strategy the United States adopted in the 1970s to address the Soviet challenge.54 To counter the U.S. military’s technological advantage, PLA leadership developed an offset strategy of its own. Top officials in the U.S. Department of Defense have warned that the United States can no longer take for granted military superiority in East Asia.55
China embarked on five distinct but mutually supporting lines of effort:
• “Military-Civil Fusion” (MCF) to achieve the world’s most technologically sophisticated military by acquiring, including through illegal means, advanced and emerging technologies from the United States and from countries around the globe;
• “Systems-destruction warfare” strategy — emphasizing attacks on command and control centers — to shut down enemy operational systems;
• Vast arsenals of ground-based precision missiles to penetrate U.S. defenses;
• “Assassin’s Mace” capabilities to surprise the adversary from unexpected vectors;
• Industrial dominance to attain world leadership in artificial intelligence.56
China’s offset strategy has resulted in a form of asymmetric arms racing. Beijing has invested in large numbers of ground-based theater missiles, third- and fourth-generation aircraft carrying advanced standoff missiles, diesel submarines capable of dominating regional waters, counterspace and cyber capabilities, and an increasingly advanced nuclear arsenal. The PLA’s rapid progress in producing and deploying hypersonic missiles — designed to defeat U.S. and allied missile defenses — underscores Beijing’s determination to achieve asymmetric advantages.57 It does not appear that China is mirroring Soviet behavior by sprinting to quantitative nuclear parity, but evidence mounts that Beijing seeks to at least double the size of its nuclear forces and achieve a form of qualitative equivalence with the United States.58
Meanwhile, China has placed more satellites in space than any country other than the United States.59 Beijing is also working on a range of counter-space and anti-satellite capabilities designed to threaten U.S. nuclear and critical military command and control assets.60 The PLA demonstrated its progress in 2007 when it conducted a successful anti-satellite test, destroying a Chinese satellite operating in the same low-earth orbit as U.S. military-imaging satellites.
The PRC has also adopted non-military stratagems to complicate U.S. military operations.
