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Notes -
500 tomahawks a year is terrible too. That’s five months of Russian-level Ukraine war expenditure or about four hours of a war with China.
If they all hit, then the war will be over in four hours. (But note that Raytheon says they intend to scale up to 1,000/year.)
It's hard to tell how much is enough because a lot of it is about the timeframe (1/year is fine if you started building around the Jurassic period, for instance), effectiveness, intended target, delivery vehicle...much of which isn't know.
My thinking is that China's window is closing, but they have a respite with the Iran war. Right now it looks to me like that window is about five years, but that's a guesstimate and could change due to further actions by the United States or China or third parties.
China wants to LARP as Burgerland in WWII, and enter the war after everyone is already exhausted from fighting each other for years. Iran isn’t even going to really get started until after midterms in November.
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