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Unfortunately for those military types they're not in charge. The CIA has the ability with State Dept to just start a war. Instruct their pawn in Taiwan to declare independence, ensure the US president who is commander of the military knows they must intervene to defend them or else be seen as weak. President orders it, generals object and facepalm but China is already on the move and there's nothing that can stop it at that point.

So it's not what the generals want. Yes they can probably stop or dissuade the president from launching pre-emptive attacks for no particular reason but it won't go down that way. Instead it will go down as a crisis (an engineered one obviously) that will occur, demand action and the US will feel based on everything that it is that it has no choice but to act and so it will be.

I suppose China could just let them have Taiwan but if they do the US will station tens of thousands of troops and missile systems and probably nukes on Taiwan before long and China won't get it back this century in this case which is a real deal-breaker.

I think that military conflict doesn't need to grow intense.

Like Ukraine it just needs to happen enough that the US government can pull a big lever called "fast decoupling" and force companies out of China quickly by slamming down a wall of sanctions. And like with Ukraine they can drag the EU into this via "defending democracy" and get them to pull their companies out and to do sanctions, divestment, decoupling.

This may be more about re-orienting the world for campism and a new cold war with the west withdrawing and putting up economic walls against China/Russia/BRICS and then trying to draw as much of the world as possible into their sphere while keeping out as much of the world from the BRICS sphere as possible with a strong possibility they can get India to pick up the slack from China and turn their position in BRICS into the kind of Turkish/Hungarian position inside NATO which is a spoiler who restrains the rest of it and takes contrary actions for its own self against the group interests and agenda. It's a modified form of the cold war playbook the US used to success in the first cold war in the 50s through 70s. Strategic coups, destabilization operations (terrorism, separatism in key regions) to disrupt China's supply routes and access to key resources and the belt and road.

This would be a time buying exercise. It would lock down NATO/EU markets for only western companies and non-Chinese/Russian firms and aim to out-compete using cheap labor while betting on crushing China/Russia on high technology leading to growing discontent and shortages as well as them falling behind. What if one of the points of the Ukraine war is to kill enough young men that they can justify importing a ton of desperate migrants to create a cheap factory (deeply destabilized due to the tensions of this situation) on the periphery of the EU to replace Russia/China along with their utilization of India? I wonder sometimes.

There's a real chance the US will just do something like deploy mines or AI-drones and dump them in the straits to try and cut off China's navy and land a bunch of weapons systems and special forces to fight China. The idea of a full confrontation between the US navy and the PLAN may never materialize so the intensity of the conflict will be lower. The US will use their vast air power to airlift in supplies and troops to the island. China can still win if they want to but it increases the costs and draw it out to be enough of a media spectacle that the people in the west are turned against China and the pressure for decoupling succeeds.