Timothy R Heath

The Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) Reform asked the RAND Corporation for an independent analysis of PPBE-like functions in selected countries and non-Department of Defense federal agencies. This executive summary distills key insights from nine case studies of budgeting processes across comparative organizations, as detailed in three companion volumes.

This report seeks to address how the U.S. Army can most effectively project and employ land power in the Indo-Pacific, during competition and conflict, with a focus on scenarios involving China. The authors developed three concepts to guide the Army's ground force role in the theater, offering the essential architecture of basing, information, relationships, and flexible combat power needed to make the joint force effective.

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.

This report assesses how China may react to expanded or varied U.S. military activities in the Indo-Pacific. It provides a framework of key factors likely to determine Chinese responses and identifies the characteristics of U.S. military activities that may either enhance deterrence of Chinese aggression or increase the risks of an escalatory Chinese reaction.

The authors develop a framework of 17 indicators to assess valuable attributes of potential host nations from Beijing's perspective, focusing not only on the utility of host nations (desirability) but also on China's ability to secure access (feasibility). They recommend strategies for the U.S. government, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Army to better understand China's overseas plans and to prioritize risks to U.S. forces.

The dramatic increase in Chinese power and military capabilities over the past two decades has prompted calls for U.S. policymakers, and the U.S. Department of Defense in particular, to reevaluate their approach to the Indo-Pacific region, including changes to U.S. military posture. This report provides a framework of key factors that U.S. policymakers should consider in assessing how China may react to shifting U.S. posture in the region.

The U.S. National Security Strategy focuses on the expectation of a new era of growing international competition that the United States is expected to confront. The authors examine the nature of the emerging era, assess the perspectives of 16 countries (beginning with the primary challengers to the U.S.-led order), and evaluate various characteristics for each.

The international system appears headed for a renewed era of intense competition among major powers. The authors sought to identify the factors that keep such rivalries stable and those that lead to conflictual outcomes. Leveraging theory and historical case studies, the authors created a framework for assessing the stability of a strategic rivalry, then applied it to the current U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China competitions.

Land-based, multi-domain anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) forces can play a role in deterring or defeating aggression. This report highlights growing Chinese and Russian A2/AD capabilities and potential scenarios for conflict in the Asia-Pacific region (centered on China) and the Baltic Sea (centered on Russia). Ground-based capabilities offer an affordable way for U.S. allies and partners to deter or defeat aggression.

This study describes China s national and security strategies and its approach to war and escalation control; summarizes its military capabilities developments; and reviews its concepts for deterrence in strategic (nuclear, space, and cyber) and conventional domains. The study concludes with implications for U.S. policymakers and warfighters."

This report's authors examine how transitions in the Chinese Communist Party's political legitimacy since 1949 have affected the Chinese military's development and performance. The authors also consider how these links could evolve in coming years.

U.S.-China trade tensions have waxed and waned for decades but have remained persistently high since 2017. In this report, the authors assess the effectiveness of recent, more-restrictive U.S. economic policies regarding China. They also provide recommendations on how to improve the United States' ability to defend its economic interests and enhance the likelihood of the Chinese government adopting fairer trade practices.

This report is part of a larger RAND Corporation study on the societal foundations of national competitiveness. The authors surveyed Chinese and Russian thinking about the qualities of nations that tend to produce competitive advantage and found that both China and Russia hold starkly different views from most U.S. and Western officials and analysts about the societal sources of competitive advantage.

The Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) Reform asked the RAND Corporation for an independent analysis of PPBE-like functions in selected countries and other federal agencies. In this volume, RAND researchers conduct case studies of the defense budgeting processes of China and Russia.

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.

In their quest for national revival, China’s leaders under Xi Jinping have sought to improve the economy’s performance. The disappointing economic record of authoritarian regimes provides ample grounds for doubt, yet not all have failed. Why have some succeeded where most did not? The theory of the “enabling condition” highlights the central role that politics plays in the pursuit of economic advancement. The theory explains that a political situation characterized by a strong central leadership, weak elite opposition, and a united public offers favorable prospects for enacting concentrated growth policies. This arrangement enables the central leadership to enlist the public in convincing elites to implement policies that they might otherwise resist. Focusing on the experience of single party, authoritarian regimes, The Autocrat’s Predicament: The Political Peril of Economic Upgrade in Single Party, Authoritarian Regimes examines episodes in the histories of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and the Soviet Union. It concludes that China’s unfavorable political situation could be potentially unfriendly for its ambitions to build an efficient, highly productive economy.

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.

Since about 2000, the world has been in a period that mixes some aspects of modern life and a much more substantial attenuation of others and features weakening states, fragmenting societies, imbalanced economies, pervasive threats, and the informalization of warfare. This report examines how the U.S.-China rivalry might unfold in this neomedieval era. Many theories about why and how great powers compete will need to be reconsidered.

Great powers have frequently employed large, expeditionary military forces engaged in various operations abroad. As China has ascended in power, observers have debated whether the country might follow a similar path. China has undertaken two types of military interventions in its post-1949 history. The report's authors assess which one of two patterns is likely to predominate in China's future and how this pattern might change.