2024 Air, Space & Cyber: The China Problem

At the Air, Space & Cyber Conference, AFA hosted a session titled “The China Problem” featuring Dr. Brendan Mulvaney and Dr. Kevin Pollpeter, both from the China Aerospace Studies Institute at Air University, with J. Michael Dahm, senior resident fellow for aerospace and China studies at AFA’s Mitchell Institute, serving as the moderator, on Sept. 16, 2024.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm, Senior Resident Fellow for Aerospace and China Studies, AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies:

Good afternoon and welcome to what I’m sure will be a fascinating discussion on what we’ve titled The China Problem. I’m Mike Dahm, senior fellow for aerospace and China studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace studies. Today I’m joined by three experts who have a penetrating knowledge of China Military, air and space issues. On your left is Mr. Wayne Ulman, the National Intelligence manager for East Asia at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Wayne and I first met when he was the China issues Manager at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center out there in Dayton, Ohio. Since that time, almost 20 years ago, Mr. Ulman has served in senior intelligence positions at indopacom, STRATCOM, and most recently, DIA as the Defense Intelligence Officer for East Asia. To his left is Dr. Brendan Mulvaney, Director of the Department of the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute. Dr. Mulvaney is a marine and Cobra helicopter pilot. He was the first director of the Marine Corps Commandant’s red team. He earned his PhD in international relations from Fudan University in Shanghai, where he was an Olmstead scholar and also taught Chinese at the US Naval Academy. And finally, we’re joined by Dr. Kevin Pollpeter. Dr. Pollpeter recently joined the China aerospace Studies Institute as its director of research. He is a noted and widely cited expert on China’s space program and information warfare capabilities. Dr. Pollpeter has worked in a variety of academic and research roles at the Centers of Excellence, such as the University of California Institute on global conflict and cooperation, the RAND Corporation, and most recently, the Center for naval analyzes. So, Mr. Ulman, you are the National Intelligence manager, or NIM for East Asia. I don’t know that many folks outside the intel community know what a NIM is. So, if you would please give us a quick rundown of what the NIM East Asia does, and to the extent you can describe how the US intelligence community has been shifting from supporting the global war on terrorism to competition with China over the last several years.

Wayne Ulman, National Intelligence Manager of East Asia:

Great Thanks, Mike. Really happy to be here as a proud alumnus of starting my career at NASIC as an Air Force civilian. So, it’s really kind of fun to show up here and run into a bunch of people that I happen to know. So, with that said, so as everybody probably recalls, ODNI was set up after 9/11. Basically the 9/11 commission report says the intelligence community did not integrate well enough. You had two minutes stove piping going on between individual agencies. So, sort of like the founding premise for the ODNI was to improve the way the intelligence community, various agencies work together. And that’s really the heart of what the Nim the National Intelligence manager does. If you think about sort of two big sides of ODNI, one of them is the NIC the National Intelligence Council, the other is the NIMS. So, the National Intelligence Council, they’re the ones that put together national intelligence estimates and other sort of assessments, where they bring together the intelligence community to come to a conclusion about this is what we think is happening, or this what we think is going to happen. We’re the other side. We’re the okay, what are we doing about it? We’re the bringing the community together to look at collection, to look at all of our programs. Where are we putting the proper emphasis on things? So, it’s a fantastic career. And I would say that anybody that might be interested in such a thing, right? We typically staff about 1/3 through joint duty rotations, 1/3 through cadres, and about a third of them actual military members. So, there’s actually quite a bit of opportunity to come and join the ODNI for at least periods of time. Your other question here about how are we turning towards China? So, I started working in China basically 30 years ago, just right after the Cold War ended, and so we’ve been soldiering along in this for a long time here. And really, I think another way to think about the way the intelligence community works is three big shifts, and the first would be starting roughly 1950 through about 1990 where the Soviet Union, because of the Cold War, was the organizing principle for the entirety of the IC we did a lot of other stuff, but that was really the thing that we put the primary focus on. Then for 20 years, it was really global counter terrorism, that was the thing that we put so much emphasis on, and then lots of other stuff. So, we’re in but in both of those cases, you had sort of key events that drove that to quickly happen. Of you know, 911 being, being the most, the most dramatic. We’re literally the day after agencies were having people move down the hall, and you are now a counterterrorism analyst. It’s a lot slower evolution with what’s happening with China, but it’s really the third big shift that we’re seeing, and we’re in the sort of in the mid midpoint of the process here, where the agencies are moving towards organizing around China as the primary organizing principle. So, yep.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

So, Dr. Mulvaney, you know in that, in that vein of shifting, the Air Force set up the China Aerospace Studies Institute, or CASI, tell us a little bit about how you support the services.

