Lol it happened with the nazis. The diaries of their leaders at the start of the invasion of the ussr were like "this is the biggest movilization ever! Our victory is inevitable and glorious", 3 weeks later goebbels was like "our intel was completely wrong".

I've got this special interest with regard to the amazingly-wide gulf between the perception of how effective the Amerikan military is, and how incompetent they actually are. tl;dr, practically all of our wargame simulations are heavily scripted-- when they don't script how OPFOR "is supposed to act"(direct quote from one of the overseers of MC'02), OPFORs rungs lower on the tech ladder absolutely TPK our shit with low-tech methods. Millennium Challenge '02 is a prime example of the kind of fuckery the Joint Chiefs get up to fudging how effective our troops are.

Part of me thinks they know as well and they are looking for other ways to either destabilize China or avoid war by turning shit inwards.

"Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance" - Sun Tzu