China’s Military Buildup is So Much Bigger Than We Realize.

How powerful is the chinese military that's one of the great unanswerable questions in global affairs right now a question that even china's own leaders would struggle to fully answer but just like any other great mystery everybody's got a hot take about what the answer should be and as you might expect everybody is convinced that they're absolutely right

The most outspoken of the china hawks tend to agree with the beijing propagandists that today china boasts the military of a true global superpower capable of challenging the united states in a head-to-head battle and able to comfortably wipe the floor with everybody else the skeptics claim that the chinese military is fundamentally broken reliant on stolen

Western technology and totally inexperienced in real-world combat the political analysts claim that chinese military serves as the chinese communist party reinforcing the party's control of its own people and being bent into nearly unrecognizable shapes to maintain its loyalty to the will of the party and as for those who see china in a state of perpetual

One-man rule well to them the chinese military is little more than a vanity project to stroke the ego and build the personal power of one xi jinping but the one thing that nobody can deny about the chinese military is that in 2026 it's grown to be absolutely massive its navy sails more warships than the united states its air force flies hundreds of advanced

Stealth fighters and its total active duty strength is over two million troops over half a million more than the country in second place today china's annual military budget is nearly eight times as large as it was in the year 2000 and within the next 10 years is expected to become a dominant nuclear power on par with the us and russia yet even as impressive

As those figures might be they still don't tell the full story on how the chinese military has expanded at a scale that's difficult to fully comprehend whether or not china could use its military whether or not china poached foreign technology to build that military those are important questions to ask but the answers to those questions don't change the

Larger reality that the modern chinese military is a hell of a weapon and it's growing more dangerous by the day the conventional every once in a while the united states pentagon takes a moment to release a report on the chinese military and every time that report comes out the takeaway message is basically the same the chinese military is extremely

Formidable it's working to challenge america's place in the world order and washington needs to spend more and build more to stay ahead of beijing but as much as that warning has become a bit repetitive there's a reason that the us feels the need to keep banging on the same drum across most of the world a decent-sized military might expect to improve its

Quality each year maybe by expanding recruitment maybe by placing new orders for foreign hardware or for the really good militaries unveiling a new weapon or capability that's all their own but china is one of the ultra-rare global militaries that can expand its fighting strength dramatically year over year in just about every domain of modern warfare and

For china that expansion has happened at a scale and with a consistency that no other country on earth can even come close to touching including the usa take the chinese navy the military force that's kept pentagon planners tossing and turning every night for the past decade occasionally sending worried text messages to their counterparts in tokyo and seoul

China's navy passed the us navy in hull count several years ago meaning that at some point around 2020 china was able to put more warships on the water than the united states but back in 2020 the us could still dismiss china's hull advantage fairly easily back then china only had two relatively small conventionally powered aircraft carriers to its name as

Opposed to the 11 nuclear-powered supercarriers of the united states china could boast more warships but america's were much bigger much more capable and handed washington a clear advantage in overall tonnage best of all china's navy was still mostly restricted to the south china sea with only a few vessels that could travel reliably to other parts of the

World but over the course of the 2020s china's claim to fame on the high seas has gotten so much better beijing is cagey about its overall numbers but this year it's expected to swell its navy to roughly 400 battle-ready ships as opposed to a bit under 300 in u.s service by 2030 china is projected to have nearly 50 more ships in the water than america does

And if that sounds like a stunning growth rate well that's because it is a stunning growth rate china boasts incredible shipbuilding capacity both for military and civilian purposes to the point that in 2025 roughly six in ten ship orders worldwide were going to be filled by chinese shipyards between 2019 and 2023 china's four largest shipbuilders by

Themselves built brand new warships with tonnage higher than the entire fleet of the british navy the united states meanwhile is asleep at the wheel with a shipbuilding problem so severe that america's made the previously unthinkable choice to allow foreign shipyards to help make up the gap quoting a 2025 analysis by the foundation of defense of democracies

