The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy

Seth G. Jones

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In the mid-2010s, Pentagon officials in the United States were alarmed by the military progress China and Russia were making. Both countries were investing in cyber, space, and electronic warfare capabilities as well as precision-guided munitions and long-range, ground-based weapons. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work was particularly concerned about China, which he determined was trying to achieve parity with the United States in military technology. China had developed the DF-21D, an antiship ballistic missile with a range of nearly 1,000 miles dubbed the “carrier killer,” which posed a threat to U.S. ships—including aircraft carriers—in the Pacific. It was time, Work and others in the Pentagon concluded, to imagine what a war in the Pacific might look like and consider how the United States would win it.

Inspired by the so-called offset strategies that the United States developed to counter the Soviets during the Cold War, Work proposed a “third offset” to counter China’s advantages in the Pacific. The U.S. military started drafting new warfighting concepts, such as the navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations, which involved spreading out forces over a large area and developing long-range weapons. The Pentagon also started identifying what weapons, systems, and equipment it would need to buy, prompting new investments in space capabilities, advanced sensors, and a variety of promising technologies, such as advanced sea mines. The third offset, as Work described it, was a “combination of technology, operational concepts, and organizational constructs—different ways of organizing our forces—to maintain our ability to project combat power into any area at the time and place of our own choosing.”

But in many ways, Work’s third offset was a decade ahead of its time. At the time, the United States was still the preeminent superpower. Neither China nor Russia possessed a significant military advantage over the United States—there was not much, in other words, for the U.S. military to offset. Although Work’s call to action inspired various initiatives, it never fully took shape with coherence or urgency.