Dr. Brendan Mulvaney, China Aerospace Studies Institute, Air University:

Yeah. So, thanks, and thanks for having me. This is a fantastic opportunity. So we are, yeah, Department of the Air Force organization. I’m now an Air Force civilian. Everyone at CASI speaks and reads Chinese, and so we do open-source native language analysis. So, the great part is everything I know, unlike some of our brethren in the intel community, I know from open sources, because that’s what the Chinese are saying. So, I could come and talk in audiences like this. I could talk to allies and friends and partners. We could go up to the hill. We could go around the world and just tell people what’s going on with China. So, we look at everything that flies. So that’s the Air Force, naval aviation, Army Aviation, rockets and missiles, which for them, is a separate service, space, which is a separate force, cyber which is a separate force, and then China is just organized differently. So, we do these things called state owned enterprises. So, you could think of if Boeing or Lockheed Martin was actually part of the U.S. government. That’s what China has. And so, we do everything in the flies to try to just tell you what’s going on. How are they catching up so quickly? Where are they headed in the future, and what are they doing to close the gap with the United States?

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Excellent. And Dr. Pollpeter, as I said in the intro, you recently took over as research director at CASI. So, could you tell us about some maybe some recent publications, or what we should look forward to in the new fiscal year in terms of your research priorities?

Dr. Kevin Pollpeter, Director of Research, China Aerospace Studies Institute, Air University:

Sure. Thanks, Mike. And thanks to the Air Force Association for having me. We’re finishing FY’24 strong with a number of really good publications. We’ve just finished up with a three-part series on China’s space situational awareness capabilities, and we’re looking to continue that into FY’25 we’re going to have a number of reports out on China and UAVs. We’re looking towards a report on humanoid robotics, and then also report on space and deterrence. So going to have a strong FY’25 all of our reports are cleared for public release. Are available on our website, so just put in China aerospace Studies Institute into your search engine, to your browser, it will come up immediately. You can not only access those reports, but also a series of videos that we put out that serve as educational tools for understanding the PLA.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Excellent. We all know that the Department of Defense has identified China and the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, as the pacing challenge for the US Military Secretary Kendall, for his part, has been pretty clear over the last several months with his top three priorities: China, China… and what was the third one? China. So, you know that indicates that the Air Force and the Space Force is simply out of time for modernization, given how fast is developing they’re capabilities and developing those threats that he was talking about this morning. So, I’m wondering what, what do you think, as the experts are the areas that the PLA has made the greatest progress in terms of capability over the last several years. And Dr. Mulvaney, we’ll start with you, sure.

Dr. Brendan Mulvaney:

Thanks. I think part of it is just understanding that they are leveraging their entire system against ours, and they can do it at the direction of the Communist Party. So, the Communist Party of China sets the priorities, and then they put all the parts of the state, the military, and indeed their research and academic institutes, into action trying to get at these technologies. So, I’ll let Kevin talk about space, because that’s really his expertise. But they’ve made a huge, huge strides there. But really, if you look at the Aerospace Forces writ large, if you look at the new J-20, it’s not quite as good as an F-22 or not for 35 but it doesn’t have to be, right? It’s just good enough, and it’s come a long way, very rapidly. The other thing is, I tell people, the Chinese are going to come up to Chinese solutions to Chinese problems. So, they’re not approaching these things as United States military would, and they are simply trying to keep us out long enough to accomplish whatever that is. And that means, hey, I don’t care if I can’t beat an F-35 if the F-35s never get there. So, they have anti access. Aerial denial is what we like to call it. The Chinese call it counter intervention, pushing the air force, pushing the Navy, pushing our allies and partners out long enough so that means longer range air to air missiles, longer range ballistic missiles that will attack aircraft carriers or tankers, or all the things that we need to enable our better aircraft to get in. They just simply want to keep them out, and that’s where they think they probably made the biggest strides over the last 15 years.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Mr. Ulman?

