Did you just skip the “if it comes to that we’re in WW3” part? It seems to me adventured is fully acknowledging that if China wants a shooting war, they can ta

Did you just skip the “if it comes to that we’re in WW3” part? It seems to me adventured is fully acknowledging that if China wants a shooting war, they can take out US Pacific carrier groups, after which Beijing and Shanghai will be smoking craters, and we’ll find out if US anti-missile defense is any good (I tend to think it’s snake oil, but I’d really rather avoid testing that). The goal of having a military is to encourage diplomatic ends. The US has many diplomatic goals that don’t involve combat on the Chinese mainland. It’s also not clear to me that in a shooting war scenario it’s a bad plan to have some manned fighters, assuming basically all EM channels for controlling drones will be jammed.