US forces could potentially lose an armed conflict to Russia or China, a think tank report warns

I feel you must consider carefully the political environment in which this report was written.
Also, you must consider the question of maintaining a huge standing force vs mobilization.
The key problem here is the economic impossibility of unrealistic levels of defense funding.
Warmest Regards, Sandy :)

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1700/RR1782/RAND_RR1782.pdf

Diplomacy is strongly needed in our current environment.

We shouldn't be spending all this money on the F-35 which I consider to be a very unreliable and underpowered platform. The F-22 we have but we don't have enough of them. If we could have taken the 1.5 trillion dollars that we wasted on the F-35 and I put them into the A10 warthog, we would probably have 10 times as many as we have now. We have enough money to keep the pilots flying and not be stressed out and leaving like they are now. We could even have such things as stealth technology added to the existing A10 Electronics and for all we know, we could have the warthog flying with laser blinding capability against the adversaries on the ground. We wasted money on the G whiz F-35 when we could have fix the procurement having enough Logistics available for the Air Force. We could have replaced the kc-135 years earlier instead now we have issues where the replacement is getting a no-go from the US Air Force. We have so much mismanagement in today's military. Look at the uniform Fiasco. The Marine Corps had it right. The Army had it wrong when they picked the ACU rock quarry digital camouflage uniform in July, 2004 when I was at Fort Knox taking my Captain's career course. Now we have this ocp uniform which should have been the choice back in 2005. I know that is not the fault of the USAF. We are not the inept leaders in the puzzle Palace who makes decisions.