Jake Harrington

China is conducting an unprecedented campaign below the threshold of armed conflict to expand the influence of the Chinese Communist Party and weaken the United States and its partners. The scale of China’s actions in the United States is unparalleled. This CSIS report offers one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of Chinese political warfare activities and examines China’s main actions, primary goals, and options for the United States and its partners.

Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) have played an important role in warfare over the past two decades, including to conduct counterterrorism operations. To better understand the utility of UASs, this latest report from CSIS adopts a comparative case study approach and examines the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, Ukraine war in 2022, and Northern Edge-21 exercise in the Indo-Pacific in 2021. These cases demonstrate that UASs have been increasingly integrated into combined arms warfare, a major change from the past. In addition, UASs are likely to play an increasingly important role in several types of missions as part of strategic competition and warfare with such countries as China and Russia.