Yes, bloggers are generally more reliable than the average RAND know-nothing.
Whenever ur ready to brief a West Point class please be sure to invite me ..am waiting breathlessly. Otherwise keep ur crap in ur crapper.
If the average West Point class is less informed than the blogger with battlefield experience, and thinks the PRC has 3,000 nuclear warheads hiding in a giant tunnel, then that sort of proves the point. Russian successes in places like Georgia and Ukraine seem to be rooted in opponent incompetence and inadequacy more than Russian wizardry. The PRC has yet to have anything similar to Ukraine, so there's not a of ability to judge their capabilities, but what they're showing at trade shows isn't terribly impressive.
A guy who is easily duped by random blog posts and asserts that the PLASRF has a giant tunnel of thousands of nuclear missiles hiding under a mountain or something should probably be politely asked if he would like to retire, though. It's not a very serious assertion and it's a bit dangerous, arguably, because he has a doctorate and inherent social capital, so what he says has outsize worth.
But the entirety of US post-Cold War threat assessment is rather...poor, to say the least. It seems to designed to invent threats to post-hoc rationalize force structures, rather than objectively evaluate them and build force structures to counter them. But given the Army is a major player in these threat assessments it's not hugely surprising why (the Army is afraid of being cut down to a size that more accurately reflects its relevance in future conflicts, as they perhaps should be if America finds itself in a war where it needs a big army in the future).
Until the Russian and Chinese armies notch up the amount of combat experience accumulated by the US and British armies since 1990 I will take all the fear stories about the poor state of the West's land power with a large pinch of salt.
No use comparing with the rapid build up of Hitler's Wehrmacht. This took place less than twenty years after Germany had fought a major land war in Europe.
A partial issue is that said Western armies are using their even less experienced proxies as vicarious battlefield experience with their opponents, though. This both plays into the hands of the proxies (who want to present Russia as a big, frightening, powerful nation to get aid money to funnel into Cypriot bank accounts and bitcoin), and the hands of people who promote the idea that Russia and PRC are currently massive threats (because they will get cushy jobs at Lockheed or Raytheon).
Neither side there really wants to promote the realistic interpretation of the threats, which is that for the moment Russia and the PRC are both very weak militarily, and that the US is very, very strong. This will not appreciably change, except that the PRC may end up consuming more of US combat power in a regional spat in a couple decades, assuming it doesn't collapse under its own internal weight (Xi has done some very curious things lately), and for Russia it seems unlikely to ever change (if anything it will continue declining).
The greater land power issue is probably real to some extent, but it just reflects a general question about the utility of large land forces in general. There's not a lot of role for armies to play in the predominantly air and naval oriented battles of the "A2AD" future. Without air power the land forces get annihilated by air power (Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, ISIS). With air power, the land forces have nothing to attack, and even a few men in pickup trucks and on motorcycles can destroy large field formations with little effort (ISIS in Iraq and Syria before the USN showed up).
That said, ground forces have sort of carved out a niche for sieges (Gaza, Sarajevo, Fallujah) where "flatten Arnhem" isn't a serious answer, either because you can't reliably locate targets or because you want to actually capture a town or something and not just obliterate it. NATO doesn't fight many of those battles, but some other democratic countries do, like Israel.
