What Beijing Is Learning From Operation Epic Fury
- Beijing is studying Operation Epic Fury closely, watching US precision strike capabilities, munitions depletion rates, and the administration's decision-making process in real time.
- Retired Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan says Trump's impulsiveness is genuinely unsettling for Chinese war planners, but Washington's one-war capacity and stripped-down NSC process may offset that deterrent effect.
- With US missile interceptor stocks being drained in the Middle East, some analysts warn a strategic window for Beijing could be opening, particularly if Washington remains distracted through the midterm election cycle.
Five weeks into the US-Israel air campaign against Iran, the world is tallying the economic wreckage: Brent crude at $114 a barrel, the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to commercial traffic, and the International Energy Agency calling it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Beijing is watching all of it. And not just the energy markets.
Operation Epic Fury, launched Feb. 28, has given China’s military planners an unprecedented real-time window into how the United States wages high-end warfare, according to Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general and senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney. “The US military is still a very powerful organization,” Ryan told RFE/RL this week. “It can deploy overwhelming force and conduct sustained precision operations, at least from the air and from the sea.”
That part is not reassuring to Beijing. But the fuller picture is more complicated, and potentially more useful to Chinese planners.
Ryan says the Trump administration has demonstrated a critical limitation alongside its firepower: it can manage one major war at a time, and it has stripped out much of the institutional decision-making architecture that would normally govern a conflict of this scale. “These decisions look to be being made much more on impulse,” Ryan said, pointing to what he described as shifting and inconsistent strategic objectives since the campaign began.
For Xi Jinping and the People’s Liberation Army, that combination — overwhelming capability paired with constrained strategic bandwidth — is worth studying carefully. If Beijing has a clearer strategy than Washington does, Ryan argues, that gap matters as much as any hardware comparison. “Strategy is even more important than battlefield performance,” he said. “Having the right strategic assumptions and the right strategic decision mechanisms for executing that strategy is something the Chinese might think that they’re better at than the United States at the moment.”
The strategic implications extend well beyond tactics. China receives roughly a third of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The closure has forced Beijing to scramble for Russian and alternative supplies even as it publicly opposes the war and calls for de-escalation. Iran, notably, granted Chinese-flagged vessels passage through the strait on March 26, a gesture that underscored the careful line Beijing is walking: rhetorical opposition to Washington, functional diplomacy with Tehran, and eyes fixed on the Taiwan question.
China’s military budget grew 7% in 2026 to roughly $277 billion, and its official military media outlet has published formal analyses of the conflict’s lessons, covering everything from the role of AI in US targeting to the effectiveness of leadership decapitation strikes. The PLA had drones mounted on armored vehicles at last year’s military parade — Ryan says those were Ukraine lessons absorbed and adapted, and the Iran war is only adding to the pile.
One of the more alarming data points for Western defense planners is the pace of US missile interceptor depletion. American and allied forces have expended an estimated 2,000 interceptors in the campaign so far, and production rates are nowhere near sufficient to replenish them quickly. Some analysts have begun describing that gap explicitly as a strategic window. “That may be the best time for Beijing to strike,” wrote defense analyst David Axe, noting that the US “simply won’t have enough interceptors” if another front opens.
Ryan is more cautious about the immediacy of that threat. Trump’s unpredictability, while analytically frustrating for Beijing, is also a genuine deterrent. Unlike any of his predecessors, Trump cannot be reliably war-gamed. “The Chinese can’t really war game what his reaction to any kind of event might be because he just really is all over the place,” Ryan said. That uncertainty, he argues, probably induces caution in Xi.
Still, Ryan sees two scenarios gaining traction in Chinese strategic planning. The first: a grand bargain between Trump and Xi in which Washington signals it would not defend Taiwan militarily. The second: a swift, decapitating military strike designed to outpace any US response. Neither requires Beijing to be reckless. Both require Beijing to see an opening.
The congressional midterm cycle, running through October and November, could provide one. A Trump administration managing a protracted Middle East campaign, depleted munitions stocks, and an increasingly hostile domestic political environment is a different adversary than one operating at full capacity and full attention.
Taiwan is not sitting still. Taipei’s defense ministry submitted a report to lawmakers in March outlining the “T-Dome” layered air-defense architecture it is rushing to complete, drawing explicit lessons from the Iran and Ukraine wars on the need for low-cost interceptors capable of handling drone swarms. The debate over a nearly $40 billion special defense budget is ongoing in the legislature, with opposition lawmakers raising questions over cost and feasibility.
As for how Xi is reading the broader picture, Ryan’s read is that the Chinese leader sees his long-standing narrative confirmed: the West in decline, US alliance systems fraying, and Washington’s credibility with allies eroding. “Whether that’s right or not remains to be seen,” Ryan cautioned. “But I think from his perspective, that’s probably what he sees.”
The war in Iran has not settled anything about Taiwan. But it has handed both sides new information, and neither is ignoring it.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
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