By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

A New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence

In 1959, the American political scientist Albert Wohlstetter argued that the United States did not possess a sufficient second-strike capability to provide stable nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union. A year later, the economist and strategist Thomas Schelling offered what has become the seminal definition of strategic nuclear stability. “It is not the ‘balance’—the sheer equality or symmetry in the situation—that constitutes mutual deterrence,” he wrote in The Strategy of Conflict. “It is the stability of the balance.” Schelling concluded that two nuclear powers can achieve a stable balance only “when neither, in striking first, can destroy the other’s ability to strike back.” This insight became a pillar of U.S. nuclear strategy, which is premised on the principle that large portions of the nuclear force must be able to survive and retaliate against any first strike by an adversary.

Today, the United States faces a parallel strategic challenge with its conventional forces in the western Pacific. Since the early years of this century, China has vastly expanded the quantity and quality of its conventional missile arsenal, especially precision-guided ballistic missiles, which it could use in a first strike to inflict grave damage on conventional U.S. forces in the region. To counter this growing threat, strategists in Washington have begun to consider the United States’ options for a preemptive conventional attack against China’s conventional forces, a strategy that appears dangerously reminiscent of the U.S. Cold War doctrines that Wohlstetter and Schelling argued increased first-strike incentives. For example, in February 2024, in response to questions from the Senate Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, stated that preventing China from using its conventional missile arsenal against U.S. forces was his highest priority. As he put it, the United States needs to be able to “blind” Chinese forces—in broad terms, to disable Beijing’s burgeoning conventional precision-strike capabilities before they can inflict significant damage on U.S. forces.

But as happened in the Cold War, once the Soviet Union began to reach nuclear parity with the United States, such an objective would likely prove difficult if not infeasible. China’s inventory of mobile missiles and its accompanying communications and surveillance infrastructure is large and dispersed, with many systems housed in underground facilities spread over its vast territory. Even if the United States were to attempt a large-scale first strike on these capabilities, doing so would present significant escalatory risks. Moreover, if Beijing suspected that U.S. strategy was premised on preemption, China would have powerful incentives to quickly blind and disable U.S. capabilities before having its own forces blinded. U.S. forces’ vulnerability thus exacerbates reciprocal first-strike incentives, a classic recipe for crisis instability.

The logic articulated by Wohlstetter, Schelling, and others suggests a way to escape this dilemma. During the Cold War, the United States stabilized deterrence by developing a “nuclear triad”—deploying its nuclear weapons across the domains of sea, air, and land in ways that were and remain difficult for an adversary to find and disable in a first strike. Namely, it used ballistic missile submarines, which are highly elusive at sea; developed “bomber alert” operations, by which bombers could be quickly scattered to multiple bases, or even kept airborne, to ensure that they could not all be caught at once (even by a surprise first strike); and in Europe, deployed road-mobile launch vehicles, which are difficult to target when they are moving through cluttered terrain.

By contrast, many of the United States’ conventional assets in the Indo-Pacific, such as its surface ships, are highly visible or heavily dependent on fixed facilities that could easily be targeted. If a crisis were to break out, the United States might have to threaten escalation to compensate for its lack of conventional response options—potentially up to the nuclear level. To remedy this problem, the United States should develop a “conventional triad” modeled on its successful nuclear strategy. Such a force structure would both increase U.S. combat credibility and decrease first-strike incentives on both sides.

The U.S. nuclear force structure provides a basic template for building a conventional triad. Like their nuclear counterparts, U.S. ballistic and cruise missiles would be dispersed among a combination of mobile launch vehicles on land, submarines at sea, and bombers in the air. These forces would be connected through a resilient communications network analogous to the nuclear command, control, and communications system. Once established, this conventional triad could prevent the destabilizing scenario in which a conventional first strike could lead to a nuclear confrontation.

 

Collision Course

China’s rapidly expanding arsenal of conventional missiles suggests that the revolution in precision weapons is following a course similar to that of nuclear weapons. During the first 15 years of the Cold War, the United States held a significant advantage over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but the Soviets eventually caught up. By the late 1960s, Moscow was approaching nuclear parity with Washington.