Quote china builds 200 merchant ships a year for every one america builds the gap is smaller for warships but beijing built more than a hundred naval vessels over the past decade while the u.s navy got fewer than 50. according to one unclassified report from a u.s navy briefing china's shipbuilding capacity at that time was 232 times greater than america's

And according to a 2020 assessment by the u.s office of naval intelligence china's newer ships are of a similar quality to america's that's a particular problem when the vast majority of china's warships were launched after 2010 while many of america's are significantly older and going back to the question of tonnage china's not just building more ships it's

Building bigger and more advanced ships than it ever has before in 2025 china commissioned the fujian a conventionally powered aircraft carrier that's much closer to the size of america's super carriers than either of its predecessors the next chinese carrier currently known as the type 004 will be nuclear powered and it will match the capabilities of

American super carriers directly the type 004 is expected to launch sometime in the late 2020s and by 2035 china expects to have a nine aircraft carriers in service that's not according to chinese propaganda by the way that's according to the pentagon also on the water's surface china has now welcomed 10 copies of its type 55 destroyer a supposedly

State-of-the-art blue water ship that's significantly larger than america's ali burke-class destroyer in total china expects to sail 16 of the ships alongside 35 copies of the smaller but still very new type 52d destroyer plus nearly 20 other destroyers over 50 frigates of the u.s air force as well as a number of other destroyers including several similarly

Sized vessels assigned to the chinese coast guard under the water surface china is very cagey about his submarine fleet but quoting naval news china is launching submarines at a pace unmatched by any other nation including 15 to 20 subs across eight different classes launched in just the last five years all in all china may surpass the us even in naval

Firepower as early as next year with beijing expected to breeze past washington's count of the more advanced missile launch cells that modern warships used to deliver precision strikes china's air force is also expanding just as fast as its navy take the stealthy j-20 an aircraft that the rest of the world used to dismiss as clearly inferior to america's

F-22 and f-35 but one that seems to have gained substantially greater respect over the last year or two the j-20 is improving rapidly integrating brand new very powerful engines that have solved the aircraft's greatest known weakness in stealth according to reported testimony from western intelligence sources it appears to be quite good and any remaining

Doubt about the impact of its canards the little winglets set just behind the cockpit has been mostly put to rest now that it's become clear that america's upcoming f-47 fighter will probably also use these things not only is the j-20 quite formidable with its latest upgrades but it's being produced at a very impressive clip with recent reports by western

Analysts indicating that between 100 and 120 copies of the jet are rolling off ai-driven assembly lines each year that's compared to a baseline of 156 f-35s built each year so china hasn't quite caught up but it's gotten within striking distance of lockheed martin within just a few years of accelerating production elsewhere china's air force is getting

Stronger and stronger china rolls out roughly 100 copies of its advanced fourth generation j-16 fighter each year and up to 50 copies of its similarly advanced j-10c in early 2026 china started full-scale production on its second fifth generation fighter the carrier-capable j-35 which is a fairly close analog to america's f-35 while china's current j-35

Production figures are unknown it's likely that beijing is already on track to build at least a couple of dozen copies each year given that the j-35 is expected to operate on all of those aircraft carriers that china wants by 2035 we can expect production to scale up quickly in the near future while china's long-anticipated h-20 seems to still be thrown into

The air in the near future while china's long-anticipated h-20 stealth bomber frozen in development beijing is rapidly overhauling its existing fleet of long-range stealth bombers turning them into missile launch platforms to mirror lessons learned from the ukraine war china's battlefield command and control aircraft are evolving rapidly its air-to-air

Refueler fleet is growing at a good clip and its strategic and tactical airlifters have gotten a hell of a lot more impressive over time and then there's china's nuclear arsenal which is believed to have more than doubled over the last six years in 2020 china was estimated to possess only around 300 nuclear warheads but today the count is approximately 620

And pentagon analysts suspect that china will cross the 1 000 warhead mark by 2030. at that pace beijing is expected to reach parity with the u.s and russia in terms of its active deployable warheads by roughly 2035. while the rest of the world certainly hopes china will stop expanding its arsenal once it's caught up there are no guarantees satellite imagery

