This report documents Coupled Competition, a game that was developed for a broader project on U.S.-China economic competition. Coupled Competition explores the U.S.-China relationship and whether it can be managed to prevent the relationship's competitive dimensions from overshadowing opportunities for mutual gain and security. This game is one of two games that are intended to represent different perspectives on how the international system works or what basic principles drive the global order. In this report, the authors provide information on the game's design, the results of two playtests, and suggestions for future elaboration and use of this game. The playtests incorporated two models of each side's information about the other. In one case, each side had perfect information about the other, while in the second case, that information was distorted with random errors. Although the results were creatively similar, systemic stability was more fragile, and both sides invested considerably more in security in the second playtest compared with the first. Further development of Coupled Competition could explore the effects of imperfect information, introduce exogenous events, and constrain players to operate within the limits of a specific strategy.

South Korea faces challenging choices as the great-power rivalry between the United States and China intensifies. The Republic of Korea (ROK) is a global leader in the design and production of critical advanced semiconductor-related technologies and aspires to duplicate that success in the burgeoning electric vehicle marketplace. However, South Korea's policy options are complicated by its needs to remain closely tied to the United States and to maintain a generally nonhostile relationship with China. In this report, the authors describe their key insights from an analytical policy game they designed and executed that featured two scenarios: In the first, the United States expands measures against China and its indirect pressures on South Korea, and in the second, China offers incentives to South Korea to encourage elevated cooperation between Seoul and Beijing in the semiconductor industry. The players were divided into two teams: One focused on security and diplomacy while the other focused on economic growth and innovation. The teams discussed potential policy choices for South Korea regarding its role in the global semiconductor and electric vehicle battery supply chains in the context of these scenarios, and this report summarizes their perspectives and recommendations for balancing South Korea's economic, geopolitical, and technologies equities.

The United States might get very little early warning of the specific science and technology (S&T) programs that China could use to create important new military capabilities that the U.S. military might confront in the future. For this reason, a tool that could identify activity to develop these capabilities early in the pipeline is of immense interest to the military and intelligence communities. The authors developed the Military Advances in Science & Technology framework for gaining insights in these areas. Its top-down, analytic approach begins with the China's leadership's strategic aspirations for China, works through the military missions implied by those goals, and identifies new or improved capabilities required to execute those missions. The authors specified the technological bases for these capabilities and explored Chinese S&T activity as far back as the basic research phase. This resulted in a graphical dashboard, backed by qualitative and quantitative data, which indicates the status and trends of China's progress in these S&T domains. The indicators supplied by this framework can focus U.S. research and development objectives and shape modernization priorities, point the intelligence community to new areas of China's S&T activity and assist in allocating intelligence assets and resources effectively, facilitate combatant commands and Pentagon planners in assessing the potential results of China's S&T undertakings, and help the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) inform its governmental, academic, and industrial partners about S&T areas in which caution should be exercised in both Chinese investment in U.S. firms and collaboration with Chinese researchers.