“ For the US, the only pain is inflation”

That is not correct and the comment you replied to even pointed out several ways it hurt the US other than that

Inflation is the only Immediate pain. The other harms will play out over years.

While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.

> While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.

This is a positive, not a negative. It's a needed wake up call and better to get it now instead of during a war with China.