Search

Upon taking office in January 2009, Obama administration officials proclaimed a U.S. return to Asia. This pronouncement was backed with more frequent travel to the region by senior officials (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton s first trip was to Asia) and increased U.S. participation in regional multilateral meetings, culminating in the decision to sign the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and to participate in the East Asia Summit (EAS) at the head-of-state level. The strategic rebalance to Asia announced in November 2011 builds on these earlier actions to deepen and institutionalize U.S. commitment to the Asia-Pacific region. Asia's rapid growth and economic dynamism have greatly expanded the region s economic and strategic weight, elevating its importance for U.S. interests and demanding an increased U.S. focus. This evolution has been welcomed by America s Asia specialists, who have long advocated greater investment of resources and attention from high-level U.S. policymakers. At a time of often bitter partisanship in the United States, there is broad, bipartisan consensus on Asia's importance. Indeed, partisan criticism has focused primarily on whether the administration in power is doing enough to increase U.S. engagement in Asia and whether rhetorical commitment is backed with sufficient resources. While some initial comments about the U.S. return to Asia were cast in terms of correcting alleged neglect of the region by the administration of George W. Bush, senior Obama administration officials believed that the war on terror and U.S. military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan had produced an imbalanced global footprint. The United States was overweighted in the Middle East and underweighted in the Asia-Pacific. The phrase rebalance to Asia was intended to highlight the region's heightened priority within U.S. global policy.

For all their power, both the United States and China are increasingly vulnerable. Each faces a range of strategic dangers, from nuclear weapons to disruption of critical computer networks and space links. Because their relationship is at once interdependent and potentially adversarial, the United States and China are especially vulnerable to each other: interdependence exposes each to the other, while the potential for conflict impels each to improve strategic capabilities against which defenses can be futile. Strategic vulnerability cannot be eliminated, only mitigated. Of the two countries, the United States is stronger in offensive strategic capabilities, notably in nuclear, antisatellite (ASAT), and cyber weapons. Yet it is also increasingly exposed to danger in these domains, confirming that power does not necessarily reduce vulnerability. If Americans thought before the 9/11 terrorist attacks that being the only superpower made them safer, they think otherwise now. Even with a $600-billion-plus annual defense budget, the United States cannot buy its way out of strategic vulnerability. Meanwhile, China s stunning economic and technological development is enabling it to acquire all forms of power, including offensive strategic capabilities. But China s development is also making it more vulnerable, as its economy becomes more integrated at home and with the world, more dependent on information, and thus more susceptible to disruption. While the Chinese have long felt, based on their history, that weakness breeds vulnerability, they are learning that greater vulnerability can also accompany greater strength. This Strategic Forum, derived from our book The Paradox of Power, confronts the fact that as power grows so does vulnerability.

In my assignment as Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, I had the responsibility of monitoring air forces around the world. There is no question which country has made the greatest strides in developing its airpower capability. Over the last two decades, China s air force, the People s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), has transformed itself from a large, poorly-trained force operating aircraft based on 1950s Soviet designs to a leaner and meaner force flying advanced Russian and indigenously produced fourth-generation fighters. This remarkable transformation is still a work in progress, but China has made up a lot of ground in a short time. China s civilian and military leaders grasped the centrality of airpower in modern warfare as early as the mid 1970s, a lesson reinforced by the stunning success of the U.S.-led coalition during the first Gulf War. They set the goal of building the PLAAF into a world class, high-technology air force capable of prevailing against sophisticated adversaries in regional conflicts. China s expanding airpower capability has had a profound impact on the Asia-Pacific region (and beyond), causing countries to reassess their own air force modernization needs.

The United States and China have a complex, multifaceted, and ambiguous relationship where substantial areas of cooperation coexist with ongoing strategic tensions and suspicions. One manifestation involves disputes and incidents when U.S. and Chinese military forces interact within China s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Three high-profile incidents over the last decade have involved aggressive maneuvers by Chinese military and/or paramilitary forces operating in close proximity to deter U.S. surveillance and military survey platforms from conducting their missions. Why do these incidents continue to occur despite mechanisms designed to prevent such dangerous encounters? Could new or different procedures or policies help avoid future incidents? The problem in the U.S.-China case lies not with inadequate rules (for maritime operations) or history of practice (for air operations), but rather in the motivations that sometimes drive the Chinese to selective noncompliance with their provisions. China regards military surveillance and survey operations in its EEZ as hostile, threatening, illegal, and inappropriate. China s harassment of U.S. naval vessels and aircraft conducting surveillance and survey operations is intended to produce a change in U.S. behavior by raising the costs and risks of these operations.