Likewise, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States developed and maintained a monopoly over conventional precision-strike capabilities, such as stealth aircraft and GPS-guided bombs and missiles, which it employed to great effect in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 1999 Kosovo war, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. China drew important lessons from these systems and sought to replicate them. As the political scientist M. Taylor Fravel wrote in his 2019 study of Chinese military strategy, Active Defense, Beijing’s doctrine and capabilities today emphasize so-called keypoint strikes designed to “paralyze [the enemy’s] ability to fight, rather than simply annihilating an opponent’s forces.” The long-range precision weapons in China’s arsenal are now well suited for this task, especially against U.S. forces in the western Pacific, which are highly visible and heavily dependent on fixed infrastructure close to mainland China.

The United States has hardly been unaware of China’s development of precision-strike weapons. Since 2002, the Defense Department has cataloged Chinese missile forces in its annual report on China’s military power. In 2005, the report estimated China’s missile inventory at approximately 700 short-range ballistic missiles and much smaller numbers of longer-range weapons, most of which were likely armed with nuclear payloads: around 20 medium-range ballistic missiles, roughly 20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and approximately 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Today, the situation has transformed: the 2024 report found that China’s forces include 900 short-range, 1,300 medium-range, 500 intermediate-range, and 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Apart from the ICBMs, almost all of China’s ballistic missiles can carry conventional explosive payloads, showing the extent to which Beijing values conventional strike capabilities.

In addition to these advances in ballistic missiles, China has also developed a formidable arsenal of cruise missiles. Although they are slower than ballistic missiles, cruise missiles cost less to produce and can therefore be manufactured in greater quantities, and they have variable trajectories, allowing them to evade detection and defenses in a way that ballistic missiles cannot. The 2024 report counts only the estimated 400 ground-launched cruise missiles belonging to China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. But this is a small fraction of Beijing’s overall cruise missile inventory, which also includes highly capable antiship and land-attack cruise missiles aboard surface ships, submarines, aircraft, and ground vehicles. This force structure makes China’s conventional forces difficult to target, disable, or eliminate.

These missile capabilities are enabled by China’s C4ISR—command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—systems, which are based on the ground, in the air, and in space. Together, these resources underpin a strategy that Beijing calls “counterintervention” (often referred to as “anti-access/area denial” in the West), which seeks to protect Chinese forces while threatening U.S. forces and bases in the western Pacific with heavy damage or destruction. The aim of this approach is to deter U.S. engagement in a potential conflict by making intervention prohibitively costly.

The strategy appears to be working. After conducting a war game in 2023, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that Beijing’s counterintervention capabilities would impose steep costs on U.S. forces in a conflict, including the loss of two forward-based aircraft carriers and up to 20 cruisers and destroyers, with commensurate losses in aircraft, infrastructure, and personnel. Such losses would represent a significant proportion of the 11 carriers and approximately 80 cruisers and destroyers currently in service around the world. CSIS concluded that “such losses would damage the U.S. global position for many years.” These outcomes suggest that the United States’ ability to deter a conventional conflict with China may be inadequate and call into question whether the United States would prevail in a war if deterrence failed.

To address this heightened risk to its forces, the United States could seek to preempt or disable China’s conventional precision-strike capabilities, either by attacking the strike weapons directly or the C4ISR networks that enable them. But the scale, redundancy, and continued growth of China’s information systems capabilities, mobile missile inventory, and underground facilities are likely to make such an objective difficult to achieve. The 2024 China military power report notes, for example, that the People’s Liberation Army maintains thousands of technologically advanced underground facilities “to conceal and protect all aspects of its military forces,” and it is rapidly building more. U.S. attempts to attack those forces or this infrastructure at a scale necessary to achieve useful military effects would likely carry real escalatory risks.

Defense strategists both inside and outside China continue to debate which actions by an adversary Beijing might regard as “first use” and therefore might prompt a Chinese nuclear response under the country’s no-first-use policy. But it is reasonable to assume that China could view a U.S. effort to preempt or disable its precision-strike capabilities as attacking vital Chinese interests or even setting the stage for an attack on Beijing’s nuclear capabilities—especially if the preemptive strikes degraded China’s nuclear early warning or nuclear command-and-control systems, whether intentionally or not. The United States certainly might view a large-scale attack on its precision-strike capabilities and C4ISR systems in the same way.