Wayne Ulman:

Yeah, I would agree with everything he said there the other thing, a couple of things I want to mention, though, one of them is, I think we have a concern with the PLA ending up sort of overconfident, right? They haven’t fought anybody since ’79. They went into Vietnam. They train a lot. They train an awful lot, but they’ve not actually employed any of this in combat. And you can sort of get in a situation where you’re sort of like the guy in high school that’s spending all his time in the basement lifting weights, but he’s never actually been in a bar fight. So you can end up a little overconfident that way, that you would know anything about that I would know nothing about this, yes, but, but the other thing too is that I got to say we’re not good at reading each other’s signals, right in terms of as we’re trying to send messages on deterrence scene or deterrence or whatever else, right? We’re not good at reading their signals. They’re not particularly good at reading our signals. So, there’s a lot of opportunities for sort of misunderstanding that can happen here. And so accidentally finding ourselves in a fight is probably the bigger thing than some sort of deliberate, oh, we’re going to institute a six-month plan that gets us to combat.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Yeah, no. And I’ve been involved in, in war games and in, actually, you know, with Chinese participants, where, like, we just talk right past each other, and it’s probably the most dangerous thing. So, Dr. Pollpeter, you know, recently, the Vice Chief of space operations, General Guetlein, voiced his concerns about the risk of China and Russia launching a large-scale attack in orbit. So, there’s only so much we can say here about China’s counter space capabilities, but I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about how the PLA views competition in orbit, and what you think a large-scale attack on us and allied Space Forces might look like.

Dr. Kevin Pollpeter:

Sure. So, space is one area where China has really come on strong since, you know, in the 1990s they were rump space power, maybe even a pariah, couldn’t launch very many satellites into space. You know, Fast forward 25 years or so, China now has over 800 satellites in space. They have a very widespread counter space program. So, they really, this has really been a main focus area for the People’s Liberation Army. And what you see, if you look at any major publication published by the PLA on space, they regard space as the ultimate high ground. They say, whoever controls space controls the earth. So, there’s this real sentiment, then, that you need to be able to control space and achieve victory up there before you can achieve victory on the terrestrial battlefield. And so, What? What? And they’re really basing this off on how the US has performed as you space in our wars. And so, what they say is, is that the US derives 70 to 90% of its intelligence from space-based resources. They say we; we use communication satellites for 80% of our communications. And what they’re saying is, hey, we want some of that, right? But then they’re also looking at it and saying, Hey, that’s, that’s an Achilles heel. That’s a key vulnerability for the US. And so, what we’ve seen over the past, you know, 20 some years, 25 years, is them developing a full range of counter space weapons. We know about the 2007 kinetic kill ASAP tests that produced over what 2,000, 3,000 bits of debris that are still up there. More worrisome though, is that in 2013 they demonstrated the ability to attack kinetically satellites up in geo we’ve seen them develop directed energy weapons that can degrade or disable our sensors. They have a raft of electronic warfare capabilities. They can jam GPS and working on jamming satellite communications. So, what we’ve seen is that they’re hitting on all cylinders in counter space. And so, what I like to say is that China is trying to develop the capabilities to threaten our space assets from the ground all the way up to geosynchronous orbit. And so, what really has me concerned is that because of China’s active defense strategy, which is very offensive, even maybe, you know, advocates preemptive strikes. And then you couple that with the way, with how they see the importance of space, that China could strike us first in space, and that any sort of conflict between the US and China would begin up in space.