Shows the mass construction of intercontinental ballistic missile silos all across china's western and northern regions while a combination of official announcements intelligence assessments and open source analysis confirmed that china now possesses a very robust nuclear triad and finally there's the very closely related threat of china's missile arsenal

Now recognized as the largest stockpile of conventional and dual-use nuclear capable missiles on earth recently china's unveiled a wide range of new crews and ballistic missiles those include a hard to track mobile launched icbm that can hit targets 12 000 kilometers away an air launch ballistic missile that can fire from beijing's strategic bombers and a

Hypersonic anti-ship missile that can supposedly deliver incredible damage to large warships its workhorse meanwhile is an intermediate range missile called the df-26 perfectly capable of reaching any chinese adversary in a 4 000 kilometer radius while china's rocket force certainly has its problems including several murky scandals that seem to have cropped

Up over the last few years it's also an unusually large force with a basically unknown total stockpile and all of that might be impressive enough already but those are just the conventional forces that china can muster before we get into all of the very new highly innovative tags that beijing's enemies will have to contend with but before we get there we'd

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Month or fifty dollars a year that's france.co check it out and now let's get back to china the unconventional now if you're going to become a military superpower then like china you've got to start by building parity with your most powerful global competitor but if you want to remain a global superpower then you've got to be able to innovate so that you can

Stay ahead of your adversaries force them to react to new and unforeseen challenges and ideally build the sorts of weapons that can outclass your adversary for a generation like china's conventional military buildup its cutting edge and unconventional weapon systems aren't yet enough to make it a dominant global power but like the conventional buildup china

Does seem to be trending in that direction we'll start with the realm of aviation where for the last century and more military innovation happens at a constant breakneck pace of all of china's cutting edge and experimental aircraft the most talked about might be a warplane that western analysts refer to as the j-36 a three engine tailless aircraft that's

Suspected to be china's first sixth generation fighter jet the j-36 fighter jet is the largest fighter jet in the world the j-36 fighter jet is the largest fighter jet in the world the j-36 was first spotted publicly when it flew over the city of chengdu in late 2024 in an unofficial reveal that was almost certainly meant to be captured and shared on global

Social media while the j-36's capabilities are largely unknown it's thought to be a long-range stealthy and highly advanced fighter capable of carrying large weapons payloads at sustained supersonic speeds and probably launching off of aircraft carriers ever since it was first spotted western analysts have tried to learn everything they can about the j-36

And perhaps most stunning of all would be the number of copies that china's already flying as of july 2026 there were at least five known j-36 prototypes in circulation each of them showing a progression in the aircraft's design u.s air force leadership agrees that the j-36 will be a sixth gen fighter focused on air superiority and the chinese military has

Now confirmed the j-36 existence the arrival of china's newest fighter jet engines will probably enhance the aircraft even further and the j-36 fighter jet will likely be one of the most popular fighter jet aircraft in the world even as changes to the latest prototype suggest that the jet is getting stealthier with each iteration the j-36 would be impressive

Enough even if it were china's only highly advanced fighter in development and especially if it can enter service before america's f-47 but in truth the j-36 is just one in a long list of emerging chinese aircraft with china sustaining several advanced development programs simultaneously also in the manned fighter category there's an aircraft that western

Analysts call the j-50 it's a tailless aircraft that uses an advanced lambda wing design and it's been spotted via satellite at a highly sensitive chinese test facility similar in purpose to america's area 51. where the j-36 is expected to be a long-range high payload powerhouse the j-50 is likely to be a lower range more nimble fighter jet probably able to

Fly off of aircraft carriers in greater numbers and then there's the h-20 a supposed flying wind stealth bomber that china's been developing since the mid-2010s expected to serve a similar role to america's stealth bomber the h-20 is expected to serve a similar role to america's stealth bomber the h-20 is expected to serve a similar role to america's