China’s attainment of parity with or even superiority over the United States in precision-strike capability has prompted U.S. planners to seek other countermeasures. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s achievement of nuclear parity, together with its significant conventional advantage in Europe, led U.S. strategists to adopt what is known as the “second offset.” To counteract, or offset, Soviet numerical advantages, the United States developed stealth and precision-strike capabilities that could maximize the effect of each weapon and pinpoint key targets such as command and communications centers or bridges and other logistical chokepoints. But with China now able to match or surpass the United States in precision capabilities, the second offset strategy no longer offsets. In late 2014, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work announced a new initiative for a “third offset,” with the aim of harnessing disruptive technological advantages for U.S. forces in response to the loss of the U.S. monopoly on conventional precision-strike capabilities. Most discussions of a third offset have focused on technologies such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems or drones, and sensor fusion, which allows forces across multiple domains to see and respond to the same picture of the battlefield.

But no new strategic approach is likely to succeed unless it provides the United States with forces that have an assured ability to survive large-scale conventional attacks. A U.S. conventional triad would present China with a choice between a limited first strike, which would likely fail to seriously degrade U.S. forces, and a large-scale first strike, which would carry a significant risk of escalation and might still fail to find U.S. submarines at sea, bombers dispersed or already airborne, or mobile missile launchers out of garrison. Regardless of China’s choice, a greater proportion of U.S. conventional forces would be left to respond. Deterrence would thus be strengthened at the conventional level by the same logic that Wohlstetter and Schelling elucidated for nuclear stability in the late 1950s and that has helped keep the peace at the nuclear level for nearly three-quarters of a century.

 

Target Locked

Just as the Soviets’ achievement of nuclear parity challenged the United States to revise its theory of nuclear deterrence and, as a consequence, its force structure, China’s achievement of parity in precision-strike capabilities now requires the United States to rethink how it should construct its conventional forces. U.S. forces should be able to defeat and deter a large-scale Chinese conventional missile attack while maintaining a condition in which, as Schelling described it, “neither, in striking first, can destroy the other’s ability to strike back.”

In a 2014 report, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noted that the U.S. defense program was “heavily skewed” toward capabilities aimed at “low-medium threat environments [s],” referring to conflicts with adversaries that could not seriously threaten forces such as surface ships and short-range or non-stealthy aircraft. This remains largely the case today, despite the global proliferation of precision-strike capabilities. At the same time, the vulnerability of U.S. conventional forces creates powerful first-strike incentives for both sides, making minor political crises and military frictions more dangerous and prone to escalation.

For these reasons, the same principles that guided the U.S. response to Soviet nuclear parity can apply to conventional forces today. Of central importance is developing survivable forces that would be more costly in time and money for an attacker to overcome than for a defender to build. The inherent difficulty of finding submarines in the open ocean, bombers dispersed and airborne, and road-mobile missile launchers on the move ensures the survivability of a greater proportion of the force. By contrast, defending fixed bases or highly visible surface ships often requires an active missile defense that must “hit a bullet with a bullet”—a proposition that is almost always much more costly than firing that first bullet. Equipping mobile platforms with long-range munitions, such as medium-range or intermediate-range ballistic or cruise missiles, amplifies their survivability by allowing them to roam farther from an adversary’s densest concentrations of sensors and weapons and by multiplying geometrically the area that an adversary must search.

Multiple analyses and war games over many years have corroborated the basic conclusion that submarines, bombers, and mobile land-based missile launchers equipped with long-range strike weapons and resilient communications technology are the most survivable and effective assets in an environment dense with precision-strike capabilities, such as the one China has created in the western Pacific. In other words, to make its conventional arsenal survivable, the United States must replace its current stock of fixed and visible assets with elusive forces in multiple domains, following the nuclear triad model.

 

Asymmetric Advantage

In almost any prospective conflict with China, the United States will be on the defensive side. Since at least the end of World War II, Washington has generally opposed states’ attempts to change international boundaries by force as a matter of principle—one that is enshrined in treaties with Japan and the Philippines and in law regarding Taiwan. By contrast, Beijing’s policies and objectives imply a need for offensive military action: China must change territorial realities to achieve its stated goals.

