Why do you think they would think they'd lose? Our military has not made a particularly good showing in this century.
The military has made by all reasonable measures an amazingly good showing in this century. It has achieved K/D ratios as good or better as any military force in the history of the world.
What the US military
doesn't do well is nation building and peacekeeping. But those are not military missions, those are fundamentally political operations rather than military operations, and the determinants of success or failure for those lie pretty much entirely in the hands of civilian leadership that is responsible for setting the overall strategic aims and purpose for any use of military force. The military doesn't set overall political strategy, it follows the orders of civilians who set that political strategy. If the political strategy is incoherent and not based on a realistic understanding of the world, then the use of force will fail, regardless of how well or how poorly the military applies that force. That political failure, rather than a military failure, is what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And those small localized peacekeeping operations that the US military was deployed for over the past 20 years are an entirely different matter from a conventional war against another great power (nation-state).
Ironically, if there is any branch of the US military that we should really be criticizing, it is the one branch that was NOT directly involved in Iraq and Afghanistan (except for lobbing the occasional cruise missile etc) - the US Navy.
The US Navy continues to waste the vast majority of its budget on obsolete surface ships that would be pretty much useless in a conflict against a capable nation state, rather than transitioning towards an all or predominantly submarine force. In a war against a capable nation state such as China, aircraft carriers and other surface ships would be easy prey for anti-ship missiles, and would either all quickly be sunk, or else be forced to stay in port and/or far away from the fighting.
Poll