Upcoming b-21 raider very little is known publicly about the h-20's development and the head of the u.s air force global strike command general stephen davis confirmed in a 2026 interview with the war zone that america believes the h-20 is quote just not there yet nevertheless photos on chinese social media from the last two years would suggest that

Something very big and very stealth bomber-like is flying over chinese skies after the man designs we've got to talk about drones where china's playing around with stealth bombers and the j-50 is expected around with some very interesting concepts perhaps the strangest of them all might be the ju tian translating to the nine heavens an unmanned drone

Mothership that took its first flight in late 2025. when it's complete the jutean will be capable of releasing swarms of up to a hundred smaller drones or potentially even more if china's concept art of small drones being ejected from the side of the aircraft is any indication when fully loaded the jutean will be able to carry up to six tons of smaller

Drones at super high altitudes flying up to a hundred tons of drones at super high altitudes flying at a range of up to seven thousand kilometers and we should be clear here this is a program that does not appear to have a u.s rival in areas where china does need to match the united states it also seems to be doing quite well just see the race to develop

Loyal wingman drones to fly alongside its manned fighter jets china's state-owned aerospace company known by the acronym avic has proposed a total of seven loyal wingman models for the chinese air force each capable of serving in a variety of mission roles for instance a stealthy model known as the sharp sword is supposedly able to destroy swarms of aerial

Decoys and take off from the decks of amphibious assault ships and according to western observers it might already be an operational service as for reconnaissance and strike drones the type that would answer say the american predator and reaper china enjoys an abundance of options to choose from those range from the extra large soaring dragon great name

Known for a unique wing design and the ability to gather targeting data for anti-ship ballistic missiles to the sophisticated wza to bomber launch drone that's probably intended to perform supersonic or even hypersonic reconnaissance runs to map out enemy air defenses before it can be shot down china also operates the rainbow series of drones which includes

Everything from the reaper-like ch4 and ch5 to a stealthy flying wing called the ch7 which probably mirrors america's extremely secretive unacknowledged rq-180 the wing long series offers its own slate of long-range recon drones including the wing long 10 a semi-stealthy model that's since been exported to saudi arabia but even though china's reusable drone

Designs are very impressive their single use and kamikaze drone technology is arguably even more dangerous for china's adversaries beijing has been very diligent in studying the lessons of the war in ukraine as well as the lessons of other global battlefields that have been reshaped by one-way attack drones china's individual designs are often drawn directly

From the drone models made by other countries like the feilong 300d an obvious adaptation of iran's immensely successful shahed 136. but while china's far from the only country adapting the shahed 136 for its own use just see america's lucas drone china claims to have achieved price reductions that would practically perfect the shahed's cost effectiveness

According to the state-owned defense conglomerate norinco china's shahed analog can be built at just 10 000 us dollars per copy less than half of the already low cost that iran had achieved in the past year and a half of the already low cost that iran had achieved in the past year and a half of the already low cost that iran had achieved elsewhere china is

Entirely capable of producing the quadcopters and hexacopters that ukraine and russia have relied on and for a nation of china's manufacturing capabilities the world should simply expect beijing to be able to build analogs for most of the lower cost front-line drones in service with either russia or ukraine but chinese uav development is especially

Impressive when it comes to its autonomous swarm technology during its testing demonstrations china's drone to operator ratio is of legend with a single drone pilot able to manage swarms of hundreds of drones at a time the operator directs the swarm as a single unit and ai does the rest handling pathfinding and swarm synchronization basically by itself those

Command ai models are often trained to mimic animal behavior using the behavior of hunting packs and birds prey as their baseline and then streamlining those behaviors into a much more efficient kill process china swarms rely on algorithms that could keep working even when connections to satellites or humans have been cut off networking drones of different

Types and capabilities into the same swarming unit for the rest of the world it's hard to determine just what china's most sophisticated swarm ai could accomplish but this is one of those areas where an old adage usually applied to the us fits very well for beijing's capabilities if this is what they're willing to reveal to the public then just imagine what

