What I'm really not clear on is what seems to be a apples-and-oranges comparison going on in the strategic community regarding the potential threat posed by China.
China - as it is - is not a military threat. Sure, it poses an economic threat, but this is largely of our own making, both in terms of debt burden (self-inflicted, and in extremis something that offers them leverage only as long as we accept it), currency (again, self-inflicted by world monetary authorities who refuse to hold China to 1st-world currency standards), etc.
But while China is clearly a dominant power, one might even say a regional superpower, they utterly lack any ability to project this power outside their immediate region short of lobbing ICBMs. THIS is the defining point of a global superpower (and we discovered the limits of such all-or-nothing leverage from about 1950-1980). Granted, they have a billion-man army. They may even be 'unassailable' in conventional terms, and may able to impose their will militarily on any regional actor like Korea or Japan - that doesn't mean they're a threat to the US.
In short, people seem to be comparing China's 'turtled' strengths with the US's (over?)extended might, and concluding that logical extrapolation of the former means the two will be equivalent in a couple of decades.
Hardly. The threat of China as a 'global superpower' that can contend with the US worldwide, posited for 2035, 2050, 2025 depending on who you're talking to and what his agenda is, would HAVE to include projection capability...which itself introduces orders of magnitude of vulnerability and exposure. To suggest that the US has anything to actually fear from Chinese force-projection on THAT playground assumes an almost fanciful level of Chinese buildup (akin to late-1930's Germany) along with American inattention for a double-handful of decades at least.
No, we have to understand the Chinese buildup for what it is today: an expansion of capabilities certainly, an increased lethality in the neighboring seas which has the bargain double-purpose utility to China of both being useful against other regional entities as well as useful in denying US its (soon-to-be-former) ability to operate with impunity on the water, wherever it chose to. Did we really believe that was an eternal franchise anyway? Maintaining it (if even possible) would require colossal and nonsensical budgetary investments. But their denial of our ability to rummage through their front-pockets at will is hardly a threat to anyone outside of their arms' reach.
Certainly, our commitments to our regional partners require that we expend some effort to maintain our ability to operate in their behalf - to passively accept that certain seas are no-go zones would be foolish. But let's not confuse interests-at-one-remove with any actual denigration of our ability to defend ourselves, even if it seems convenient in an era of shrinking budgets to paint it so.
Ultimately, China won't be the only regional power whose capabilities circumscribe our operational capabilities near their shores, merely the first. We need a robust strategy to face these actors over the next century, and it cannot be by simply building more ships, planes, and subs - that's a dead-end strategy and vulnerable to technological breakthroughs that obsolete our massive investments in bulk (ala the cell-phone networks in the 3rd world vs. hardline phone systems in the 1st). I personally believe that the answer to this is going to be found in orbital capabilities, taking away the 'flatland' operational assumptions that inform a boundary-defining strategy anyway. But that's another subject, for another time.
Finally, the US Navy's assertions that we need to desperately fear the untested, nearly operationally useless* anti-ship ballistic systems despite their lack of actual testing is more likely to be a politically- or budgetarily-relevant assessment; it's hardly credible as a military one.
*the utility of a ballistic-missile-based antiship system is simply nil. Short of global thermonuclear war (where all gloves are off), the idea of a system with the relatively puny goal of sinking a single ship (even a really important one) appearing to all expected sensor systems as a potential ICBM is crazy. That would be as useful as making people think your switchblade is an assault rifle - simply bringing it out will immediately & grossly overescalate a confrontation to the point that your actual ability to inflict damage is made meaningless by the response you've inspired. It's politically useless. Thus the environment in which it could be deployed would already presuppose a complete all-out nuclear war in which case it would probably be more useful to actually HAVE a MiRV'd nuke warhead on that missile, rather than a single shipkiller ANYWAY. It just doesn't make sense, and the fact of China's pushing ahead with it suggests that either its a Potemkin challenge (unlikely they could pull that off for long) or a desperate dice-roll of a strategy being ironically validated by the US naval defense community's overreaction.
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