Comment Re:For now (Score 2) 38
As a historian the only caveat I'd advise there is that we are unlikely to see a long, drawn-out slog like WW2 again. Production capacity is great but the next Great Power war isn't likely to take place over years or even months. So China's technological edge is likely to matter but it's tempered with a willingness to stockpile and maintain systems which may never see use.
Doing that at limited production scale is one thing. Doing it at massive, "we're going to fight a serious war with this stuff" scales is another. China, like many authoritarian regimes, has shown itself to be dazzled by the propaganda value of wonder weapons. The CJ-1000, most recently, seems like a very impressive missile system but if it doesn't exist is sufficient quantity to turn the tide against American assets in theater it's just a waste of money.
Of course, China is also famously closed lipped so it's hard to tell. It might turn out that they have tens of thousands of those things. Probably not, but maybe.