They might have behind the scenes one particularly formidable system is the atlas an ai-enabled vehicle-mounted drone system that launches up to 48 fixed-wing drones from a single mobile launch vehicle it launches one drone every three seconds and then allows at least 96 of the drones to synchronize for precision strikes recon missions jamming operations and

Probably a whole lot more those drones are a large part of the improvements of the chinese ground forces who you may have noticed were conspicuously absent from our explanation of china's conventional military advancements that's partially because the ground forces have been so powerful that they've been so strong that they're even shrinking by about 30

Percent of their overall size within the last couple of decades but it's partly because although china's built new heavy armor like the sophisticated type 100 tank the real improvements of the chinese ground forces are in their conversion to drone warfare but in china's case we don't just have to talk about aerial drones beijing is doubling down on its

Ground drones especially its so-called robot wolves four-legged devices that model the behavior of your guested wolves adversaries down alongside human soldiers that's some black mirror right there they can be fitted with their own assault rifles shotguns rocket launchers and various other weapons covering substantial distances at impressive speeds without

Fatiguing they and other chinese unmanned ground vehicles can also perform complex vital resupply missions ferrying ammunition food and other critical support to human soldiers without putting additional lives at risk other chinese unmanned ground vehicles are much bigger the vut-10 for example weighs about 12 tons and the vut-10 for example weighs about 12

Tons and carries around either an autocannon or an anti-tank missile launcher while the sharp claw 2 can handle long-range patrol and assault missions or deploy much smaller drones like the sharp claw 1 ground vehicle or multiple surveillance or strike quadcopters at a time also at the disposal of china's ground forces as well as the other branches of their

Military are new directed energy weapons like the ones unveiled in xi jinping's gargantuan military parade in 2025. during that parade china revealed the ly-1 a high intensity laser weapon used to bring down drones missiles helicopters and even manned combat aircraft according to china the weapon was first tested all the way back in 2024 and is set to be

Adapted into a layered air defense system that can deploy on the ground or on naval vessels beijing also unveiled the ow-5 a high-energy laser that's specifically designed to shoot down low-flying low-speed targets like enemy drones the silent hunter another low-altitude laser weapon has already been dispatched to saudi arabia to deal with it drones launched

By yemen's houthi rebels and it's been filmed in service with russian forces while also having been sent off to iran long before the start of iran's war with the us and israel in 2026. the newly unveiled li-jan-3 is a portable laser system designed to be carried in a backpack and operated by a single soldier requiring less than five seconds of laser pointing

To bring down a front-line quadcopter also this year china revealed the hurricane 3000 a high-power microwave weapon that claims it will disable entire drone swarms at a range of up to three kilometers of course beijing's military ambitions still center around an eventual invasion of taiwan and as such china's naval advances are among the most impressive of

All we've discussed china's forthcoming line of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers but it's worth emphasizing just how big of a leap this is especially if china can mass-produce those carriers in a way that only the united states has done before those carriers are expected to feature sophisticated electromagnetic catapults highly impressive sensor suites and

Eventually full complements of 5th and 6th generation fighters and stealth attack drones china's also been focused on dramatically expanding its ability to carry out amphibious assaults although in this area china's focused on mostly analog solutions while beijing is developing multiple lines of dedicated massive amphibious assault ships the type 075 and

Type 076 it's also rapidly expanding its fleet of dual-use vehicles these are very large civilian fast-moving drones that can be used in the air, they're equipped with large civilian ferries featuring specialized ramps reinforced decks and other unique features that make them ideal for carrying tanks and heavy fighting vehicles in wartime those vessels are

Expected to multiply china's ability to land on taiwan or other indo pacific adversaries with a full 76 copies of the ferries being built between 2023 and 2026 according to the center for strategic and international studies to get their cargo from sea to land those ferries will probably operate alongside one of china's most unique ship water bridge barges

