China vs US

Both will lose.

It's estimated that China got enough nukes to destroy the US 2 times, and the US got enough nukes to destroy China 10 times, but 1 time is all you need.

The US certainly does not get the support from world-wide such as Russia, France, and Germany.

These countries would pick the US no doubt compared to picking China in a war.. better relations than with China.

I dont think there will be war..too much economic interdependance...but if this forum is reflective of real up and coming Chinese generation expect China to have a facist government in the future and who knows what well happen.

Right now China is a paper tiger, its air force is too small, its navy not very good..its army is all thats good.  In modern war air supremacy means everything though and a large well trained army can simply be bombed from the sky.  Numbers no longer matter in modern conventional war.

Give China a few decades and wed have a more intresting match.

I think America could win a war with china after 4 to 6 years of hard struggle. All they have is cannon fodder. We can still produce more than they can, and we would very soon move production to Southeast Asia and the like to make up for that lost producer. The Chinese air force and navy would cease to exist as fighting forces within a month of a war. Their army would probably not be too difficult to deal with unless we totally bungled it.

Also, speaking economically, Chinese would lose it's main market, and American warships would cut off all Chinese trade, their main source of money. China is also now the world's biggest consumer and a net importer of oil. With control of the seas, America can starve the Chinese very well.

I predict any battle with the Chinese would look a lot like the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. King Henry V and the English (representing the US) hunkered down behind strong fortifications and let the French move across open terrain where they were decimated with thousands of arrows fired by English longbowmen.

A battle with the Chinese I think would see American and Chinese forces coming into contact with eachother, then the Americans would dig in and construct strong defensive fortifications. We would then force the Chinese to expose themselves to attack us, or to mass to defend against any American attack, making them extremely vulnerable to American artillery and airpower.

Keep in mind, this would all be while the Chinese power grid, rail system, dams, and industry are being attacked by the American air force. We can only hope that we will use air superiority more effective than we did in WWII, but given current technology I don't think it would be hard to have a few bombs cripple a factory until major repairs have been done.

I don't think the Chinese would use nukes if they were rational (but they could very well do something irrational). They can only strike the far West Coast. We can attack all of their country. A full 90% of the Chinese population also lives on 10% of Chinese territory, which would make them incredibly vulnerable to retaliatory strikes using nuclear or chemical weapons.

If I were them, I would just try to make the Americans bleed as much as possible. I would probably try to pull off a Stalingrad type battle against us. Bring us in really close so that our heavy fire support has to be used with more caution (in the days of smart weapons this might not be as effective as it was in 1943) and then bleed us in a long battle of attrition (against troops with land warrior this might also be difficult, but street fighting still probably offers the Chinese the greatest chance of success).

But then again, the qualitative advantage of the modern US Army over the PLA is still far greater than that of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army. America still has a larger economy than China and we're lightyears ahead in technology, advantages denied to the Wehrmacht which was outproduced by Soviet Russia and had not as great a lead over the Russians as America does. The USSR had a well-respected group of scientists and engineers which occasionally outclassed the Germans, something the Chinese, who are reliant on technological imports, would have an almost impossible time achieving.

I personally think China needs to be dealt with. They are exerting more and more force in the world, and I think we should smother this potential rival in it's cradle before it grows up and becomes harder to deal with.

As far as I know China has the world third largest airforce, but it is supplied mostly with obsolete Q-5s and J-7s. The most advanced heavy bomber they have is the indiginously produced version of the Russian Badger which was already obsolete by the early 60's. China is working on production of the J-10 and the licenced Su-27 however.

It does bear mind that large scale high-tempo, high-tech warfare is exactly what the modern US Armed Forces has been planning and preparing for since the beginning of the cold war. Thats where all our main strengths in deployment, technology and tactics come into play. We really can't cope with guerilla style warfare however as history has shown, (and is still showing).

If China could manage to force the U.S. to constantly adapt to it own tactics they could definatly manage to make things tough going for the US, even today.