Dr. Brendan Mulvaney:

Yeah, let me just double down on that real quick, because Xi Jinping, the leader of China, has doubled, has really put a focus on space ever since he came in. And that’s how they’ve been able to get that fast, that far. And they have been talking about it much longer, at least in the open source, much longer than we have about war to from in and through space. And we see them operating on a daily basis, developing the TTPs, demonstrating the capabilities right honor Ridge, servicing, grappling, satellites. And so, we really need to be paying attention to what the Chinese are doing and saying, because this really is where they put in a lot of eggs in this basket, and they think that they can hurt us more than we can hurt them, because they’re going to play a home game.

Wayne Ulman:

The other piece I’ll jump in on related to that, is the way the Chinese think about warfare is that sort of in. Information and your ability to manage that, that’s sort of like the key thing. You’ve got to do it better than the adversary. You’ve got to defeat the adversary. So, the two other pieces of that, one of them being electronic warfare, which is a passion of Mike and mine going way back. And then the other one, of course, is cyber so invested very heavily in both of those domains, and they’re going to present real challenges, potentially.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Fundamentally, it is about informationized warfare. There’s nothing secret about it. Information is in the name, and like you said, space, cyber, electronic warfare, these are the, these are the disciplines through which information is in the battle space is going to move. So, while we’re focused on the potential for conflict in the Indo Pacific. You know, China, China. China, the only active, well, not the only, but the major active conflicts in the world right now are in EUCOM and CENTCOM. So, I’d like to ask each of you what you think the PLA is learning from the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine in Israel, or even between Israel and Iran and Mr. Ulman, we’ll start with you.

Wayne Ulman:

Yeah, thanks, Mike. So let me first start out. And this is why I bought my little notebook here, because I had one quote that I wanted to read. So back in March 2023 she visited Putin. They had a weeklong Summit. At the end of it, in a public statement there, she says, change is coming, not seen for 100 years, and we are the ones driving that change. So, I think that’s sort of like fundamentally at the heart of the China, Russia relationship, and the way they view the world. And so, the interesting thing that’s happened that since Russia’s invaded Ukraine, the PRC’s really looked at this as sort of like a blueprint for how they would expect the US and the West to react to a Chinese invasion or some sort of military activity against Taiwan. And so they’ve taken a lot of steps over the last couple of years to harden their own economy, right, to try to indigenize as much technology, key technologies. And then the second part of that is to try to create dependencies to the West. So this is everything from supply chains for key minerals to legacy chips. You know, they’re producing almost all of the legacy chips in the world right now. And so that, essentially, if the West starts tries to do the same sort of sanctions-based warfare that we did against Russia, that it’d be essentially cutting their own our own throats, and the other thing that they’re working hard on trying to move themselves as much as possible off of dollar denominated international trade system. There’s a long way to go right, and you can get into endless arguments with economists about how this is going, but the bottom line is, there’s a lot more trade that’s going on in local currencies or in renminbi now than there was three years ago. So that’s sort of a key part of that, and it’s also… the other thing I’ll mention is really fundamentally altering the relationship between Russia and China, with China coming out as sort of the key partner. So, I think that’s an interesting thing, because it’s going to like from the Russian perspective, that’s not how you see yourself.

Dr. Brendan Mulvaney:

All right, anybody else? No, yeah, no, I would definitely. I would echo all that. Most of the stuff that the learning is at that strategic level. You asked about the PLA specifically, I think Xi Jinping probably has pat himself on the back, because way back in 2015, and ’16, he actually created an entire organization dedicated to logistics. We can argue about how well it’s working or isn’t. But he knew that was a thing, and I think that’s for the PLA specifically. That’s one of the big lessons is, hey, this logistics thing, it’s hard, it’s contested. We need to focus on it. Even if Russia’s playing a home game essentially, like China would be, it is still going to be a challenge for them. And so that. And then, of course, we’ll see what happens with the nuclear deterrence options that Mr. Putin continues to wave around.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

All right, so keeping on the China Russia thing, you know, the changes that have not been seen for a century. So, China and Russia have been engaged in joint exercises for several years. This, this, you know, preceded the partnership without limits that we heard about a couple of years ago. Recently, there was a flight of Russian to 95 bombers and a Chinese H-6 bomber flying together into the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone. So how would you describe military cooperation between China and Russia? And is what we’re seeing the beginnings of an alliance and a real come combination of military capabilities and which side do you think is benefiting more from the relationship at this point? Dr. Mulvaney?

