By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

A Credible Military Plan for Deterring Beijing

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.

Today, the situation is gravely different. China’s defense industrial base is on a wartime footing, producing hardware and software at what Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, calls “an alarming pace.” Its military and commercial shipbuilding capacity is roughly 230 times larger than that of the United States, and its long-range missile capabilities have mushroomed over the past two decades. This means that China poses a serious threat to the U.S. military in the two concentric island chains on Beijing’s maritime flank, the second of which extends south from Japan to Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Palau. If, for example, the current tensions over Taiwan were to break out into a full-scale war, U.S. forces from Japan to Guam would be vulnerable to Chinese strikes before they even got to the fight.

Like the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, however, China has vulnerabilities that can be exploited. It is time for the United States to develop, in earnest, a new offset strategy. Although Beijing has dominated Washington’s agenda in recent years, the Pentagon has not yet developed a modern-day equivalent of the so-called AirLand Battle concept that U.S. leaders established in the 1970s to defeat the Soviet Union in Central Europe. Thus far, much of the focus has been on emerging technologies, such as autonomous systems and artificial intelligence.

Technology is important, but it has never been sufficient to win wars. As Andrew Marshall, the longtime head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, argued, “Technology makes possible the revolution, but the revolution itself takes place only when new concepts of operation develop.” The United States, in other words, needs to develop a joint concept of operation—a plan to use forces to conduct specific military operations—and it needs to follow through by making the necessary investments and acquisitions to offset Beijing’s numerical and industrial advantages. If it does not, the United States risks losing a war with China.

Chinese soldiers rehearsing ahead of a military parade in Beijing, September 2025

 

New Look

The United States has done this before. During the Cold War, the United States succeeded in several major efforts to offset Soviet advantages. The first was the Eisenhower administration’s New Look, which involved countering the Red Army’s significant numerical advantage in central Europe. In the 1950s, the Soviets had nearly three times the number of ground forces in Europe as the United States and its allies did, and it was building a formidable industrial base.

But instead of deploying and sustaining a large standing army in Europe, which might have crippled the U.S. economy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his administration developed New Look: the plan to build an overwhelming nuclear advantage and plan, in the event of a war, to use tactical nuclear weapons against Red Army troops, including inside West Germany. As described in the administration’s policy paper NSC 162/2, which Eisenhower approved in October 1953, the United States would develop the capability to inflict “massive retaliatory damage by offensive striking power.” The goal was to strengthen deterrence and persuade the Soviet Union not to start a war, but for the United States to nevertheless be prepared in case of a conflict.

New Look was backed up by new acquisitions in nuclear weapons and long-range bombers. In 1956, for example, Eisenhower pushed through Congress a request to ramp up B-52 production from 17 to 20 aircraft per month, along with additional funding for missile research and expansion of B-52 facilities. The result was overwhelmingly successful: the Soviets were deterred in central Europe, and by the 1960s, the United States held a commanding lead over the Soviet Union in missiles—including nuclear missiles.

A decade later, however, the United States was in danger of losing that edge in deterrence thanks to U.S. defense cuts and Soviet advancements. The Soviets had reached nuclear parity with the United States and had a three-to-one advantage in conventional capabilities in central Europe. To respond, U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering William Perry led a second offset.

Brown and Perry realized that they could defeat Soviet forces attempting to invade Western Europe if they could effectively strike the rear-echelon forces, or those feeding the frontlines, with precision. The so-called second offset, which included the concept of AirLand Battle, thus led to a focus on acquiring stealth and precision weapons, such as the F-117 Nighthawk aircraft, the laser-guided Copperhead antitank projectile, and various precision-guided bombs and missiles.

The Reagan administration continued these efforts into the 1980s as Moscow watched with alarm. In 1981, Soviet General Nikolai Ogarkov and other Soviet leaders conducted a massive exercise, called Zapad-81, to see how Soviet forces would fare against the new U.S. strategy. Afterward, Minister of Defense Dmitri Ustinov said the military balance between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was “at the moment not in our favor.”

 

The Third Offset

Developing a successful offset strategy has two distinct phases: first, identifying an operational concept, or specific plan, to defeat the adversary; second, identifying, developing, and deploying the weapons, systems, and equipment that the operational concept calls for. Doing these steps in order sends a clear message and strengthens deterrence.

