> we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself.
Will we? It appears to me that modern war works substantially like modern factories - you don't actually want a large mass of semiskilled workers to pull the levers, each of which can substitute for a different one on about five minutes' notice. You want relatively few, highly-trained specialists to instruct the ~~robots~~ drones. It is perhaps less true in war than in manufacturing, quantity still has that quality all its own, but it seems very unclear that just raw numbers of soldiers will be an important bottleneck as between Great Powers.
I'm pretty sure most of the robots and drones are manufacturered in China though. Even if they weren't, a lot of critical components for building things come from there now.
I think that I have seen that this kind of "independence" has been a driving reason for China's strategies too. I don't think that it's necessarily a defence against a war, maybe more of an economic buffer, ensuring that China, and whomever follows the strategy is no longer dependent on any other entity for parts of their supply chain.
One of the things, too, that people seem to forget is that the West (in general) has neglected their manufacturing capability in favour of the "Asian Tigers" doing the work (Japan, Korea, Taiwan), China is just the current holder of the title (for how long is anyone's guess, Japan especially has endured a sustained stagnation of their economy over the last several decades).
Germany, for a while, was a strong manufacturer, and have (so far) been using the resulting economic position to their advantage inside the European Bloc. Perhaps that's the model that the USA (and others) should be looking toward?