This strategic reality disadvantages the United States in one respect: China would almost certainly have the initiative at the outset of a conflict because it would move first. Given the way that U.S. forces are constructed today, U.S. defense strategists face a difficult choice between preemption, with its attendant risks of escalation, and the real possibility of a first strike by Beijing, with the heavy losses that would cause. Apart from the high visibility of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region, the U.S. military’s basing infrastructure is sprawling and fixed; its logistics are dependent on unprotected commercial support, such as commercial ships, cargo aircraft, and computer networks, which may be more vulnerable than military assets; and its space-based communications infrastructure, despite recent technological advances, is still dependent on a relatively small number of satellites. Indeed, Chinese military doctrine has explicitly set for its forces the task of disabling this U.S. infrastructure and the weapons platforms that rely on it, and Beijing has shaped its formidable missile arsenal to achieve that goal.

At the same time, the United States and its partners would have one significant advantage if China were to act on its revanchist claims against Taiwan: they would be defending against an amphibious assault, widely acknowledged as being among the most challenging of military operations. To take and hold territory beyond the Chinese mainland, China must expose its forces over open water and in complex landing operations, while the United States and its partners can conceal their forces and fortify their positions on terrain that they already control.

A U.S. submarine off the coast of Western Australia, March 2025

But to fully maximize these advantages, the United States must restructure its conventional forces in the Indo-Pacific. A force weighted toward submarines, long-range bombers (or similar capabilities), and road-mobile missile launchers would reduce the current dependence on highly visible surface ships and short-range aircraft operating from bases close to China, which are within range of the largest number of Chinese missiles.

Making such a shift will be a significant undertaking, but the United States undertook a similar effort when it designed and constructed the nuclear triad. One indication of the logic of the approach is that other nuclear powers, including China, India, and Russia, have replicated the structure, fielding nuclear weapons in some combination of submarines, bombers, and road- or rail-based mobile launch vehicles. (Silo-based ICBMs, which also form part of the land-based triad, are less survivable and contribute to deterrence by a different logic: they force states to choose between using one of their nuclear weapons on an adversary’s silo, thereby forgoing a more valuable target, and using one on a more valuable target, accepting the damage that the intact silo’s missile might cause.) This basic force structure is a product of operations analysis and refinement over the 80 years of the nuclear age, grounded in the deterrence logic that points to the indispensability of an assured second strike.

To build an effective conventional triad, the United States must invest in more submarines, bombers, and mobile launch vehicles. This would entail, for example, redoubling current efforts to increase the production of Virginia-class attack submarines; increasing the production of B-21 bombers; accelerating air force efforts to deploy a “palletized” munitions launch system, which enables transport aircraft to launch conventional cruise missiles; and expanding the range and capacity of the Marine Littoral Regiments and the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability, a land-based missile launcher system that was recently deployed to the Philippines.

To support this new force structure, the United States will need more advanced communications and surveillance systems. These could take the form of a large array of satellites or clusters of satellites that would be resilient to Chinese attack, especially when augmented by large numbers of uncrewed aerial vehicles that can detect adversarial forces and serve as nodes for communication. Each component of the triad must also be equipped with deep magazines of the medium- and intermediate-range conventional cruise and ballistic missiles, especially antiship missiles, that China already possesses in the many thousands.

Constructed in this way, the U.S. conventional force would impose asymmetric challenges on any adversary. For one thing, it would cost an adversary much more to discover and destroy U.S. forces in all three domains than it would cost the United States to operate those forces. The munitions that those mobile platforms carry are likewise usually cheaper to employ than to defend against because of the speed of ballistic missiles and the maneuverability of cruise missiles. The difficulty of finding and defending against these platforms and their weapons essentially ensures that a significant proportion of the force would survive a first strike and thus be able to launch a second. China and the United States are also both developing hypersonic weapons, which, although costly, are likely to make missiles even harder to defend against by combining the properties of speed and maneuverability.

