[Skybird]

Ten years ago I thought that China would stick to its somewhat non-expansive tradition of foreign policies and would not militarily expand. I ruled out a chance for a major US-China war, therefore.

However, back then I made one mistake: I did not take into account their claim for historically claimed grounds and territories, that is so absurd to me like Italy claiming territories on the grounds of the widest expansion of Imperial Rome. I thus failed to take such a thinking into account.

Today I think that there will be a next great international war, a real major one, within this century, and that the waterways near China and the ressources in the disputed sea areas will be the reason for it. The major battlefields will be the seas, but the cyberspace as well.

And I fear the US is not on the right way to win it. It gets outnumbered, technology gaps narrow down, and the Americans for my taste base far too much on the WWII concpetion of aircraft carriers. But their untouchability I compare to that of the German U-Boats in the late stage of WWII when they were no longer the hunters, but the hunted. Militaries tend to plan the next war in the fashion they had won the last war, and that all too often is the recipe for getting defeated. In other words: aircraft carriers today are more political weapons and weapons for striking against weak and inferior enemies - not a power of your own strength and calibre.

I would not be surprised if autonomous drones as weapon platforms play the decisive role in such a war. There may be ethical implicaitons - but in military logic making drones autonomous is the logical and necessary next step.

Hope is that China continues to become a High-Tech nation - and by that becoming as vulnerable and dependent as Western high tech nations are, so that just a few swift blows to the economic infrastructure can spell decisive desaster. A heavyweight boxing fight, so to speak, where just one blow can knock the other out. You rarely have that in lighter weight classes.

Until then, other things, namely the crisis of debts and paper currencies, will continue to have a forming effect on how that war will be fought, and how well or ill prepared the US will be.

I assume that by then Europe will be militarily so impotent that it will play no role in a China-America war. Thinking about British and French navies.

Hope I am already dead when that war happens. When the end of your life knocks on your door, last thing you want needing to witness, is such a disaster.