If the United States’ goal is to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, it is useful to imagine how that would play out. A war so close to the Chinese mainland would be a major challenge for the U.S. military because of China’s ability to deploy a large number of missiles, aircraft, ships, and other capabilities to the fight. It would also be difficult for China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, which would have to move massive amounts of troops, weapons, and materiel through an amphibious landing, air assault, airborne landings, or a combination of these means. The first troops to land would have to seize a foothold in Taiwanese territory before allowing follow-on PLA forces to flow into Taiwan. The United States would need to act within hours or days to prevent a territorial fait accompli, and it would need to be able to rapidly strike at the heart of the PLA’s invasion force, dislodging it from any territory it had gained.

Consequently, the United States needs to strengthen and expand its force posture in the region to respond immediately to a Chinese invasion. The United States can, for example, deploy additional bombers to bases in Australia, harden shelters for aircraft at such locations as Kadena Air Base in Japan, establish active defenses for missiles in Guam, and stockpile fuel, spare parts, munitions, and other materiel across the Indo-Pacific that can be used for a fight.

For the United States to carry out rapid strikes on Chinese forces, it will have to be able to see all high-value PLA targets on the battlefield at any time, hit targets with mass and precision, and destroy any target that can be hit. Such targets include PLA amphibious assault ships, landing craft, air assault helicopters, and planes carrying PLA soldiers, weapons systems, and air defenses, as well as the operational command-and-control centers supporting the invasion force. The United States would need to generate combat power that can operate both inside and outside the reach of China’s strike systems. As Admiral Paparo has remarked, “I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using many classified capabilities so I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”

This would require a major increase in the U.S. inventory of precision-guided long-range missiles that can strike PLA vessels and aircraft. Long-range antiship missiles are effective against PLA targets, but they are expensive at over $3 million per missile, and the United States does not have enough of them. The United States needs to ramp up the research, development, and production of long-range missiles—especially antiship missiles to strike PLA surface vessels—that are cheaper. The United States will also need a lot more relatively cheap unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, particularly drones that do not need runways to launch.

Manned aircraft, however, are still important, especially bombers and stealthy fifth- and sixth-generation fighters. The range and strike capabilities of stealth bombers such as the B-21 Raider present China with a particularly daunting challenge. They can be based beyond the range of Chinese ballistic missiles, and they can carry substantial conventional and nuclear bombs to thin Chinese forces. Some fifth- and sixth-generation stealth aircraft such as the F-35 are also helpful because their speed, sensor packages, and strike capabilities allow them to operate inside the first and second island chains for air-to-air and air-to-ground missions, as well as to collect and share battlefield data across ground, air, and maritime forces.

Finally, the United States needs a mix of large nuclear-powered attack submarines and cheap underwater drones. The PLA is relatively weak in the undersea domain and struggles to detect, identify, and track U.S. submarines. In multiple iterations of war games by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for example, U.S. submarines wreak havoc on Chinese ships, including large amphibious vessels, escorts, and logistics vessels. The United States must lean into this undersea advantage and prioritize maintaining it.

 

Focus the Fight

Other capabilities are also important, such as software that leverages next-generation artificial intelligence, which allows the U.S. military to share massive amounts of data quickly between forces. But the future of warfare is not just about unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, and other technologies. U.S. military capabilities need to be grounded in a viable operational strategy. Inventing technologies or being the first country to use a technology has never guaranteed an advantage on the battlefield. British engineers at William Foster & Co. developed and produced the tank. But it was German military officers, such as Heinz Guderian, who used the tank to devastating effect during blitzkrieg operations in World War II.

There is also a lot that the United States will not need for a potential conflict with China, such as large numbers of surface ships and aircraft carriers, which are vulnerable and highly exposed in a war. The United States is also still investing in land systems, such as tanks, that will not be necessary for this fight. An offset that focuses on China, of course, does not exclude preparing for contingencies elsewhere, such as against Russia in eastern Europe, Iran in the Middle East, or North Korea on the Korean Peninsula. But it does mean that the United States needs to prioritize defeating and deterring China, much as the United States focused on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

 

 

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