Thinking Through Protracted War with China

Résumé du livre

The United States has acknowledged its long-term strategic competition with China. As ample wargaming and analysis have shown, any war with China would be economically and strategically costly, as well as fraught with the risk of escalation to nuclear war. In addition, there is growing interest in the hypothesis that U.S.-China competition plausibly could lead to wars that endure longer than envisioned by traditional force planning scenarios, which often are designed around relatively limited objectives and optimistically presuppose U.S. forces and capabilities that could bring a war to a quick, decisive conclusion. This report describes a set of scenarios through which the authors explore this hypothesis and provide what could be a foundation for more-detailed planning or analysis. To allow free creative scope for the scenario development process, the authors did not place a priori constraints on the meaning of "protracted," and therefore the resulting scenarios feature a variety of circumstances in which the United States and China could be required to sustain military operations on a potentially open-ended time frame.