and lots of units, and each of them are basically interchangeable one for another.

In air and naval war, you have a small number of platforms, and they're more differentiated and specialized.

So if you take out one or two of these key things, like if you take out the carrier, all of the ships around the carrier then get easier to kill.

So it's like dominoes falling.

That's why in the past, the major engagements in naval history were...

once they start, tend to be, the outcome is determined within minutes to hours.

And that means so much depends on whose forces are deployed where, when the actual engagement begins, who has the element of surprise,

then who can blind the other and take out the other's communications in that critical opening phase to land an effective first punch?

And so many of the details of how this is done are highly, highly classified.

They're above top secret.

They're accessible only to people with a need to know.

But my hunch, based on talking to people in this business and just based on observing China, is that if China thought that they could defeat the U.S.

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

And the U.S.