The reality is that fighting any country with a decent military has to be all-out war. We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs. A war with China would be the same, it can never be fought from a distance with primarily $1m+ precision surface to surface missiles.

Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at all, I don't believe it was.

>fighting China would be a proper all-out war

I figure it would probably be like the US backing Ukraine's defense against Russia but backing Taiwan's defense against China. It would probably be quite hard for China to take Taiwan. There's a lot of sea in between and you can see how well Russia's navy has done against Ukraine's drones and missiles.

> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.

Well but war will be like this now. Like for ICBMs, with PGMs it's use it or lose it, so lots of ordnance is fired off at the outset (onset?) of hostilities.

But there wouldn't be a Chinese navy left which would give Taiwan and it's allies some breathing room.

There won't ever be an "all out war" of nuclear states with each other. Only via proxies.

> If they can exhaust all their firepower in a couple weeks fighting Iran, China would have no reason to feel threatened in the first place.

I think the reason China has no reason to be threatened is the US outsourced most of it's manufacturing to them, meaning China now has more skills, know-how, and manufacturing infrastructure to redirect to wartime production.

That was truly a brilliant move by US business leaders and the 90s political elite. Besides creating the military vulnerability, it also helped get Donald Trump election, who they all love dearly.

>not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.

Are you openly saying the president and the secretary of war are lying when they say they have done "massive" bombings of Iran?