Eyck Freymann

as far as i understand my last book was called the arsenal of democracy was about the specific military and military industrial parts of this my best understanding is that if we fought china today a high intensity war in the western pacific it would be nasty thousands of americans would die but within a matter of days to a couple of weeks

Pretty much all of the PLA Navy would be at the bottom of the Taiwan Strait.

Most of their air force would be obliterated.

Essentially, maritime wars, air and naval wars, the kind we haven't fought for 80 years, they work fundamentally differently from land wars.

It's not about attrition and holding back reserves.

It's just about who can deliver the hardest, most effective opening punch.

And a lot of that has to do with cyber and electronic warfare and other classified stuff that allows you to fry the other guy's eyes and ears.

We have various advantages in those capabilities, which are super classified.

The balance is tilting.

It's not as much of a sure bet as it was before.

But I think it's safe to say if China thought they could defeat us in a high-end conventional war, our problems would go way beyond Taiwan.

It would be about the defense of Japan and the Philippines and South Korea and Australia and Guam and Hawaii.

And China would be acting in a much less cautious and restrained way.

However, as you say, China doesn't necessarily have to think they could win that war if they're confident that they can keep the contest in a crisis sort of short of war.

And this is your question about how to deter the gray zone strategy.

I think the basic idea should be we need to show we're going to push back proportionally to maintain an overall stable situation.

And that's tricky because let's say they have thousands of fishing vessels, civilian fishing vessels, which are paramilitary trained by the PLA that are hanging out around Taiwan harassing shipping.

We're not going to do the same thing to China.

So we need to stabilize the situation in another domain.

And it's tricky to establish what is proportional.