Great question. My analysis suggests that China is preparing to avoid a traditional fight by shaping the battlespace in space, cyber, cognition, infrastructure and alliances. And while we focus on China’s strengths, China is equally focused on its own gaps, dependence on foreign compute, energy chokepoints, fragile logistics over distance, sanctions exposure, demographic decline, brittle industrial systems and a lack of real combat experience.
They will always outperform on centralized production and industrial integration. But they have no answer for the West at its best: distributed, federated, creative, resilient, alliance-powered innovation ecosystems.
So the long-term Western play is not to replicate China’s industrial machine. It is to build what China structurally cannot counter:
• alliances that can sustain logistics globally
• space and cyber architectures that cannot be blinded
• militaries that can reconfigure by software, not hardware
• energy systems that cannot be choked
• autonomous swarms that interoperate across nations
• and societies that can absorb pressure without fracturing
Couldn't agree more; your take on the industrial-service AI divide is briliant, but what's the West's play here? Really thought-provoking.
Great question. My analysis suggests that China is preparing to avoid a traditional fight by shaping the battlespace in space, cyber, cognition, infrastructure and alliances. And while we focus on China’s strengths, China is equally focused on its own gaps, dependence on foreign compute, energy chokepoints, fragile logistics over distance, sanctions exposure, demographic decline, brittle industrial systems and a lack of real combat experience.
They will always outperform on centralized production and industrial integration. But they have no answer for the West at its best: distributed, federated, creative, resilient, alliance-powered innovation ecosystems.
So the long-term Western play is not to replicate China’s industrial machine. It is to build what China structurally cannot counter:
• alliances that can sustain logistics globally
• space and cyber architectures that cannot be blinded
• militaries that can reconfigure by software, not hardware
• energy systems that cannot be choked
• autonomous swarms that interoperate across nations
• and societies that can absorb pressure without fracturing