Assessing the overall military capabilities of a nation's military, as has been done in the previous seven chapters of this book, is valuable. It provides a way to compare the military power of that nation to that of the other nations of the world, and the overall military power of different nations affects the calculations and decisions of national governments and leaders. The actual outcomes of military conflicts, however, depend not just on the overall military capabilities of the combatants, but also on the specific nature and location of the conflict (as well as difficult-to-predict factors such as the competency of top military and civilian leaders, intelligence breakthroughs, and plain luck). Thus, in 1973 the world's most powerful military conceded defeat to a much less powerful military, in part because the nature of the conflict prevented the United States from bringing its full military capabilities to bear against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In addition to assessing a nation's overall military power, therefore, analyzing specific conflict scenarios in which that military power might be employed is also important. The purpose of such analysis is not to predict the outcome of a future conflict, but rather to provide a means of assessing how effectively the nation would be able to bring its military power to bear in a particular conflict. Such assessments can assist in understanding the calculus of different nations with regard to the issues over which the conflict could occur, as well as in understanding what changes to the capabilities of the participants in the conflict are likely to have the greatest effect on the outcome.

The number of imaginable conflict scenarios involving China is large, but it is not practical to analyze all of them. Instead, this chapter examines two scenarios that, at the time of this writing, appear to be among the more likely scenarios involving China. The first scenario entails a Chinese attempt to invade and conquer Taiwan in the face of U.S. intervention on Taiwan's behalf. The second scenario entails a war over the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea that involves China on one side and treaty allies the United States and the Philippines on the other.