Report to Congress on Great Power Competition

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The emergence over the past decade of intensified U.S. competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) and the Russian Federation (Russia)—often referred to as great power competition (GPC)—has profoundly changed the conversation about U.S. defense issues from what it was during the post–Cold War era: Counterterrorist operations and U.S. military operations in the Middle East—which had been more at the center of discussions of U.S. defense issues following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—are now a less-prominent element in the conversation, and the conversation now focuses more on the following elements, all of which relate largely to China and/or Russia:grand strategy and geopolitics as a starting point for discussing U.S. defense issues;

the force-planning standard, meaning the number and types of simultaneous or overlapping conflicts or other contingencies that the U.S. military should be sized to be able to conduct—a planning factor that can strongly impact the size of the U.S. defense budget;

organizational changes within the Department of Defense (DOD);

nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, and nuclear arms control;

global U.S. military posture;

U.S. and allied military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region;

U.S. and NATO military capabilities in Europe;

new U.S. military service operational concepts;

capabilities for conducting so-called high-end conventional warfare;

maintaining U.S. superiority in conventional weapon technologies;

innovation and speed of U.S. weapon system development and deployment;

mobilization capabilities for an extended-length large-scale conflict;

supply chain security, meaning awareness and minimization of reliance in U.S. military systems on foreign components, subcomponents, materials, and software; and

capabilities for countering so-called hybrid warfare and gray-zone tactics.

The issue for Congress is how U.S. defense planning and budgeting should respond to GPC and whether to approve, reject, or modify the Biden Administration’s defense strategy and proposed funding levels, plans, and programs for addressing GPC. Congress’s decisions on these issues could have significant implications for U.S. defense capabilities and funding requirements and the U.S. defense industrial base.