China does not have to believe the United States is weak to draw a dangerous conclusion from the Iran war. It only has to believe America’s best weapons run out faster than America can replace them.
That is the part Beijing will study. U.S. bombers, missiles, and air-defense batteries did what they were built to do. Iran paid the price for testing them.
Aircraft Carrier in the Sunset. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The awkward part came after the missiles flew. Tomahawks, Patriots, THAAD interceptors, anti-ship weapons, and long-range strike systems are the weapons that would matter in a war in the Western Pacific.
CSIS has estimated that several key inventories depleted in the Iran campaign would take years to rebuild under current production plans. Around Taiwan, Guam, and the carrier operating areas inside China’s missile envelope, those weapons would be spent far faster under far worse pressure.
The Missiles Went Fast
Iran was not China. China has a major industrial base, a huge navy, a dense missile force, and the advantage of fighting close to home. The scale changes everything.
The Iran war still matters because it exposed the interval between combat time and industrial time. Combat moves fast. Production does not. A missile can leave a launch cell in seconds. Replacing it can involve contracts, subcomponents, skilled labor, and money that Congress has to appropriate before a factory manager can hire the next shift.
Washington spent years calling China the pacing threat while buying the weapons for that competition as if wars would come one at a time and end quickly. Ukraine drew down one set of inventories. The fight with Iran drew down another. Taiwan is supposed to draw on what’s left.
A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor is launched from the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska in Kodiak, Alaska, during Flight Experiment THAAD (FET)-01 on July 30, 2017 (EDT). During the test, the THAAD weapon system successfully intercepted an air-launched, medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) target.
China’s Factory Floor
China’s industrial advantage is visible in shipyards, electronics, drones, missile production, repair capacity, and the blurry line between civilian production and military use.
The U.S. Navy has circulated the now familiar comparison that China’s shipbuilding capacity is roughly 230 times that of the United States. That number gets repeated because it sounds absurd. It is more useful because it points to a larger reality.
China can build at scale. It can repair at scale. Its forces would also operate much closer to the relevant factories, ports, depots, and launch areas than American forces would after crossing the Pacific.
The United States did not win the Second World War because its weapons were better. It won because it became the arsenal that could keep replacing what war consumed. The phrase “arsenal of democracy” still gets used in Washington. It now does more emotional work than industrial work. The old memory flatters Americans because it is true. It also misleads them if they treat industrial depth as a national inheritance rather than a national habit that has to be maintained.
A war over Taiwan would put that phrase on trial. The opening phase might reward American skill, submarines, intelligence, and long-range strike. A longer fight would reward volume, repair, adaptation, and the ability to keep feeding the front after the first assumptions have failed.
The Sea Still Matters
There is a catch, however, and it is not a minor one. China’s factories still need the sea.
China remains the world’s largest crude oil importer. In 2024, it imported about 11.1 million barrels per day, roughly 74 percent of apparent consumption. Those barrels do not appear by political command. They move through the Strait of Hormuz, the Indian Ocean, the Malacca Strait, the South China Sea, and other routes familiar to every naval planner in Asia.
Beijing has stockpiles. It has Russian supplies, overland routes, pipelines, and wartime controls. None of that should be dismissed. China has spent years thinking about the Malacca problem because serious states consider the places where their economies can be affected.
But the vulnerability remains. A factory floor is not self-sufficient simply because it is large. It needs fuel, parts, shipping, insurance, port access, and some expectation that commerce will keep moving. A U.S.-led maritime campaign would not need to produce a perfect blockade on day one to matter. It could raise costs, delay traffic, reroute tankers, and force China to spend military effort protecting the arteries that feed its own industrial machine.
Hormuz showed how fast maritime risk becomes a market event. China would face that problem on a wider map, with more at stake, with few easy ways to make it disappear.
Whether Washington would have the political stomach for that kind of campaign is another matter. It would be hard, escalatory, legally contested, and painful for both allies and China. That question usually gets skipped in clean war plans.
The Part Washington Has Not Fixed
This is not a Chinese victory story. U.S. submarines remain one of the great unresolved problems in Beijing’s war plans. The geography around China is crowded with American allies and partners, some more willing than others, but all relevant. Japan matters. Australia matters. The Philippines matters more than it did ten years ago. Guam is vulnerable, but it is not irrelevant. South Korea has its own calculations. The United States also brings combat experience in joint operations and long-range strike that the PLA has not had to prove in a real war.
The institutional problem is uglier than the speeches admit. Munitions production cannot be surged by announcing that China is the pacing threat. Shipyard repair capacity cannot be wished into existence after the shooting starts. Allied co-production takes time. Multiyear procurement helps, but it does not erase a generation of buying exquisite systems slowly and treating munitions as the place to save money when budgets get tight.
A Pacific war would demand unglamorous quantities: interceptors, mines, torpedoes, anti-ship missiles, drones, spare parts, replenishment ships, and repair crews. It would also demand political steadiness after the first week, when losses begin, and the familiar expectation of quick American dominance starts to look tired.
That is the uncomfortable point Beijing may take from Iran. America can still hit hard. China can still be hurt badly. But if the first weeks of American firepower are backed by thin inventories and slow factories, deterrence begins to rest on an assumption that the other side may start testing.
The United States does not need to panic. It needs to stop treating industrial capacity as something behind strategy rather than part of it. Beijing does not have to believe America cannot fight. It only has to wonder whether America can keep fighting at the pace a Pacific war would set.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
