La riflessione è di Sidney Freedberg, editor di Breaking Defense, ed è stata pubblicata una ventina di giorni fa.
Oltre agli aspetti strategici segnalo agli illustri lettori lo spunto riguardante il ruolo del cyberwarfare nel contesto di un eventuale conflitto tra Stati Uniti e Cina:

[…] So how would China’s preemptive attack unfold?
First would come weeks of escalating rhetoric and cyberattacks. There’s no evidence the Chinese favor a “bolt out of the blue” without giving the adversary what they believe is a chance to back down, agreed retired Rear Adm. Michael McDevitt and Dennis Blasko, former Army defense attache in Beijing, speaking on a recent Wilson Center panel on Chinese strategy where they agreed on almost nothing else. That’s not much comfort, though, considering that Imperial Japan showed clear signs they might attack and still caught the US flat-footed at Pearl Harbor.
When the blow does fall, the experts believe it would be sudden. Stuxnet-style viruses, electronic jamming, and Israeli-designed Harpy radar-seeking cruise missiles (similar to the American HARM but slower and longer-ranged) would try to blind every land-based and shipborne radar. Long-range anti-aircraft missiles like the Russian-built S-300 would go for every plane currently in the air within 125 miles of China’s coast, a radius that covers all of Taiwan and some of Japan. Salvos of ballistic missiles would strike every airfield within 1,250 miles. That’s enough range to hit the four US airbases in Japan and South Korea – which are, after all, static targets you can look up on Google Maps – to destroy aircraft on the ground, crater the runways, and scatter the airfield with unexploded cluster bomblets to defeat repair attempts. Long-range cruise missiles launched from shore, ships, and submarines then go after naval vessels. And if the Chinese get really good and really lucky, they just might get a solid enough fix on a US Navy aircraft carrier to lob a precision-guided ballistic missile at it.

[…] Perhaps the least obvious but most critical uncertainty in a Pacific war would be invisible.
“I don’t think we’ve seen electronic warfare on a scale that we’d see in a US-China confrontation,” said Cheng. “I doubt very much they are behind us when it comes to electronic warfare, [and] the Chinese are training every day on cyber: all those pings, all those attacks, all those attempts to penetrate.”
While the US has invested heavily in jamming and spoofing over the last decade, much of the focus has been on how to disable insurgents’ roadside bombs, not on how to counter a high-tech nation-state. China, however, has focused its electronic warfare and cyber attack efforts on the United States. Conceptually, China may well be ahead of us in linking the two. (F-35 supporters may well disagree with this conclusion.) Traditional radar jammers, for example, can also be used to insert viruses into the highly computerized AESA radars (active electronically scanned array) that are increasingly common in the US military.
“Where there has been a fundamental difference, and perhaps the Chinese are better than we are at this, is the Chinese seem to have kept cyber and electronic warfare as a single integrated thing,” Cheng said. “We are only now coming round to the idea that electronic warfare is linked to computer network operations.”
In a battle for the electromagnetic spectrum, Cheng said, the worst case “is that you thought your jammers, your sensors, everything was working great, and the next thing you know missiles are penetrating [your defenses], planes are being shot out of the sky.