Uhh.. yes...fighting with India you say?

WAR!

Contained the article is the idea that the British saying this about America in the 1930s would be insane. But actually the prospect of war of some sort between America and the Brits was still pretty healthy up until the 1930s economic collapse hit and paralyzed most governments (other than Stalin, Duce, and Hitler). The main impetus for the Washington Naval Treaty in the 1920s was to prevent a major naval arms race between the UK and US. Especially in the Pacific, where the British were actually allied with the Japanese at the time in an attempt to curb our spreading influence. Of course it had some rather unpleasant unintended consequences (namely, Japan's huge Pacific fleet), and since that alliance ended pretty much right after the treaty was signed. But the idea that the US and Britain were close and allies throughout the 20th century, as they have become since the war, and were not prone to potentially dangerous fits of mistrust is rather fragile. Even after the war, the British had major conflicts with us over their interests in the Middle East (such as the Suez Canal) that, had they had the influence or power as in their British Empire days of say 1930, could have spawned some sort of major incident of diplomacy. Even shooting wars.

Despite all that semantic use of history, I'm in agreement the idea of a real shooting war with China is extremely low in the "foreseeable future" (whatever that term means). Particularly given they're a member of the nuclear fraternity. Same with India, a shooting war with which seems even less plausible as they have fewer competing interests with us regionally or globally over resources or territories. Taiwan and North Korea for example are both causes of regional friction to all interested parties. While for Pakistan there is much agreement between India and the US how to handle.

I do think they will be a strong competitor to our current hegemony this century, both of them will be in fact, but not militarily. I am therefore in agreement that we have plenty of super expensive fighter jets for the time being. Particularly since we're way more likely to fight small-scale forces in guerrilla style engagements instead of nation-states with elaborate radar defense grids and coordinated air force patrols. Also because we're more likely to blow up F-22s in Hollywood than actually use them to fight our enemies abroad.

I also think there are people on both sides of the Pacific looking warily at each other and trying to guess just how likely that possibility is, and coming up with answers that are extraordinarily high. We had such thinking throughout the Cold War. Maybe people like Cornyn need to just grow up and stop trying to fight new wars by looking for the old one again. Or maybe they need to be aware of just how superior our equipment would be to crushing any single nation-state's armed forces in an organized conventional battle of forces for at least the next couple decades. Talk like we're about to fight a war with China being used to defend funding unnecessary defense projects reminds me an awful lot of the "missile gap" talks in the 1950s and 60s. We had over 3 times as many warheads as the Soviets back then. Everybody important knew it. Every one of them knew it wouldn't matter if we had anymore. But we kept funding them anyway. I'm pleased that we didn't make the same mistake now, so far. Maybe we're learning.