Dr. Brendan Mulvaney:

So, I think we’re far from an alliance. You know, it’s they’ve come a long way, but they have a long way to go before they have anything that approaches what the United States has. They are working in coordination, in tandem. We’ve seen no real interoperability. We did see them, you know, taking off from the same base. So that’s something new. They continue to do something new, but it is slow. It is step by step, but it is continuing, and it’s far more than they ever did. So, we should keep in mind Adas is our international airspace. We continue. Need to say that the United States will fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows. So, this was perfectly permissible under international law, and we need to make sure that we are very clear about that with the Chinese, that we’re not saying there’s a problem here, but we do need to keep an eye on it, but we should expect to see more and more cooperation, but it’s a long way from being an alliance. You know, you’re not seeing PLA showing up in Ukraine, and you’re not going to see little green men showing up in Taiwan anytime in the near future.

Wayne Ulman:

Excellent, but let me jump in there really quick. So totally agree that you’re not going to see an alliance in the sense that, you know, the US and NATO are the five eyes, right? That we have Alliance structures there, but they do very fundamentally see the world the same way, right? It’s sort of the definition of like-minded there, that the problem is the United States and the West and sort of the system that we’ve put in place since the end of World War Two, and, you know, different approaches to it, Russia’s, I think, very much in the mindset of we want to burn it all down. Where the Chinese are like this system no longer suits our needs. And we need to, you know, we need a prominent seat at the table, and we need to shift some of this stuff to accommodate us. So different approaches there, but fundamentally, they sort of view the problem as the same. And then I think it gets really intriguing with when you bring the North Koreans into the equation, right? And what does that sort of trilateral situation look like? I think there’s a lot of frenemy sort of things going on there. There’s a fundamental sort of lack of trust in all directions there, but it’s certainly things we have to watch and be concerned about.

Dr. Brendan Mulvaney:

Yeah, before Kevin jumps in on that note, I think there’s a transition going on in that relationship, especially when it comes to space, where China is now clearly the larger, the more advanced partner in that relationship, it still seems to be, well, we’re not sure how the Russians are going to take that long term and what that means for other parts of the relationship, but that is an interesting power shift dynamic that’s going on.

Dr. Kevin Pollpeter:

Yeah, sure. So, I was going to comment on the China-Russia space relationship as well. So, what we see is that the space relationship is actually just a microcosm of the overall China-Russia relationship. And what we see happening in cooperative activities between China and Russia is that they’re using it to strengthen their own militaries. They’re using it to send a message, to strengthen their influence throughout the world, but then also to undercut Western influence throughout the world. So, we’ve seen a whole range of different cooperative activities, especially on missile defense. They’ve shared technology. They say that they’re sharing missile early warning information. They have a confidence building measure where they notify each other a ballistic missile and space launches. They’ve done missile defense exercises. China and Russia are the charter members of the International Lunar Research Station, which is their effort to send humans to the moon, which is scheduled to occur by 2030. We see them participating in cooperative activities on satellite navigation, on space arms control. So, it’s really a burgeoning relationship. Is it an alliance? No, but it’s one where they come, where they increasingly see some commonality that they can use to further both of their interests. But as Brennan was saying, yeah, it’s interesting the way the relationship has changed, where, in the 50s, 60s, Russia, the Soviet Union then, was definitely the big brother in the relationship, you know, even giving ballistic missile technology to China. And now that seems to have flipped just overall, in the overall relationship. China now seems to be that dominant partner that is driving that exchange.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Thanks. All right. Well, I have a bunch of questions to get to, but I’m just going to go ahead and jump ahead to the one that I’m sure everybody wants to want to know about, especially a certain friend of mine. You know who you are. We’ve heard from U.S. military leaders that Chairman Xi Jinping has told the PLA to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027 others have suggested the 2027 goal is more about, you know, being able to stand up to the US military, preventing that intervention, the counter intervention, in a Taiwan scenario. Some academic assessments have said that 2027 is nothing more than a short term goal in the context of the 2035, and 2049, goals, right? The Chinese like things in threes. So now we’ve got 2027, 2035, and 2049, when China’s supposed to become a world class military power. I’m interested in how each of you interpret what the 2027 goal means to the PLA. Should I be selling my stock in the Taiwan Semiconductor Corporation? Yes, or no?

