Voracious reading — “I am reminded of Andrew Gordon’s masterful book ‘The Rules of the Game’ about the decline of the Royal Navy before the Battle of Jutland” — fuels the fluent writings of Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.). Their distilled essence is: People who are serious about national security should immediately speak loudly so that the nation can carry a big military stick. To qualify for the “marathon” competition with China, the United States must “win the sprint” right now.

After Princeton and before earning a Georgetown doctoral degree, Gallagher served seven years as a Marine, learning Arabic, and, during two Iraq deployments, learning the cost of good intentions combined with muddy thinking. Now 38 and in his fourth congressional term, he chairs the House’s newly created and instantly most important committee. Its single subject is China — meaning, practically, the Chinese Communist Party.

Deterrence failed regarding Ukraine, with a huge cost in blood and treasure; a comparable failure regarding Taiwan would be immeasurably more catastrophic. About this, Gallagher’s thinking is congruent with that of scholars Hal Brands (Johns Hopkins) and Michael Beckley (Tufts) in “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China.”

Demography, the authors say, dictates China’s destiny, which is decline. The danger zone is not this century — the marathon — but this decade, when China, “a falling power” facing an “ugly” future, might lunge through a closing window of opportunity for aggression.

The long run favors the United States, which is why “getting to the long run won’t be easy.”

China, Brands and Beckley write, is at “the intersection of ambition and desperation,” the latter because China’s 37-fold real gross domestic product growth 1978-2018 is certain to be followed by a prolonged contraction. By 2050, almost one-third of the nation will be older than 60. Because of the long echo of the ruinous “one-child policy” (1980-2016), China’s population, they write, “will be just half its current size by the end of the century and perhaps as soon as the 2060s.”

And: “From 2020 to 2035, China will lose roughly 70 million working-age adults and gain 130 million senior citizens. That’s a France-sized population of young workers, consumers and taxpayers gone — and a Japan-sized population of elderly pensioners gained — in just fifteen years.”

Gallagher believes that China’s recklessness might increase as its dynamism wanes. Hence his questions, recommendations and complaints that the committee can explore.

Why the seeming retreat from the long-standing goal of a 355-ship Navy? Why is China purchasing U.S. agricultural land? Why has Congress not funded improved air and missile defense systems on Guam, just 1,700 miles from Taiwan? Why is Saudi Arabia ahead of Taiwan in the line to receive Harpoon missiles?

There should be more surge capacity in munitions manufacturing. “On any given missile system,” Gallagher writes, “roughly 30 percent of the material requires lead times on restocking that may run beyond a year.” U.S. policy should protect Indo-Pacific nations from “Finlandization,” a Cold War term for large authoritarian powers reducing nominally independent countries to functional subservience.

Defeating an amphibious invasion of Taiwan would require U.S. strikes against China’s coastal facilities, according to Gallagher. So, crucial military munitions plants on the U.S. mainland should be hardened against potential retaliatory strikes by China’s precision weapons with conventional explosives.

Gallagher tartly says, “Silicon Valley, a leader in the corporate social responsibility movement, should modernize its conception of social responsibility to exclude technology partnerships” that facilitate China’s human rights abuses and weapons development.

And in his summoning of the nation to seriousness, he is scalding about the Defense Department’s “woke commissariat.”

The growing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy, wielding “fringe history and shoddy social science,” has bombarded the Navy with scores of recommendations — although this service is more diverse than the U.S. population. “The military,” Gallagher writes, “is an elite and meritocratic organization where only the most fit, disciplined, and lethal individuals should thrive, regardless of gender, race, or socioeconomic status. To that end, the military obsessively measures pull-ups, marksmanship, and a general ability to endure pain.” All other measurements are of secondary importance.

The House Select Committee on China was created by a bipartisan vote of 365-65.

All of the opponents were Democrats, probably wary lest China’s threat complicates the progressive agenda of devoting ever more national resources to multiplying dependent domestic constituencies. Some congressional Republicans, speaking loudly (if vaguely) for frugality, would provide the nation with a smaller military stick rather than touch the two-thirds of the budget devoted to entitlements.

To both factions, Gallagher cites another Marine who does not mince words, former defense secretary Jim Mattis: “America can afford survival.”