Nicholas D. Anderson, Daryl G. Press
How has the balance of power shifted in maritime East Asia, and what does this change mean for the U.S.-China military competition in the region? We examine these questions by focusing on a central pillar of U.S. military might—land-based air power—in the context of a war over Taiwan. We create a new, unclassified, and transparent model of a Taiwan conflict, which allows users to explore multiple scenarios, alternative U.S. basing options, various People's Liberation Army attack strategies, and a range of potential U.S. defensive enhancements to see how those alternatives influence outcomes. We find that: (1) the United States' current approach to defend Taiwan exposes U.S. forces to significant risk of catastrophic defeat; (2) the U.S. Air Force's answer to this problem is both unlikely to work and escalatory; and (3) a combination of hardening air bases and enhancing missile defenses and local jamming at U.S. facilities is a better option. More broadly, U.S. national security policy toward China approaches an inflection point. The United States can lean in and significantly enhance the resilience of its forces in East Asia; lean back and rely more on instruments of military power that are less vulnerable to China's regional defense systems; or reconsider its broader geopolitical goals in the region. The current path, seeking to deter Chinese attacks with a vulnerable forward-based military posture, courts disaster.
The United States and China are engaged in an intense competition in maritime East Asia. For decades, the United States enjoyed military preeminence in the region, using naval forces and land-based aircraft to dominate the sky and key waterways. But China is eroding Washington's regional military advantage. Over the past two decades, Beijing has launched dozens of new satellites and other sensors to locate U.S. forces and hundreds of increasingly accurate missiles—ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic—to strike airfields and ships throughout the region. Washington has countered by improving U.S. missile defenses, expanding its regional base access, modernizing key military facilities, and developing an ambitious new doctrine based on dispersion and maneuver to blunt China's expanding anti-access capabilities.1
Where does the military balance stand today, and where do the trend lines point? What options, if any, would allow the United States to retain its conventional superiority in the western Pacific? And, perhaps most importantly, what does the shifting military balance mean for key U.S. foreign policy objectives, such as deterring a war over Taiwan, preventing catastrophic escalation should such a war occur,2 and maintaining credible commitments to its allies in East Asia?3
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