That can join together and form a collapsible highly mobile extended pier to land anywhere along an ordinary beach china is known to have at least six of the barges first shown in action via chinese social media in 2025 but china is expected to be building more and the new barges aren't the only innovative vessels that china's concocted satellite imagery

From 2026 reveals that china is building a gargantuan new vessel near guangzhou a ship that if western analysts are correct about its purpose would be the single largest naval resupply ship on earth that's the kind of ship that could travel all around the world to rendezvous with chinese carrier strike groups keeping them active in prolonged global

Deployments back in 2024 china revealed a strange flat top vessel that was marked as a civilian research ship but that was roughly the same size as a light aircraft carrier or amphibious assault ship known as the discovery one it's advertised as a testing platform for helicopters and large civilian drones although use potential is obvious and the sheer speed

Of its construction suggests that it may have been a test run for china to build more of these vessels rapidly under wartime conditions western observers also suspect the vessel of being a drone mothership able to travel around the world with a degree of plausible deniability before unleashing its capabilities in unexpected ways underwater meanwhile

Satellite imagery spotted a giant new submarine in 2026 using a highly advanced design that does not feature a submarine sail the protrusion that most modern submarines feature on the top of their hulls it appears to have a narrow hump probably fulfilling a similar purpose and it's unusually long and thin roughly 10 meters wide but 120 meters long and just

Like in the sky and on the ground the chinese navy is spoiled for drones of all types just like the us and other major competitors china's been working on an expanding suite of larger unmanned surface vessels including a stealthy autonomous trimaran that's able to launch missiles and drone helicopters there's also the much smaller sharp shark a 12 meter long

Vessel that displaces about 10 tons and carries a vertical launch mechanism to deploy loitering aerial drones while details on china's smaller ukraine star kamikaze watercraft are harder to pin down beijing is expected to be building the boats in very large numbers given their obvious utility in a naval war with taiwan the us and other indo-pacific

Adversaries underwater china's building all sorts of drone submarines including ultra-large designs that stretch up to 45 meters long smaller models expected to perform constant undersea reconnaissance and others that function as autonomous long endurance torpedoes capable of ripping an underwater hole through the hull of an adversary submarine or surface

Warship china also appears able to swarm its underwater drones including the haiyi autonomous research glider indicating that china solved some of the challenges that come with underwater wireless communication a matter of scale now it's at this point in today's episode that we'd like to pause for a moment and introduce a counterclaim that we're sure you'll

Find in the comments below this episode that really we're making too much out of china's supposed military capabilities after all we will be the first to admit that we've presented a rather glowing review of chinese weapons and war machines so a concerned and knowledgeable viewer might ask well simon what about everything wrong with the chinese military what

About the scandals the unpreparedness or the many other known problems that china still faces well china does face its fair share of military problems starting with the most obvious of all their complete and total lack of any modern combat experience china's last meaningful clash with another military was in the battle of lao shan in 1984 meaning that its

Soldiers have never stared across a battlefield at a real-life adversary and the vast majority of its commanders have never done their jobs in the high-pressure environment of a modern conflict china has stealth aircraft drones and soon a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier but it has no experience using any of them if and when china enters a major conflict

It's going to have to gain all that experience at once in an exceptionally dangerous exceptionally high-stakes affair with no room for error it is entirely fair to look at the current state of the people's liberation army and conclude that no military could work out that many bugs that quickly under such intense pressure let alone a military as sprawling as

China's with such a reliance on technology that hasn't ever been tested in combat then there's the political element in beijing there is no question about what comes first the chinese communist party dominates the military leadership and any military decision must be approved by the ccp by the ccp as soon as it's approved by the ccp there is no question

About what comes first the chinese communist party dominates the military leadership and any military decision must be approved by the ccp and any military decision must be approved by the ccp who appraise the ways those decisions serve the party as well as xi jinping chinese officers and commanders operate alongside dedicated commissars each day whose jobs