The second half of the 20th century featured a strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. That competition avoided World War III in part because decades of arms control negotiations created a mutual understanding that allowed U.S.-Soviet competition to proceed without armed conflict. The first half of the 21st century will be dominated by the relationship between the United States and China. That relationship is likely to contain elements of both cooperation and competition. Territorial disputes such as those over Taiwan and the South China Sea will be an important feature of this competition, but both are traditional disputes, and traditional solutions suggest themselves. A more difficult set of issues relates to U.S.-Chinese competition and cooperation in three domains in which real strategic harm can be inflicted in the current era: nuclear, space, and cyber. Just as a clearer understanding of the fundamental principles of nuclear deterrence maintained adequate stability during the Cold War, a clearer understanding of the characteristics of these three domains can provide the underpinnings of strategic stability between the United States and China in the decades ahead. That is what this book is about. David Gompert and Phillip Saunders assess the prospect of U.S.-Chinese competition in these domains and develop three related analytic findings upon which their recommendations are built. The first is that in each domain, the offense is dominant. The second is that each side will be highly vulnerable to a strike from the other side. And the third is that the retaliating side will still be able to do unacceptable damage to the initiating party. Therefore, the authors make an important recommendation: that the United States propose a comprehensive approach based on mutual restraint whereby it and China can mitigate their growing strategic vulnerabilities.

Although China continues to lag approximately two decades behind the world s most sophisticated air forces in terms of its ability to develop and produce fighter aircraft and other complex aerospace systems, it has moved over time from absolute reliance on other countries for military aviation technology to a position where a more diverse array of strategies can be pursued. Steps taken in the late 1990s to reform China s military aviation sector demonstrated an understanding of the problems inherent in high-technology acquisition, and an effort to move forward. However, a decade later it remains unclear how effective these reforms have been. Where are the People s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and China s military aviation industry headed? What obstacles must be overcome for China to join the exclusive ranks of those nations possessing sophisticated air forces and aviation industries capable of producing world-class aircraft? This study identifies potential aviation technology development and procurement strategies, presents a general model of the options available to developing countries, and applies that model to explain Chinese procurement and aviation technology acquisition efforts over the last 60 years. The model articulates three main technology procurement avenues: purchase (buy), indigenous development (build), and espionage (steal), and three subavenues: reverse engineering (combining buy/steal and build), coproduction (combining buy and build), and codevelopment (combining buy and build, with an emphasis on build)., China Strategic Perspectives no. 4.

Few issues are as important to U.S. national security analysts as China s military modernization, a process that has benefited directly from the past two decades of dramatic economic expansion. This book addresses the Chinese navy the People s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN the service that has most dramatically benefited from increased defense funding. This collection of essays surveys and analyzes the most important aspects of China s naval modernization. The book s 10 chapters represent papers delivered at a 2007 conference, but have been updated and, most importantly, framed by expertly written introductory and concluding chapters that bring the book firmly into the century s second decade.

China's 2010 Defense White Paper provides relatively little new data and less information about Chinese military capabilities and modernization efforts than previous editions. Consistent with past white papers, this one does not provide any information about specific weapon systems or about nuclear forces and modernization efforts. An INSS methodology for evaluating military transparency indicates that China's 2010 white paper receives lower transparency ratings than the 2008 edition and provides less information than defense white papers of other major Asia-Pacific powers. China emphasizes the importance of transparency about strategic intentions rather than capabilities. Although Chinese military officers state that increased transparency is intended to reassure neighbors about China's benign intentions, efforts to downplay China's expanding military capabilities suggest that the 2010 Defense White Paper will make little progress toward this goal. This monograph presents a table of overall transparency ratings for China's Defense White Papers dating from 1998 to 2010. In the accompanying analysis, the authors provide the rationale for why each of the 19 categories in the 2010 white paper received its specific transparency rating.

