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China's military—the People's Liberation Army, or PLA—is one of the largest and most modern fighting forces in the world. It has more warships than the U.S. Navy and might soon have more combat aircraft than the U.S. Air Force. The quality of China’s stealth aircraft, warships, submarines, and aircraft carriers lags behind only that of the U.S. military. And in some areas, such as hypersonic missiles, China has surpassed the United States.
China's large and impressive suite of weapons and equipment is undeniable. But according to a new paper by RAND's Timothy Heath, its ability to translate that materiel power into combat power is far from proven. That's because the PLA “remains fundamentally focused on upholding Chinese Communist Party rule rather than preparing for war,” he writes.
What might China's prioritization of regime survival mean for the United States? For one, this focus reduces, but does not eliminate, the likelihood of a large-scale, high-intensity U.S.-China conflict. So, rather than focusing exclusively on the dangers of a potential great-power war, U.S. defense planning may be better served by rethinking how it handles what Heath calls a “crowded threat picture.” This means considering how the remote conventional military threat from China competes with equally urgent and far more proximate dangers, such as pandemics, transnational terror groups, and intrastate conflict.
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