Beijing is studying America’s next war

UNITED STATES / CHINA

The Iran campaign offered China a rare opportunity to assess US military power, and where the cracks may be beginning to show.

WHILE much of the world is debating who won and lost the Iran war, China is using the conflict to answer one of the most important military questions of the decade: can America still sustain a major war against a peer rival?

And that answer may already be changing.

“The idea that the US can still run a two-theatre conflict and simultaneously fight a near-peer rival was the gold standard,” says John Hemmings, Senior Advisor at the Pacific Forum.

“I think that’s gone out the window.”

For Chinese strategists, Operation Epic Fury was a rare opportunity to observe American military power under real-world conditions, testing assumptions about everything from artificial intelligence and intelligence fusion to munitions expenditure, logistics and political decision-making.

Many Chinese commentators assumed Donald Trump would stop short of direct military intervention. He did not.

Yet the political lessons may ultimately prove less important than the military ones.

Earlier this year, Chinese military channels published an English-language assessment identifying five lessons the People’s Liberation Army drew from the conflict.

Among them were the importance of superior firepower, the dangers of internal infiltration, strategic self-reliance, integrated air and missile defence, and the risks of complacency.

Hemmings argues that one of the most important lessons concerns artificial intelligence.

During the campaign, the US deployed Operation Maven, a Pentagon targeting platform designed to process huge volumes of information from satellites, drones and other sensors.

During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States collected vast quantities of intelligence but often lacked enough analysts to process it all.

“They still say to this day there are reams and reams of data that have never been looked at,” says Hemmings.

Operation Maven changes that equation by helping commanders analyse and act on information in real time.

“Where you would have had 100 sorties a day, you’re now up at 3,000,” he says. “You’re beyond the ability of human beings.”

Court filings revealed a Grok-derived model integrated into Maven helped US forces strike 2,000 targets with 2,000 munitions in just 96 hours.

Yet the technology remains far from infallible.

Reports of civilian casualties, including at a school struck during the opening stages of the conflict, highlighted the risks of machine-assisted targeting and compressed decision-making cycles.

Hemmings believes Chinese planners will be studying those failures as closely as the successes.

“The Chinese are watching this. This is what they’re watching. This is what they’re trying to learn from. What are the weaknesses in the US targeting system? Where have they gone wrong?”

Aedan Mordecai, Sibylline’s Lead Asia-Pacific Analyst, argues that Chinese planners are likely to have examined Iran’s ability to absorb punishment and continue resisting despite being heavily outmatched by the United States and Israel.

“Iran is obviously hugely outmatched from the US and Israel from a total military resources point of view,” he says. “But obviously not incapable to sustain itself in some ways and remain a threat.”

The lesson carries obvious implications for Taiwan.

“The fact that Iran is still standing speaks volumes, frankly,” says Mordecai.

“They wouldn’t be able to say for sure they will resist like that. But to dismiss it as a possibility would obviously be completely foolish when you’re going into a conflict of that degree.”

For Beijing, however, the crucial question remains whether American power can be sustained over time.

That question sits at the heart of a warning Sibylline raised earlier this year.

In February, Sibylline argued that the United States could win the opening phase of a conflict against China and still struggle in a prolonged war if industrial production, logistics and munitions replenishment became the deciding factors.

The issue is not simply military capability but endurance.

Even a relatively limited campaign against Iran consumed munitions at an extraordinary rate. Estimates suggest the first 100 hours of operations burned through around $3.7 billion worth of munitions, roughly $3.5 billion of it unbudgeted.

The drawdown in some key weapons was particularly striking. Reports indicate the operation consumed more than a quarter of US Tomahawk cruise missile inventories and more than a third of long-range JASSM stocks.

Those figures are likely to have attracted close attention in Beijing. Every missile fired must ultimately be replaced by factories, supply chains and skilled labour.

A conflict over Taiwan would almost certainly be longer, larger and more demanding than the Iran campaign, turning stockpiles, production lines and industrial capacity into strategic assets in their own right.

The lesson is not lost on Moscow.

Alexander Lord, Sibylline’s Europe Analyst, says Russia is likely to have focused on a different aspect of the campaign.

“Russia learned in Ukraine that cheap, mass-produced drones can impose costs out of all proportion to their price,” he says. “What Iran demonstrated is that this remains true even when facing an opponent with overwhelming air and precision strike superiority.”

The contrast is striking. While the United States expended billions of dollars in precision munitions during the opening phase of the campaign, relatively inexpensive drones continued to shape the battlefield and force costly responses from defenders.

A Government Accountability Office review found that the Air Force’s aerial refuelling fleet consistently fell short of readiness targets between 2019 and 2025, citing ageing aircraft, spare-parts shortages, maintenance challenges and delays introducing replacement tankers.

Defence analyst Lyle Goldstein describes tankers as “integral” to US operations and “outsized” in any conflict with China.

The GAO report also highlighted increasing reliance on parts cannibalisation, with components removed from one aircraft to keep another operational.

For Hemmings, such concerns point to a broader challenge.

“The US does not have the defence industrial base for that,” he says, referring to the traditional assumption that America could simultaneously manage multiple conflicts while confronting a major rival.

“All of these things are going into their calculations on how to circumnavigate these apparent American strengths and, on the defence industrial base side, exploit the window.”

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