This volume is the result of the conference "Cross-Strait Relations: New Opportunities and Challenges for Taiwan's Security," held November 7, 2009, at National Defense University in Washington, D.C. The conference was jointly sponsored by the RAND Corporation, the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at National Defense University, and the Council for Advanced Policy Studies (CAPS) in Taipei. It was the 21st annual conference on China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) cosponsored by RAND and CAPS. The 2009 conference examined how a range of political, economic, and military aspects of the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan are likely to shape the challenges and opportunities for Taiwan's security over the next decade. Leading experts on political and military issues from both the United States and Taiwan were asked to write short (five to six pages, single-spaced), incisive, policy-relevant papers on a range of topics related to four broad issues: the opportunities created by improved cross-Strait relations and what further progress will be supported by domestic politics on both sides of the Strait; the potential for confidence-building measures (CBMs) to play a role in managing or reducing cross-Strait tensions; the military balance and the impact of changes in key Chinese and Taiwanese military capabilities; and two possible alternate futures: one in which positive trends in cross-Strait political relations continue and another in which improvements in relations are reversed, including how and why these futures might come about. After the conference, the contributors were asked to revise their papers in response to questions and suggestions that were raised during the conference or subsequently conveyed by the editors of this volume. This volume presents the revised versions of those papers as well as a brief introduction by the editors., Proceedings of Cross-Strait Relations: New Opportunities and Challenges for Taiwan's Security, held in Washington, D.C. on 7 Nov 2009. Sponsored in part by NDU/INSS.

The United States and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region have expressed concerns about China's expanding military capabilities and called on Beijing to increase transparency on military issues. Chinese officials and military officers argue that Chinese transparency has increased over time and that weaker countries should not be expected to meet U.S. standards of transparency. Lack of an objective method for assessing military transparency has made it difficult to assess these Chinese claims and has inhibited productive dialogues about transparency. This paper presents a methodology for assessing military transparency that aims to confront the question of China's military transparency from a comparative perspective. Drawing upon research done by Korean defense expert Dr. Choi Kang as part of a Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific working group, it focuses on defense white papers as a readily available and comparable source of official defense information. The paper develops an objective methodology for comparing the relative transparency of defense white papers by employing standardized definitions and a four-tiered set of criteria to evaluate transparency across 19 categories. This approach can be used to evaluate changes in transparency over time and to compare China's transparency with that of other Asia-Pacific countries. We use this methodology to evaluate changes in transparency in China's six defense white papers (from 1998 through 2008) and to compare its 2008 white paper with 13 other recent Asia-Pacific defense white papers. We find that there has been a gradual but modest increase in the transparency of China's defense white papers over time. China's degree of transparency is roughly comparable to that of most Southeast Asian countries and to India, but significantly less than Asia-Pacific democracies such as Japan and South Korea.

This study reviews the last 20 years of academic literature on the role of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in Chinese elite politics. It examines the PLA's willingness to support the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and to obey directives from top party leaders, the PLA's influence on the selection of China's top civilian leaders, and the PLA's ability to shape the domestic political environment. Over the last two decades the discussion of these three issues has largely been shaped by five trends identified in the literature: increasing PLA professionalism, bifurcation of civil and military elites, a reduced PLA role in political institutions, reduced emphasis on political work within the PLA, and increased military budgets. Together, these trends are largely responsible for the markedly reduced role of the PLA in Chinese elite politics. First, we identify and assess key trends in civil-military relations over the last 20 years. This analysis seeks to identify key changes in civil-military relations that affected (and mostly reduced) the military's role in Chinese elite politics. The second section contains a brief review of the main approaches to civil-military relations that have been employed in the literature, and analyzes the evolution in analytical approaches over time. The third section reviews cases where authors writing on the role of the Chinese military in elite politics made specific predictions that can be assessed against actual outcomes. Although there are relatively few specific predictions, the ones that do exist provide an additional means for assessing the predictive value of analytical models. The fourth section presents our conclusions about the literature's ability to apply analytical models to specific cases and generate firm predictions about the military's role in elite politics. We conclude that most of the literature has been descriptive and interpretive rather than predictive.

In “China’s Naval Nationalism: Sources, Prospects, and the U.S. Response,” Robert Ross seeks to explain why “China will soon embark on a more ambitious maritime policy, beginning with the construction of a power-projection navy centered on an aircraft carrier.” Ross argues that geopolitical constraints should lead China, a continental power, to pursue access denial as its optimal maritime strategy. He relies on “naval nationalism”to explain China’s development of naval power-projection capabilities, which he describes as a suboptimal choice given China’s geopolitical position. We argue that “naval nationalism” is an underdeveloped and unconvincing explanation for China’s pursuit of expanded naval capabilities. Instead, China’s development of a limited naval power-projection capability reflects changes in China’s threat environment and expanded Chinese national interests created by deeper integration into the world economy. In our critique, we first identify flaws in Ross’s geopolitical analysis. Second, we discuss shortcomings in his causal argument. Lastly, we briefly present Chinese rationales for the development of limited power-projection capabilities, which are consistent with a proper understanding of Chinese interests.