Dr. Brendan Mulvaney:

Probably not quite yet. So, and again. This is all Brendan’s personal opinion here on this one, right? 2027, is a goal for the PLA to get ready, right? So, this is not a deadline. This is not an invasion plan. There’s a big flashing caveat should be going on behind my head, that should something go sideways in Taiwan if President Lai wakes up tomorrow and decides to get up on the world stage and say Taiwan is a free and independent country, and we’re going to start acting that way. The PLA is going. The PLA is going, whether they know they’re going to lose or not. They are ready, willing and able today to go. They just know that they would likely lose with US and allied involvement. Short of that, they absolutely have goals to get there by 2049. This is the first one. It was Xi Jinping pushing the PLA to go a little faster, a little farther, to demonstrate the world that, hey, we are on track to meet those 2049 goals. And this is an interim step, but they have a long way to go with doctrine, with TTPs. They’ve got a lot of new kit, but they don’t have the organization. They don’t have the personnel that’s ready for it. They don’t have the command and control. They absolutely are working on it. As Wayne said, they exercise all the time because they haven’t done it in the real world, but they are getting after this problem. But that stoplight chart is not going green until at least the 2030’s in my book.

Wayne Ulman:

And let me jump in on that too. So, Xi Jinping comes into office the end of 2012 and its pretty clear right from the get that he’s skeptical of PLA claim capabilities. And he has, I could pull out literally 10,000 articles with him talking about how the PLA needs to train harder. They need to train more realistically. They need to go faster here. So, he lays these sorts of goals out for them to have a milestone to work towards, and it’s very important, right? Because if he ultimately, they want to solve the Taiwan situation without, without actual fighting, right? Coercion? Yep, absolutely. But fighting, they don’t want to have the fighting. So you’ve got to have a military that reaches a certain level of capability, so that everybody on the other side of the streets and everybody in Washington, DC, understands that the PLA is not to be taken lightly, and that ultimately we need to resolve this thing by the US telling Taiwan go to the table, you guys settle this thing, or some variation of that, right? But you the first thing of that is you’ve got to have a highly credible military, and that’s what he’s trying to get to.

Dr. Kevin Pollpeter:

I would just add that agree with the other two speakers, that you need some sort of deadline, right? So, if you, if you say, hey, PLA, you need to modernize, you need to be able to retake Taiwan, you need to be able to give them a deadline of when that’s going to happen. So why 2027? Well, it is the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the PLA so it’s a nice deadline to hit. It’s also the last year of the third term of Xi Jinping. So, he broke a recent convention and didn’t step down after two terms and will go on and is in the middle of his third term. And he’ll be 74 by 2027, so Xi Jinping likes to control everything, but he cannot even control Father Time. So, if you’re thinking about a legacy, then he wants to be able to say that he has created a PLA that is able to retake Taiwan. And then you can, you know, if you’re thinking further about his legacy, you know, give them some time to exercise that, to sort of get a little bit more proficient. And then, as Brendan said, then you’re looking maybe into the 2030s when they’re really capable of carrying out some sort of action against Taiwan.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Okay, I think I’ve got time to squeeze one more in before closing thoughts. So, Mr. Ulman, there’s been a lot of news over the past couple of years about significant growth in China’s nuclear arsenal. Specifically, the PLAs to be appears to be building a significant number of lands based intercontinental ballistic missile silos. What? What is the assessment of what’s driving this increase in nuclear capability? And is there any indication that Beijing might be moving away from its long standing no first use policy?

Wayne Ulman:

Yeah, thanks, Mike,

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Because that can be totally unclassified. It’s gone right.

