Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

to defeat a technologically superior American adversary—depends heavily on “system destruction warfare.”50 This means destroying America’s forward-deployed aircraft while they’re parked on the tarmac and preventing a surge of U.S. forces from other regions by paralyzing their lines of communications and logistics. To prevent China from making this theory work, the United States must scatter its forces across dozens of small operating sites in East Asia and reduce its reliance on non-stealthy weapons systems that require anything more than episodic communication or data flow. The few big bases that remain must be outfitted with hardened shelters, robust missile defenses, and fake targets to absorb Chinese missiles.