Some idle speculation

Chris asks me, in re: my and Noah's defense spending foofarah:

"..how much of a different story do you think a land war would be? Yes, they have us outnumbered a whole-lot-to-one, but we still have big better machinery and flying stuff that makes big boom. Obviously the casualties would be massive either way, and we could probably just close up shop financially, but would it even be a match?"

I'll gladly take a swing at that. People don't ask what I think about this kind of thing nearly enough, in my opinion. ;) Before I get my wonk on, though, bear in mind that I'm not a land-war guy; my experience is with sea power. I tend to believe that numbers only matter when there is near parity in military technology, such as would be the case in a China vs. India or China vs. Russia scenario.

In the first Gulf War, when Iraq still had a military (and a relatively decent, Soviet-supplied one at that), we killed between 100 and 1000 of theirs for every soldier we lost. Now, we had a two-to-one advantage in terms of total numbers in that war. Just going on those numbers, and ignoring the specifics of the conflict, even if we had fought at a ten-to-one disadvantage, wouldn't that still translate into between a 5:1 and 50:1 casualty ratio in our favor?* In that war, at least, the best tech made all the difference.

So who has the best tech, and how much will it matter? The problem, that I've discussed with Noah, is that it's been so long since the most advanced militaries in the world fought each other directly (i.e. not through proxies who use the exported tech that is no longer cutting edge) that so much modern military theory is just that. Practice in the form of wargames only takes you so far. You learn more by observing how the other sides' weapons perform, and by stealing them, but until the actual fight occurs there's no sure way of knowing whose gadgets reign supreme.

A good example is in the area of electronic warfare, which doesn't get talked about much but could prove decisive in a conflict with China. When we debate about the dangers of China's big shipkiller missiles, we tend to focus on how effective our anti-missile weapons will be at knocking them down, and ignore that modern EW suites have many ways to neutralized a missile's "brains" without destroying it. A "fooled" missile is as good as a "killed" one. In the event of a land war with China, both sides will deploy plenty of missiles, but also plenty of unmanned combat drones which, in EW terms, are even more vulnerable, because not only can their brains and sensors be fooled, but the lines of communication between the drone and its human operator can be disrupted as well. The state of American electronic warfare is pretty advanced, we think, and China's somewhat less so, but the reality is that all this is pure theory- in other words, right now, we have no way of knowing how effective any of this stuff will be, because we've never really tried it.

In my own humble, amateur prediction, in a stand-up, conventional war with China, our technological advantages would cause them to suffer tens to hundreds of times as many casualties as us. We would have not just air and sea superiority, with our much more advanced fighters and a whole plethora of cool naval toys, but space superiority as well, since we've proved able to plink China's satellites without much problem. Whether these advantages would really translate into victory for us or not is impossible to say, of course, and I'm certainly not eager to find out.

* I pose this in the form of a question because I am quite open to the possibility of my math being faulty...

edit: this is a good example of how superior EW tech makes all the difference