Matthew Hennessey had a heads-up in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Free Expression section. His warning is summarized in his subheadline and again early on in the piece.

China is getting a good look at the precision and professionalism of the American war machine.

And

With the possible exception of Donald Trump and the Iranians themselves, no one is following the progress of the latest Middle East war more closely than China’s Xi Jinping. Not so much for the outcome, but for the scouting opportunity. Mr Xi is interested in US tactics and weaponry because he’s preparing for a war of his own.

Of course Xi is. Whatever else he (and his rump general staff, come to that) might be, they’re not stupid men.

Which brings me to my concern. Hennessey liked his football analogy throughout his piece, so I’ll expand it. The…game…between the US and Iran is like unto a start-of-the-season game between a highly ranked college team and a third or fourth tier college team, a game whose value for the ranked team is little more than another scrimmage, this time with plays and outcomes on the line.

Or, a more apt analogy: the campaign the US is executing against Iran (Hennessey ignored Israel’s role in the campaign because Xi isn’t concerned with the Israeli machine’s precision and professionalism) is little more than a live fire exercise.

Live fire exercises are tightly constrained in their activities; even when state-of-the-art systems are used, those are used under artificial constraints and only employed a very few times, as proofs of technique. I strongly hope we’re not putting our best systems, tactics, and doctrine to use against this third or fourth tier opponent, or at least limiting their use. There’s no need, in order to crush the mullahs easily, to broadly expose those for Xi’s edification.

“Better is the enemy of good enough” applies here, too.

On the other hand, there’s this bit of Hennessey misapprehension:

One thing to remember: it’s been 47 years since the PLA was involved in anything close to a real firefight—a monthlong spitting contest that it fought to a draw with Vietnam in 1979. The US military has been trading blows with real bad guys in hard places more or less constantly since 2001.

That’s true enough, and our military’s hard experience is invaluable. But would it be enough? It’s been 75 years since our military was involved in a fight with a peer or near peer enemy. And that was against the PLA in the Korean War, and absent the use of nuclear weapons, we escaped with a draw.