Take this for what it's worth.
I worked for a company and we hired a technical guy straight out of the Marines. Great guy, super smart, lower-level officer. He told me in the late 90s that our defense departments often run simulations. In every simulation they'd run of the US v China, we'd lose. No derivation provided a win. We simply run out of bullets before they run out of people. 1.325Billion people v 320Million people is a distinct advantage.
Who programmed those simulations, RAND? I ask for a very specific reason but I won't go into it.
Your friend, while probably a sharp guy like you said was misinformed or participating in a limited modeling scenario that didn't include the social aspects of life in China. The Chinese army is not a professional army, it is an arm of the communist party(conscripted foot soldiers led by party *** kissers). The Chinese military is also nowhere near ours in terms of employment of force multiplication, i.e. if they had to fight outside their borders they would be shredded by our Navy alone because of this weakness.
You also have to look at their technology. They can't even at this point in time build a decent jet engine, they have to copy from the Russians and that usually amounts to inferior copies of whatever they're building.
They may in the future threaten our supremacy in technology, but even if they do human capital will remain their weakness as long as their political system remains oppressive.
Had to come back and edit this because I just remembered one other aspect of this scenario; the last time China was engaged in a hot war was 1979..for one month against the Vietnamese, meanwhile how much experience does the U.S. have since 1979?
At this point in a conventional war where they are attempting to expand beyond their borders, they are no match.
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