A Strategy of Distribution for Addressing the PLA of 2025–30

Abstract

T oday’s military balance in the western Pacific is the product of the successful 25-year effort by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to build a military capability that specifically targets and holds at risk U.S. air and maritime forces. Since the Taiwan Strait crisis in the mid-1990s, China has worked diligently to exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. forces and mitigate U.S. strengths. The PRC’s geography, strategy, and military systems place the U.S. military—and the interests it defends—at significant risk. There is reason to believe that Beijing could now successfully launch a lightning attack that would seize a strategic advantage or objective. This, in turn, would force Washington either to accept the result of an attempted fait accompli or to engage in a high-risk military conflict to dislodge People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces from their target. This wicked problem is further exacerbated by the time horizons that the United States and its allies confront when planning to address the PLA as a challenge over multiple decades. Anything is possible in the arena of defense planning when timelines are pushed well into the future. It is convenient for Washington to focus on the military challenge the PRC will pose in the 2030s and beyond, when exciting emerging technologies and new military hardware promise to offer operational capabilities that can theoretically close the gap between the two militaries but do not yet exist. Yet Washington would be falling into a temporal planning trap if it only organized to address the PRC military dilemma of 2035. As the past year has demonstrated, Beijing has escalated its use of coercion and aggression in areas of significant U.S. interest in the western Pacific. Given this reality, the Pentagon, lawmakers, and the White House need a strategy that can effectively deter the PLA in the near to medium term (2025–30). The grave costs, potential for miscalculation, and impact of the eroding military