Should a major conflict break out between China and the United States, the ability of the United States to protect its conventional forces and provide an assured second strike would also reduce its losses relative to China’s. This could be crucial in a contest against a state with vast economic, technological, and industrial resources. Since neither side would be able to achieve a total victory akin to the Allied defeat of Japan and Germany in World War II, the United States’ ability to minimize its losses and reconstitute its forces and preparedness, especially relative to China’s ability to do the same, would become a salient measure of success. By contrast, a conflict in which the United States successfully defended against a first attack but at such a high cost that it could not defend against a second would put it at a long-term disadvantage. Survivable combat capabilities are therefore essential not only to deterrence but also to guaranteeing a stable post-conflict balance should deterrence fail.

 

Balancing Act

The principle of an assured second strike has underpinned nuclear stability for more than half a century. Because of advances in technology, this logic increasingly applies at the conventional level. If the United States is to retain the credible ability to defeat and thereby deter a Chinese attempt to revise the East Asian political order by military means, U.S. conventional forces will need to develop an assured second-strike capability. By reducing incentives on both sides to strike first, such a capability would also reduce the likelihood of inadvertent and potentially catastrophic escalation.

The Defense Department and Congress have taken important steps to increase the production of conventionally armed submarines, bombers, and mobile missile launchers and to develop resilient communications and surveillance infrastructure. There is broad bipartisan support for developing mobile land-based long-range missile capabilities through the army’s Multi-Domain Task Forces and the Marines’ Littoral Regiments and for expanding the production of U.S. attack submarines beyond two per year. There is also significant backing for expanding procurement of long-range weapons, such as the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile Extended Range and the Tomahawk cruise missile. The air force, for its part, has long recognized the importance of the B-21 strategic bomber and continues to develop options to use cargo aircraft such as the C-17 and C-130 as large-capacity munitions launchers. And the Defense Department’s efforts to expand its use of proliferated satellite constellations such as Starlink will enable all its fighting forces to better communicate with one another, detect adversaries, and coordinate attacks, among other essential functions.

The Defense Department has also made recent efforts to accelerate the development of low-cost autonomous systems, such as uncrewed aerial and underwater vehicles. These include the Replicator initiative, the department’s program to develop and field these systems, and the “Hellscape” concept for the systems’ use in the Indo-Pacific. By fielding large numbers of relatively inexpensive drones, these programs offer important ways to offset China’s numerical advantages in military assets. And if positioned close to the adversary, these systems could potentially respond to an attack more quickly than U.S. ships or planes that would have to travel from Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, or the West Coast of the continental United States. For now, however, Replicator-type systems are a specific solution to the specific problem of defending U.S. partners close to China on short notice. As Paparo told The Washington Post in June 2024, Hellscape is intended primarily to buy time—to make the lives of Chinese troops “utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”

At Airshow China in Zhuhai, China, November 2024

The “rest” of the task, which involves a broad reconfiguring of U.S. forces in the western Pacific, remains a work in progress. U.S. submarine and munitions industrial bases remain sclerotic and are improving only slowly and at significant cost. The construction of 100 or more B-21 bombers will take a decade or longer. Boeing stopped building C-17s in 2015, and the air force’s plans for its next-generation cargo transports remain in infancy. Meanwhile, the ultimate range and capacity of the mobile land-based firing capabilities of the army and the Marine Corps have not yet been fully determined. To keep pace with China’s continued missile development, all these force levels would have to be greatly increased.

The constraints and challenges that stand in the way of developing these capabilities are real. But China is not slowing its efforts to expand its conventional precision-strike arsenal, and the threat posed to U.S. allies and partners in the western Pacific by China’s military modernization is not going away. If the United States perceives the current security architecture in the region as a vital interest, it must be prepared to build a stable conventional deterrence equilibrium that will endure for as long as it expects China to be a military challenger.

Construction of a conventional triad would not only produce a more powerful deterrent but also lower the risks of rapid conventional or even nuclear escalation if deterrence fails. Just as U.S. strategists during the Cold War discovered when the Soviets achieved nuclear parity, their successors facing a world of long-range precision-guided conventional weapons today may find that a stable balance of deterrence remains possible. It will depend, however, on U.S. forces acquiring a credible and assured conventional second-strike capability. This will force Washington to make difficult choices amid sharp political and budgetary debates. But the approach is feasible. And the alternative—increasing levels of risk to U.S. forces, to deterrence in the western Pacific, and to crisis stability—is not one the United States can afford to accept.

 

 

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