Wayne Ulman:

Oh, no. 100% right. And Mike knows this is another thing I really am interested in. Spent did a whole tour out at STRATCOM. So, we were all about the nuclear forces there. It’s actually pretty simple, right? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out, right? They’ve had forever a strategy of nuclear sufficiency, right? To have to have a nuclear force that could survive a first strike and have just a limited number of weapons that you could then lay down on your adversary, usually with very large warheads, and just make that ability to retaliate punishment just too painful, right? That’s the way they got their security. And this was not like a plan for a launch under attack, like we might be able to operate this would be a, I don’t know, a few days a week later, right? We were launching some big nukes back at you, and Los Angeles is going to go down. So that was their philosophy for decades. But I think as they’ve reassessed things, particularly, starting in the middle of this last decade, it’s become more and more clear to them that in order to prevent them from suffering some sort of nuclear blackmail and coercion in the United States, that they need to develop a force that’s at least in rough parity with the United States and what the Russians have, right? So, I think that’s really what they’re driving. Into, there’s a lot of information in the open source the last couple of years about silo fields being developed. It’s pretty clear where they’re going with this and why they’re doing it, and the whole issue of first no first use. That’s a policy, that’s a stated, you know, I think that will forever be in place. Your ability to actually change that on the fly is pretty quick and easy. You just change it. But I don’t think, I don’t see that ever changing.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

Okay, so we could keep this discussion going for the rest of the afternoon, but unfortunately, we’re running short of time. I’d like to give each of you an opportunity for some closing thoughts by asking, what are the greatest risks facing the U.S. military with regard to China and what may be on the horizon that we’re not necessarily expecting. Dr. Pollpeter, we’ll start with you.

Dr. Kevin Pollpeter:

Okay, so maybe I’ll be a little bit provocative here, but I will say we need to be careful not to have overconfidence in our ability to deter China. And let me caveat this by saying that first of all, I absolutely think we should be working to deter China. We should be trying in every possible way to try and deter China. I also want to say that, you know, deterrence seems to be working now, right? They haven’t attacked Taiwan, so it seems to be working. However. We often when we’re talking about, how did he do her China, we think about a she, you know, Xi Jinping is doing a cost benefit analysis, okay? And, and, okay, right now that the cost outweighs the risk. So, we’re not, we’re not going to go, and it assumes that Xi Jinping is a rational actor, okay? And what I mean by that is, is that it’s somebody who sits down and rationally goes through the costs and benefits, and we know, and this doesn’t mean that Xi Jinping, if you say he’s irrational, is crazy. What it does mean is that humans do not react, do not act in rational ways. We often do not do a logical cost benefit analysis. And what we see in the deterrence literature, both through case studies and theoretical analysis is that people are swayed much more by their biases, by other opinions, by their own priorities, rather than simple cost benefit analysis. So, we see things like international pride and prestige factor heavily. We see things like internal domestic issues factor heavily. We see things like international grievances and whether they feel that they are losing out from the international situation. And so, when you look at the literature, both the empirical literature and the academic literature, and even literature on human psychology, what we see is that actually deterrence fails more than it succeeds. So, the downside here is that a lot of these factors we cannot influence. And so really what it behooves us is, really, we need to focus on that deterrence, but then be also prepared that we may need to go to war.

Dr. Brendan Mulvaney:

Yeah, I’m going to tie that to the last question about nuclear missiles. So, this is another growth area that Xi Jinping has been very focused on from the very beginning, right? So, he came in, he said, what is, you know, what are the strategic advantages that China has? It’s the position. Taiwan’s only under nautical miles off. It’s a hard under nautical miles, but it’s really, really close to China. Guam’s pretty far away, but they’ve got missiles that can get there. Xi Jinping increased the size of the rocket force by 33% over four years. Think about increasing the budget and the size of the Air Force, or the Space Force, for that matter, 33% over four years. Anybody would love that? What is included in there? Yeah, lots of medium range, lots of intercontinental lots of short-range missiles across the board, intentionally intermingled, nuclear, non-nuclear, and they read all the stuff. So, anybody know what the next Nuclear Power posture review for the United States government’s going to say, nobody’s working on it now, but I guarantee you the next one’s going to say we need a triad, because they all say we need a triad. And that’s what he’s that’s what he’s building. And so that’s what he’s focused on. And he is making us think, how is he going to deter us? Which is why that the strategic lessons from the Ukraine and what President Putin is doing are very, very important to how China is going to perceive the future and the utility of these weapons. And so that’s exactly and that’s why we have a potential conventional intercontinental ballistic missile. You want to talk about pulling your hair out thinking about deterrence. That’s what should keep you up at night. What is he going to use that for? What is your what is the response to the President when you see some missiles coming over? There’s not many. And you know, they may not be nuclear, but they might be. I don’t want to be in that position well.

