China’s ambitions, assertiveness, and massive military expansion have stimulated a major shift in Australia’s defense policy. From the AUKUS partnership to new allied posture arrangements to the acquisition of long-range strike capabilities, Australia is carrying out a series of ambitious initiatives to strengthen deterrence. Canberra has further called on the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to become a “focused force” designed to deal with the highest-order dangers. As Australia undergoes this strategic reorientation, it confronts weighty investment and divestment decisions that could have lasting consequences for force structure and posture.

Today, states are pursuing an array of supposedly "disruptive" or "game-changing" technologies that could alter how they organize, train, equip, and employ their forces, including their nuclear forces. The 2022 National Defense Strategy emphasized the link between some of these technologies and the risk of nuclear use, noting that "a wide range of new or fast-evolving technologies and applications are complicating escalation dynamics and creating new challenges for strategic stability." 

Senior Fellow Toshi Yoshihara surveys Chinese histories of the Pacific War to discern lessons that mainland analysts have drawn from the ocean-spanning struggle. He examines the extensive Chinese-language literature on the great battles at Midway, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa and pinpoints the operational insights that Chinese strategists have gleaned from them. The selected campaigns involved warfighting that will feature prominently in a future Sino-American conflict: carrier air warfare, contested amphibious landings, expeditionary logistics, and electronic warfare.

Since its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, the United States has been free to develop new medium and intermediate-range conventional missiles to strengthen its conventional deterrence posture. The military services have tested and fielded a variety of systems that could bolster their long-range strike capabilities and proposed still others. To date, however, Washington lacks a clear path for how the various service initiatives might contribute collectively to a broader precision-strike complex.

All militaries confront resource tradeoffs. As China and the United States enter a period of intensifying military competition, understanding the tradeoffs the two must face and their likely consequences will become ever more important. Yet, without a better understanding of China’s own resourcing constraints and associated vulnerabilities, policymakers lack the critical insights to holistically assess the state of the competition and develop effective strategies.

China’s military is going global. In the coming decade, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could be well-positioned to influence events and conduct a wide range of missions, including limited warfighting, beyond the Western Pacific. The United States and its close allies, who have enjoyed largely unobstructed access to the world’s oceans for the last three decades, will need to adjust to new military realities as the PLA makes its presence felt in faraway theaters.