Officials in the Obama administration have highlighted the need for a "positive, cooperative, and comprehensive relationship" with China that can help the United States address an array of global challenges. Administration officials have not adopted the "responsible stakeholder" language that characterized recent U.S. China policy, but their overall approach appears compatible with that concept. Initial policy statements have focused on expanding U.S.-China cooperation, with particular emphasis on addressing the global economic crisis and climate change. This paper focuses on an important but neglected topic: how to address the challenges posed by China's development of advanced strategic and military capabilities that might threaten U.S. interests within the context of a broader policy emphasizing engagement and cooperation with China. Relations in four strategic areas -- nuclear modernization, space and counterspace, cyber warfare, and conventional force modernization -- are analyzed, and the potential for competitive dynamics in these areas to affect the stability of the broader U.S.-China bilateral relationship is explored. The paper suggests that China's approach to nuclear modernization, which has sought to maintain a credible second-strike capability that would induce U.S. restraint while minimizing economic and political costs, may be a model for its future behavior in other areas. However, specific characteristics of these areas -- including the expected costs of competitive behavior and the extent to which deterrence functions effectively -- may also influence competitive dynamics.

This article seeks to illuminate the future force structure of the PLAAF by exploring the different ways of thinking about the role of the air force within overall PLA modernization plans, as well as the potential roles it will play in future PLA missions. It begins with a concise breakdown of the PLAAF as it stands now and is shaping for the future. It then shifts to the potential influences and missions that Beijing will weigh in making determinations for modernization. These influences are already affecting PLAAF transformation., Published in JFQ Issue 47, p28-33, 2007.

China launched a direct-ascent ASAT weapon on January 11, 2007, which struck a Chinese FY-1 weather satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO). The ASAT's kinetic kill vehicle was likely boosted by a two-stage launcher based on a DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile, which may be mounted on a mobile launcher. China reportedly conducted several previous tests of the system; it is unclear if the same configuration was used for all the tests. The successful test demonstrates a Chinese capability to destroy a number of U.S. satellites in LEO used for reconnaissance, remote sensing, surveillance, electronic surveillance, and meteorology. The direct-ascent ASAT appears to be part of a larger Chinese ASAT program that includes ground-based lasers and jamming of satellite signals. People's Republic of China (PRC) analysts, scientists, and strategists have written extensively about ASAT weapons and potential means of countering U.S. military uses of space. The revelation by the director of the NRO that Chinese lasers have "painted" U.S. satellites indicates a capability to disrupt imaging satellites by dazzling or blinding them. Jamming can disrupt U.S. military communications and global positioning system (GPS) navigation and targeting signals. The exact performance characteristics of Chinese systems are unknown, but a range of ASAT capabilities would provide flexible options to temporarily or permanently deny U.S. space capabilities. The NDU's Institute for National Strategic Studies convened an unclassified roundtable to discuss the motivations and implications of China's direct-ascent ASAT weapons test. The roundtable was intended to highlight issues and perspectives that U.S. policy makers should consider in thinking about U.S. responses to the test. This report draws heavily on views expressed at the discussion, but the authors have added further analysis to provide a fuller explication of the relevant policy issues., Published in Joint Force Quarterly, n46 p39-45, 3rd Quarter 2007.

Chinese leaders are pursuing a long-term grand strategy based on maintaining a peaceful international environment that allows China to build the economic and technological foundations necessary to become a rich and powerful country. China's increased global activism is intended to secure inputs for the economy; protect against a possible U.S. containment strategy; expand Chinese political influence; and pursue Chinese commercial interests. The timing and pattern of China's increased activism in different regions has evolved along largely independent strategic and economic tracks. This paper analyzes the rationale and drivers for China's increased global activism; examines the tools China is employing and how they are being used; assesses the empirical evidence about priorities and patterns in China's global activities; and considers whether these activities reflect an underlying strategic design. The paper concludes with an overview of likely future developments and an assessment of the implications for the United States., Institute for National Strategic Studies Occasional Paper 4. The original document contains color images.