Dr. Kevin Pollpeter:

And it also puts that H-6 bomber flight into the Alaska it is into some context. Sure. Mr. Holman will give you the last word, yeah.

Wayne Ulman:

So, for the military planners out there, right? Let’s talk about this most likely and most dangerous situation. And your most dangerous is that we end up with some sort of high-end, large-scale conflict with the Chinese sometime late in this decade. Here, entirely possible, I think the chances that are. Small, but they are nonzero, right? There’s a real chance this happens. The scale, the scope, the speed, the global implications of that are unlike anything we’ve seen since World War Two. And actually a lot of it’s going to would be a lot worse. So, there’s a real chance that happens. The much greater likelihood is that we end up in a many decades long strategic competition, Cold War Two, if you want to call it that, with the Chinese. So, like for the military, that’s really hard decisions. This is the def, sec, def Hicks likes to talk about, is the 123, fight. Its problem here. So, you have to make really important decisions about, okay, if you’re actually planning to fight the next four or five years, right? I can’t retire anything, right? I got to spend a lot of money on munitions and a lot of money on training, right? If I don’t think we’re going to fight for maybe ever, but maybe not for a couple of decades, here, I can retire a bunch of stuff. I can invest in a lot of new weapon systems. I can defer a little bit of maintenance, defer a little bit of training, so I’ve got money for the new systems in the 30’s, right? These are tough decisions that the DOD has got to grapple with, and the services have to grapple with here, and then sort of more broadly, to the US in general, right? You’ve got to think about what you’re doing with economic and tech policy. How much you want to have the government more involved in, sort of, either protecting technologies or protecting industrial sectors or fostering, you know, things like chips here, AI, things like that internally. So, these are, like, huge decisions that are really being driven very much by the PRC, the way they operate, the force the economy, everything that they’re building we’re having to react to and the way they operate. It’s, it’s very, sort of interesting, and you can see it sort of trickling down through our very deliberately in our political dialogs. Right, both, both sides of the aisle agree that China’s a problem. They differ in many cases on so what do we need to actually do about it? But you’re seeing the United States behave in ways that never would have we never would have thought we’d behave 20 years ago, when it was all go, go free economics and, you know, it’s put the put the factories in China, put the technologies in China. They don’t ever catch up anyways, yeah. So big decisions, right? So, so watch, watch the newspapers, watch how this all develops over the course of the next any, any number of years. Here, yeah, and I’ll just go ahead and close.

Panel Moderator: J. Michael Dahm:

You know, I am a recovering intelligence officer 25 years in the intelligence community, and since I’ve been out, I have really, really, really come to appreciate the value of open source, the work that CASI does, the China Aerospace Studies Institute, the work that China Maritime Studies Institute does up at the US Naval War College, I think Carlyle, the Army War College now has the China land power Studies Institute. It’s just a couple of people, but they’re standing up a capability there as well. You know, the fact of the matter is, I know there are people in this room that are, you know, cleared to the moon and, you know, read all this stuff, you know, with their morning coffee that that has four-inch headers and footers on the top and the bottom of the page. So, classified. You can’t even think about it when you go home. We need to be looking at open source, if a lot of times, if you want to know what the Chinese are thinking, you just have to ask them or read what it is that they are writing about themselves. And some of the folks on this stage have been instrumental in bringing that to the fore and providing it to you, to your squadrons, to your flights, to your commands that you can reference and understand something more about the China problem with that, I’d like to thank our panelists and hope you have a good time at the conference for the rest of the day.

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