He told the New York Times that he thinks the U.S. will “very likely” find itself in a three-front war with China, Russia, and Iran. As a result, he said, the Pentagon should continue developing autonomous weapons at full speed, pointing to big mismatches in how far the U.S. would be willing to go while fighting a war compared with other countries.
China considers itself a regional power, and doesn’t delude itself into calling itself a world power like Russia does. So it’s unlikely they’d direct any strikes at CONUS if a war broke out. They would instead try to force all US/allied influences out of their sphere of influence and just play the defensive game until some kind of peace could be negotiated.
They have aspirations to become a global power in the next century and possibly could do it, the real question is do they intend to share the stage with the US or find ways to erode US power down to regional power and rise up to take their place?
I think that if a war was to break out, it would be like US vs Japan in WW2. Except we would be Japan and China would be the US.
The Japanese had superior weapons and ships, but were unable to replace losses in a timely fashion, leading to being dominant in the beginning of the war, but once the US manufacturing base started producing weapons and ships, the Japanese were quickly overwhelmed and unable to keep up.