With China as the pacing challenge and a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as the pacing scenario, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) must balance operational effectiveness, force survivability, and escalation management as it considers its approach to prosecuting a hypothetical future conflict with China. As a result of China's secure second-strike nuclear retaliatory capability, the United States must now, more than ever, consider how to tailor its conventional military operations to avoid triggering Chinese nuclear first use. This report is part of a series exploring how the U.S. joint force could better balance military operational effectiveness, force survivability, and escalation management in a Taiwan conflict scenario. In this report, the authors consider the potential thresholds and drivers of Chinese nuclear first use in a Taiwan conflict scenario in the context of China's evolving nuclear force posture and ongoing nuclear buildup. Their overarching finding is that, in the event of a fully committed military conflict with China over Taiwan, nuclear escalation will always be a plausible scenario in which no amount of U.S. effort could reduce the risk of escalation to zero. As China's nuclear posture continues to evolve, the United States is now dealing with a China that has a survivable second-strike capability. This suggests that the United States must actively account for how China might interpret and respond to U.S. conventional strikes when planning its operations and be adequately prepared for dealing with Chinese nuclear first use.

Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping's reported order to the Chinese military to be prepared to invade Taiwan by 2027 and China's ongoing nuclear buildup have raised U.S. concerns over the prospect of a U.S.-China conflict. A conflict with China would be distinct from the wars the United States has fought in the post–Cold War period against regional powers without nuclear weapons. This report summarizes a series of reports on how U.S. joint long-range strike, especially the U.S. Air Force's bomber force, could adapt to better balance military operational effectiveness, force survivability, and escalation management to achieve desired military and political objectives without triggering catastrophic escalation, specifically Chinese nuclear first use. This report is the product of a mixed-methods research approach that combined regional studies, analytic strategic theory, and historical case studies, all informed by operational analysis. The authors (1) conducted original Chinese-language research leveraging open-source Chinese military writings; (2) supplemented the limited information available from open-source Chinese military writings with historical case studies and a broad review of analytic strategic theory dating back to early RAND work in the 1950s, along with a literature review of Western scholarship on China; (3) reviewed publicly available U.S. Department of Defense documents and recent non-U.S. government wargames; and (4) developed an analytic framework that linked China’s nuclear escalation with specific technical or employment characteristics of U.S. joint long-range strike.

Chinese leaders see themselves in competition with the United States to build military power in space. The ongoing development of U.S. and Chinese capabilities could lead to unstable competition in space, raising the risk of rapid, and perhaps unintended, military escalation. This report surveys open-source literature across the Chinese defense enterprise to present a composite image of People's Liberation Army (PLA) perspectives and key factors for U.S.-China crisis stability in space. It draws on authoritative materials, including leader speeches reported in official media, defense white papers, and official professional military education, which collectively reflect political leader guidance and PLA strategy and doctrine. The findings suggest that the PLA's thinking on escalation dynamics in space has become significantly more risk-tolerant than that found in PLA documents published just a decade prior. This shift emphasizes Xi Jinping's guidance to be more proactive in shaping the international environment, which includes accepting higher but carefully calibrated levels of risk even though such proactive measures might result in unintended escalation with the United States. This higher escalation tolerance is complicated by Chinese leaders' inflated threat perceptions of the United States and resultant policy approach that resists cooperating with the United States to arrest unintended crisis escalation.

The United States, according to official U.S. national security statements and an avalanche of commentary since about 2016, is engaged in a long-term strategic rivalry with China and a lesser — but still critical — rivalry for influence with Russia. Many U.S. strategy documents refer to the concept of strategic competition, but the core idea — and increasingly the reality — of these relationships matches the classic historical concept of a great power rivalry. These rivalries, especially with China, promise to define U.S. foreign policy and national security challenges for decades. Yet most assessments of these rivalries tend to ignore the critical question of outcomes. This report is part of a larger project on the societal sources of national dynamism and competitive advantage. This research aims to identify historical modes of strategic success and failure in great power rivalries that offer lessons for the United States. The authors define categories of success and failure (in terms of such variables as control over territory, relative power, victory or defeat in war, international legitimacy, and social stability) and present detailed case studies on specific historical examples that are associated with success and failure. They also discuss the implications of the typologies of both kinds of outcomes for the rivalry with China.

The way in which a military organization plans for and conducts logistics can provide critical insights into how capably the military can achieve its operational objectives. Assumptions are often made about the capability of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to carry out and sustain high-end operations, but missing from that discussion is an assessment of how capably its logistics systems and processes perform, which affects how well the military might operate in actual conflict. A review of literature on China's evolving military capabilities indicates that little attention has been given to the topic of the PLA's logistics capabilities, particularly understanding and analyzing the PLA's approach to some key subfunctions of logistics, such as maintenance. The People's Liberation Army's growing ability to project and sustain power will rely on its logistics capabilities, systems, and processes. The PLA is rapidly modernizing its military systems, which requires sophisticated maintenance management practices to keep pace with and maintain much more complex systems. An assessment of PLA progress in these capabilities requires an understanding of the PLA's approach to maintenance, which includes an assessment of its maintenance apparatus and how it operates within their system. In this report, the authors look at the PLA's historical approach to maintenance, identify critical reforms that affect maintenance practices, and highlight key themes related to the PLA's current maintenance capabilities.