Amount to loyalty checking those officers at all times and scanning for any sign that their command could be unreliable or whether they're out of step with party ideology those commissars help to prevent the military from going rogue but in wartime they are a command and control nightmare capable of overruling militarily sound decisions and badly disrupting

Military operations china may believe that those problems would disappear in moments of national crisis and it may believe that its contingency planning is sufficient to create a more streamlined system during wartime in practice however that still leaves china vulnerable to poor communication decisions by military commanders who fear repercussions during

Peace time and a potential clash of egos at every level of china's warfighting infrastructure across the last several years the military has also been functionally decapitated not by a foreign adversary but by xi jinping himself xi's anti-corruption purges are notorious worldwide expelling or removing high-placed generals key decision-makers and even zhang

Yousha xi jinping's second-in-command and the day-to-day leader of the entire pla she and his allies consistently describe those purges as a sweeping anti-corruption effort and indeed china's military is also known for its endemic corruption with ramifications that are unknown in their entirety but generally expected to be quite severe but even still those

Dismissals have left china's command and control apparatus badly degraded especially at the top as key decision makers who spent decades training and being groomed for their roles now have been disappeared into the chinese detention system their replacements are often badly inexperienced and promoted for loyalty or other political reasons instead of their

Competence which only worsens the problems that china is expected to face if it does choose to engage in the modern war but notice that as legitimate as those problems are none of them have to do with the tools of war fighting at china's disposal instead they're all about how china chooses to leverage those tools and whether it can leverage them competently

Enough to actually win a war against its indo-pacific adversaries maybe china can get past those problems or maybe you can't and that's a really important question to answer and it's one that we've grappled with in prior episodes here on warfront so i mean go check out those episodes if you'd like to dive into those problems at more length but there's the

Tools at china's disposal and then there's the way china is going to use those tools there is ample reason to be skeptical of china's ability to use what it has china's arsenal well quite frankly it's unlike anything else on earth and a military that could use the tools at china's disposal should be considered an exceptionally dangerous threat to any

Adversary nation in the vicinity and all that before we've even started to discuss china's greatest weapon think back to every piece of chinese military technology that we have discussed so far from beijing's growing fleet of carriers and fifth generation fighters to its nuclear warheads and its autonomous drone swarms those innovations clearly show china's

Ability to adapt and compete with the very best militaries on earth some allow china to rival the united states directly and some of china's capabilities like its shipbuilding prowess and its highly advanced drone ai systems seem to be the very best in the world but china's ultimate weapon is one that we've hinted at again and again throughout this episode

Without ever naming it directly and that's the fact that china has gone all in on a very specific strategy to win future wars not prioritizing quantity over quality but learning to build high quality hardware in quantities that no other nation can match to understand what that means we can look at the conflict that every country is trying to learn from the

Russian invasion of ukraine among the countless lessons of the ukraine war the world has found out that the expectations of western capitals after the war are not going to be the same as those of the world after the war that high attrition high loss warfare was a thing of the past were catastrophically off the mark the ukraine war relies on the use of

Weapons that are meant to be mass-produced used once and then forgotten one-way attack drones crews and ballistic missiles and good old-fashioned artillery shells the only way to really counter those capabilities when they're used in such massive volumes is to deploy your own version of those same capabilities ideally in equal or even greater numbers than

The enemy but on a really bad night in ukraine or russia a long-range attack by either side might involve let's say 800 to a thousand kamikaze drones and 25 to 50 cruise and ballistic missiles multiply those numbers by 10 and you might get close to what china has the power to achieve if it were to fully shift over to a wartime economy in a period of extreme

Global tension we've got to be really clear in this section that what we're talking about is partly speculative as of the time of writing china hasn't shifted over to a war economy and seems to have no imminent plan to do so but in the event of an invasion of taiwan or a prolonged war against the us and its indo-pacific allies for other reasons china would

Almost certainly make the decision to shift at least part of its civilian manufacturing infrastructure over to wartime purposes once that happens china can unleash pure production capacity at a moment when the ability to put as many lethal one-way systems into the fight as possible is a war-winning advantage and to get a sense of the scale we're talking

