Toshi Yoshihara, and Casey Nicastro
Rarely does a week go by without more grim news about China’s growing military power and the deteriorating strategic balance in Asia. Projections of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into the 2030s, assuming deterrence holds between now and then, suggest that the operational environment will be even more hostile to the U.S. armed forces and those of its Asian allies. Although unpleasant circumstances a decade from now may seem a distant prospect, force planning decisions must be made now for them to bear fruit in time for that dangerous future. To do so, policymakers must come to grips with difficult choices and trade-offs about force structure and posture that are cost conscious and tactically relevant amidst uncertainty.
To wrestle with these choices and trade-offs, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) ran a series of force-rebalancing exercises in Washington and Canberra to forecast what the correlation of forces might look like a decade hence. Exercise participants used a one-of-a-kind web-based tool to rebalance the PLA and the Australian Defence Force in an interactive simulation. The goal was to test how local powers—by themselves and alongside the United States—might best prepare for and respond to the Chinese military’s most acute challenges in the mid-2030s.
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