The Iran conflict is draining American military capacity not just in the Middle East but across the planet. Robert Kelly, a professor of international relations at Pusan National University, warned that the war "is acutely illustrating the problem of the U.S. military's small size" - a problem Beijing is almost certainly cataloging for future use.
As "Hvylya" reports, Kelly wrote in 19fortyfive.com that U.S. ground and air defense units have been pulled into the Gulf from American positions around the world. Missile and interceptor inventories are running low. The U.S. carrier force, he argued, is "clearly overstretched."
Kelly noted a "widespread consensus that the U.S. Navy is too small and doing too much." The strain has become visible during conflicts with what he described as middling powers - Venezuela and Iran. A confrontation with China would demand an entirely different scale of commitment.
A war with Beijing, Kelly wrote, "would be a major peer-to-peer clash, something the United States has not fought since World War II." It would pull almost all major U.S. assets into the Indo-Pacific theater, stripping other American commitments worldwide of military capability.
The overstretch is compounded by the nature of what the U.S. fields. American ships and planes may outclass their Chinese equivalents individually, but if there are not enough of them, "China can triumph by sheer mass." The Iran war, Kelly argued, is putting that vulnerability on display in real time.
Earlier, "Hvylya" explored what Foreign Policy said Ukraine's fight foreshadows for dozens of other states facing similar threats.