The best general, to paraphrase Sun Tzu anachronistically, is the one who wins without having to fire a shot. In 1995-1996, what is now called the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis took place, which was a turning point in Chinese and American defense strategies. As I wrote elsewhere some years back, for China, what it did was embark on a crash course, with unlimited funding, to build up its missile, submarine, and aircraft capabilities, the idea being that any American technological superiority could be swarmed to death with a barrage of land, sea, and air-launched missiles, and eventually with a carrier battle group (or two, or three) of its own by Beijing. In the two decades since, we’ve seen this come to pass, including Chinese construction on sandbars and atolls to create the Chinese version of what the Americans once did in Manila Bay: turning islands into, essentially, concrete battleships—or today, concrete aircraft carriers or missile launcher bases—in the South China Sea (SCS) to swarm any hostile American fleet.

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