Sale Lilly

The People's Republic of China's (PRC's) and the People's Liberation Army's (PLA's) understanding of the military balance is fundamentally based on systems warfare concepts. The authors provide a detailed analysis of the factors and components associated with PRC leaders' assessments of the Chinese PLA's strength and the implications for the U.S.-China military balance.

The People's Liberation Army's (PLA's) growing ability to project and sustain power will rely on its logistics capabilities, systems, and processes. Understanding the PLA's approach to maintenance management is essential for assessing the PLA's ability to sustain a modernized force. The authors provide an overview of the PLA's approach to maintenance to inform a broader understanding about how the PLA plans to operate and sustain its forces.

Expanding on prior research, the authors identify the tasks that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) would likely be assigned by Chinese leaders to achieve strategic goals both in peacetime competition with the United States and in a hypothetical low-intensity conflict. They then analyze potential vulnerabilities in the PLA's execution of those tasks and how the United States could leverage those vulnerabilities to disrupt China's strategic goals.

This report develops a new concept for strategic disruption by special operations forces, exploring how disruptive campaigns can frustrate an adversary's preferred strategy and enable friendly gains across multiple instruments of national power. This research articulates a clear framework for special operations campaigning short of war, particularly when potentially escalatory conventional options are ill-suited or infeasible.

The authors examine how direct combat experience has shaped the way the U.S. military approaches training and how indirect experience outside combat has shaped the approach of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). The authors then consider the extent to which training and operational model adaptations in both militaries have kept pace with an evolving global context and prepared the U.S. military and PLA for great power conflict.

In this report, the authors develop a framework for assessing a country's capacity to resist a large-scale attack. The authors then use that framework to assess Taiwan's capacity to withstand such an attack by China for at least 90 days. An accurate assessment of Taiwan's ability to sustain a defense could help U.S. decisionmakers and planners better anticipate and respond in such a situation.

In response to a requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, the authors examine the strengths and vulnerabilities of China's defense industrial base (DIB) by designing and applying a comparative analytic structure that could be used to assess any country's DIB. They assess six areas: economics; governance and regulations; research, development, and innovation; workforce, labor, and skills; manufacturing; and raw materials.