Melanie W. Sisson and Dan Patt
The United States has an enduring interest in supporting conditions that minimize the likelihood of war in East Asia. Since 1945, this has meant maintaining robust defense alliances that temper intra-regional insecurities and dispatching the U.S. military to underwrite the unimpeded transit of goods and people through the region’s seas and skies.
For decades, the United States achieved these goals by being able “to transport overwhelming air, sea, and land power to far-off places.” The operation of this model of expeditionary power projection in East Asia was enabled, in part, by the United States’ clear military technological advantage over the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This fact allowed the U.S. military wide latitude, as described in the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), to “deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, and operate how we wanted.” It also allowed policymakers to be confident that the U.S. military could be used to address acute conflicts of interest, often without requiring significant trade-offs across cost, risk, reputation, and the ability to maintain operations elsewhere around the world.
The military balance in East Asia no longer clearly favors the United States and is not likely to again. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is becoming an increasingly professionalized and well-equipped force capable of contesting U.S. action across a broad range of military contingencies.
No comments:
Post a Comment