About here we'll need a little bit more time to think about that we'll examine simple factory capacity according to chinese official figures the nation is home to roughly 404 000 large-scale manufacturing enterprises compare that to russia which doesn't distinguish between the size of its manufacturing companies and counts only 227 000 of them in total

Including everything from small startups to major producers in other words china has nearly twice as many large-scale factories as russia has manufacturing facilities of any size those factories could not be quickly converted to build say missiles or tanks or major surface warships they are perfectly optimized to start building low-cost attritional weapons

In incredible numbers that means shahed-style kamikaze drones which china can already build today at a cost equivalent to just 10 000 us dollars a piece it means ukraine-style kamikaze drone boats 4 to 10 meter long simple unmanned speed boats that ukraine built using much smaller and far less sophisticated factories than the ones we've seen in the past year

And a half years ago so that means that the ones at china's disposal think back to that hypothetical that we just mentioned a really bad night in russia or ukraine coming under attack from say 800 long-range kamikaze drones a bad night for taiwan once china really gets going could very well involve somewhere around 10 000 and while we certainly don't have a

Direct window into the mind of xi jinping we do know that china's been dramatically expanding its dedicated military production capacity especially when it comes to long-range missiles out of 136 known missile production facilities across china at least 60 percent of them have shown signs of expansion over the last few years based on satellite imagery

Estimated at roughly 2 million square meters of new factory space according to cnn those figures only corresponds to changes that can be observed via satellite meaning any new complexes being built underground or any reconfigurations or upgrades to the production lines themselves are totally unaccounted for in 2014 the u.s government announced a new supply

Chain that would be built in china in 2024 the u.s estimated that china possessed at least 3 150 ballistic missiles but those figures are almost certainly a severe undercount china is more than capable of building massive underground production facilities linked to equally massive underground storage facilities where beijing can conceal untold numbers of

Conventionally armed missiles while still retaining the ability to launch its entire land-based nuclear arsenal several times over russia and ukraine have each demonstrated that those missiles are more effective when they're launched in greater numbers and when they're paired with massive drone swarms that draw the attention of air defense systems it's here

That china vastly surpasses the united states or just about any other country on earth nations with relatively strong manufacturing centers especially strong low-tech manufacturing sectors with lots of people already trained and employed have the ability to shift over production during wartime and produce the ungodly numbers of munitions that are needed to

Produce the required to win a war but although the u.s is still the world's second largest manufacturer it would take a long time to overhaul its factories and start to produce expendable munitions and drones in the numbers that this fight would require the u.s defense industry is bloated and lethargic especially when it comes to developing new low-cost

Technologies like drones and countries like japan or south korea can only partially make up the gap china meanwhile already has the latent capacity ready to go and not just in factories that can quickly transition to build drone components chinese shipyards already churn out more than 200 chips for every one that the u.s produces china's either already

Building more fifth-gen fighters than the u.s each year or it's about to surpass u.s production using assembly lines that are still expanding in a short limited war of course that might not matter the u.s or china's other adversaries can use what they've got force beijing to back down and worry about the fallout later but china's capacity to build good

Hardware in frankly the future mind-boggling quantities turns time into china's greatest weapon the longer a fight goes on and the more enemy hardware that china destroys the greater the odds are that china ultimately comes out on top of course none of this means that china would be guaranteed to win a war in our discussion today we've really only talked

About china's arsenal in a real war china's military could be squandered by its commanders fooled by an adversary or rendered meaningless in countless other ways after all if wars were decided on paper then ukraine would become part of russia in 2022 and iran would be governed by a u.s-backed shah today but as much as china's adversaries may hope that in a

Real war beijing would be incompetent or incapable of using the weapons at its disposal they cannot bet on it if china turns out to be half as good at actually using these weapons as it's been at designing and building them then any nation that tries to go toe-to-toe with beijing is going to face serious trouble maybe quality quantity or maybe it doesn't but

These days china's got both thanks for watching