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That's not how wars work, though. You lost in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, and in every occasion you enjoyed vast military superiority by the end. "We can kill them, they can't kill us" is simplistic and part of the problem, which is a bronze age savage's theory of victory coupled with an actually cost-sensitive political and economic system.
As for interceptors, I find the alleged exhaustion rates plausible despite "classified" noise from your India-tier corrupt officials, for the following reasons: corrupt people are generally untrustworthy; we know 21st century America is generally subpar at physical production; we know that some arms sales were frozen and THAADs were harvested from Korea; we know that interception rates have declined over the war, esp. in Israel; we know the bases are wrecked.
I won't even argue the facts again (China is about 5 years behind in space and 8 months in AI). On priors, why do you believe this is even plausible? You must know that you have fewer people than China, fewer highly intelligent people, lesser talent allocation to STEM, less industrial capacity, less energy, less cutthroat markets, less… pretty much everything, except some legacy IP. Is this just blind patriotism?
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