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.

Rising tensions between Washington and Beijing, coupled with China’s ongoing expansion of its nuclear arsenal, have stoked anxieties about a possible military conflict between the two countries, especially over Taiwan. As the United States considers the prospect of a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan, the U.S. military must be prepared for the risks of nuclear escalation inherent in great-power conflict. This report is one in a series of reports exploring 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 explores potential escalation pathways that involve U.S. conventional long-range strike and end with Chinese nuclear first use. The authors employ analytic strategic theory and historical case studies informed by operational analysis as part of a larger project with a mixed-methods approach. Building on the tradition of analytic strategic theory cultivated at RAND since the 1950s and examples from history, the authors draw on the operational analysis of joint long-range strike and their understanding of the Chinese nuclear first use drivers presented in Volumes 2 and 3 of this report series to develop an original framework to analyze prospective pathways to nuclear escalation in a U.S.-China conventional conflict and identify implications for U.S. joint long-range strike.

This report is the second volume of a four-volume study that examines the risk of a military conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan escalating to Chinese nuclear first use, particularly looking at how the United States' employment of conventional joint long-range strike capabilities could trigger or at least contribute to this escalation. The aim of this volume is to provide background and context for the broader study, focusing on U.S. conventional joint long-range strike capabilities and employment options. To address the question of the nuclear escalation risks of U.S. conventional long-range strike in a war with China, the authors considered it important to first assess what capabilities would be available to U.S. leadership and how they might be employed. This consideration stems from the underlying hypothesis that different long-range capabilities and different types of long-range strike campaigns and associated target sets will have varying impacts on escalation dynamics. There is no singular or definitive answer to how the United States would employ conventional long-range strike in a war with China; in this study, the authors instead map out the underpinning logics and contours of the issue.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was initially concerned about the rise of social media, considering it a threat to the regime. The CCP has since come to embrace social media as a way to influence domestic and foreign public opinion in the CCP's favor. Even as Beijing blocks foreign social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter (now X), from operating in China, it actively seeks to leverage these and other platforms for both overt propaganda and covert cyber-enabled influence operations abroad. While the results have been limited so far, the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) could dramatically improve China's capabilities moving forward, posing a greater threat to global democracies. Most research into Chinese social media manipulation focuses on its outputs to understand what Chinese actors are saying and doing on foreign social media. However, this research can analyze only what has already occurred and has been attributed to Beijing. This report contributes to public understanding of the CCP's foreign social media manipulation by exploring the inputs of Chinese strategy, operational planning, and capability development and looking forward to the potential implications of generative AI for Chinese social media manipulation. The authors leverage extensive original Chinese-language open-source primary materials to examine how the Chinese military approaches social media manipulation. Specifically, they focus on a Chinese military-affiliated researcher, Li Bicheng, to understand how the Chinese military has conceptualized and operationalized its approach to cyber-enabled influence operations.

One recent hot topic amid the U.S. Department of Defense's shift to focusing on "China, China, China" has been China's embrace of overseas military basing. This has been made more stark by the DoD revealing that China has been interested in establishing a base in at least 18 different countries, though so far Beijing has actually scored only moderate success in establishing a permanent presence in Djibouti, and now likely Cambodia. A common refrain has been concerns about the threat to the United States, ambiguously defined, though this seems geared, at least in part, to justify otherwise non-essential missions, force structure, and capabilities for parts of the department that feel left behind in the focus on China. We argue, instead, that the United States should consider Chinese overseas basing a competition phase challenge over international influence, because Beijing appears to have neither the intent nor capability through at least 2030 to conduct kinetic offensive operations against the United States. Our judgment is based on an extensive review of Chinese military open source writings, which found that People's Liberation Army (PLA) researchers are acutely aware of the vulnerabilities of overseas basing, which stop them from being combat-credible in the way that U.S. overseas basing is. PLA researchers focus much more on leveraging overseas basing for competition phase missions, such as noncombatant evacuation operations (NEOs) and sea lane patrols. The one potential driver we could identify that may lead the Chinese leadership to order its overseas forces to strike U.S. forces is if the United States implements a distant blockade of China during a future conflict – which further calls into question the utility of such an idea. This revised framing could help right-size the U.S. response to China's basing ambitions amid other higher priorities, and there are indicators the DoD can monitor to help hedge the risk of changing Chinese intent and growing capabilities into the future.

Translation forms a crucial part of People's Liberation Army (PLA)-directed research. This is done to support influence operations, enhance cooperation with the Russian military, and even understand US policy discussions on social media. Recent research from institutions such as the PLA Strategic Support Force's (PLASSF) Information Engineering University indicates that the PLA can conduct cognitive domain operations against not just Taiwan or the United States, but almost anywhere—including authoritarian states such as Vietnam. The PLA has spent at least five years building corpora of foreign language texts to train machine translation tools, though the scarcity of quality resources has been an issue in creating useful tools. The extent to which LLMs will become an additional tool in this research is unclear. At least some PLA machine translation efforts rely on foreign open-source tools, such as Google Translate and DeepL.

This article outlines several potential theories of victory for a U.S.-Chinese war over Taiwan, focusing on denial and military cost imposition because they are the most viable and influential. We argue that a denial theory of victory is the best way to strike the balance between the desire to maximize the chances of U.S. success and the imperative to manage escalation. The U.S.-led coalition should avoid theories of victory that rely on military cost imposition, especially because of the difficulties of finding a "sweet spot" of targets that are valuable enough to influence Beijing's decision-making but not so valuable that attacking them causes unacceptable escalation. This is a dilemma we call the "Goldilocks challenge."

The People's Republic of China is brokering international access agreements to expand its security footprint overseas and extend the reach of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). While these bases' utility in peacetime is clear, their utility in wartime is less so. The authors of this report explore China's military strategy for its overseas bases—specifically, how Chinese military researchers view the utility of overseas bases during a war—based on a review of open-source Chinese military writings. The authors then address the risks that these bases might pose to U.S. military interests through 2030. Chinese military writings suggest that the PLA has neither the intent nor the capability to use overseas military bases to launch preemptive attacks or other offensive operations on U.S. forces or interests through at least 2030. While Chinese overseas military basing remains important to monitor, the authors' research shows that Chinese bases overseas are unlikely to become threats to U.S. interests and forces during this time frame. The authors also note that any PLA shift toward conducting offensive operations from its overseas bases may be accompanied by specific indications and warnings that the U.S. government can monitor.

A war between the United States and a capable, nuclear-armed adversary would introduce the risk of destruction on a scale the United States has not seriously contemplated since the end of the Cold War. The main debate in the policy world is between advocates of theories of victory that are reliant on denial and advocates of theories of victory that depend on cost imposition. Cost-imposition strategies, such as those requiring a distant blockade or a punitive air campaign, require the United States to successfully navigate what the authors refer to as the Goldilocks Challenge: specifically, identifying with high confidence a “sweet spot” of pressure points that are valuable enough to influence enemy decisionmaking but not so valuable that they cause unacceptable retaliation. To help the U.S. Air Force evaluate the feasibility of a cost-imposition strategy and assess the associated risks of uncontrolled escalation, the authors examine the ability of past decisionmakers to identify adversary thresholds and to apply this information to control escalation during militarized crises between nuclear-armed states. The authors analyze three historical cases of militarized crises and conflicts between nuclear-armed major powers: (1) the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union, (2) the 1969 border conflict between China and the Soviet Union, and (3) the 1995–1996 crisis between the United States and China over Taiwan.