The problem with this is that this is US based opinion that is based on US standards. However the real question is should we judge the situation by US standards when we are thinking about large foreign powers. So here is something from today:
SIPRI: Military spending increases worldwide
In this article there is the graph of military spending for world's biggest spending powers. However there is one little problem with that. In other words China per capita has about 6 times less money than US and that is the problem of this methodology. Because the question is does the financial spending translates into military capacity equally. In other words wages in China are much much lower than in US. But the question is are their troops and engineers proportionally worse for the size of their income? The graph says that US spent 877 Billion $ on military last year. However if China has so much lower wages you can't really put sign of equality here. In other words if you multiply their military spending with that 6 from per capita numbers you get that their actual military spending is 1752 Billion $. What isn't all that surprising since they have 4.3 times larger population. The problem is that US is so much into raw Capitalism that the country is likely to miss real numbers and calculate how much everything is worth. What doesn't always translate into proportional effect. Since through lower wages and prices they can get much more for every $. What is especially the case if you judge the country that has basically become world's factory and thus they have plenty of engineers. Also China is spending on it's military in it's own currency. Thus how much that is in Dollars is basically a matter of made up conventions regarding exchange rate, rather than a physical fact. What means that you kinda mixing apples and oranges here. What can easily lead into some very false conclusions.
On the other hand why would China confront the US directly ? All they have to do is wait and US will destroy itself at this rate. The deficits are through the roof, good chunk of the infrastructure is bad and getting worse, there is some clear loss of global influence, education is generally bad, healthcare is bad, partisanship is bad, pubic safety is a problem in many places. So it is better just to wait, go slow, develop more trade routs ... and the odds are that the problem will solve itself. Since US is unstable country at this point and therefore once this cracks the military will as well.
So in the bottom line US has to wake up if the country doesn't plan to lose this global struggle. The numbers at face value and "patriotism" don't really provide the full picture. "We can't really be challenged" is a fantasy.
