Denying Chinese Victory

This paper identifies the military, cost, and resource advantages the United States can use to make it difficult for the People’s Republic of China to win a conflict in any of the forms Beijing could choose: invasion of Taiwan, blockade, coercion below the threshold of war, or protracted war. It assesses eight military measures and six economic and technological measures against four criteria: what each costs, when it can be fielded, what it forces the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) or the Chinese state to spend or forgo, and how Beijing can counter it.

The central finding is that the measures with the most favorable cost-exchange ratios are also the fastest to field: naval mines and undersea attack on PLA sealift, mobile ground-based anti-ship missiles in the first island chain, attacks on the PLA’s long-range maritime targeting chain, passive defense of air bases, and Taiwanese stockpiles. On the quantity assumptions stated in Annex C, the U.S.-funded share costs roughly $15 billion to $25 billion over five years, of which the largest component, $9 billion to $10.5 billion for air base hardening, rests on a single reported Hudson Institute estimate; Taiwanese-funded stocks and systems add $5 billion to $10 billion. The measures that would do the most to decide a protracted war — attack-submarine production, shipbuilding, and munitions inventory — cannot mature before the 2030s, and the 2026 Iran war set munitions inventories back by one to four years. On the economic side, controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment and coordinated allied trade remedies impose real cost, but Chinese control of rare earth processing limits how far Washington can press until Western capacity exists.

The paper’s analytical contribution is a transparent mine-requirement and lift-attrition model (Annex D) built on the standard uniform-random minefield formulation, with three cases: a barrier crossed at random, a barrier the PLA lanes through, and lanes reseeded between waves. It shows that a 3,000 to 6,000 mine barrier that the PLA clears lanes through to 90 percent effectiveness removes only 3 to 11 percent of planned lift; that the barrier’s value is to force the PLA into lanes and impose a clearance task; and that the attrition comes from reseeding those lanes, where 175 to 350 GPS-guided mines released between waves remove 19 to 128 hulls, 5 to 24 percent of planned lift. Mine efficiency scales inversely with the width the mines are spread over, which makes standoff precision placement and persistent surveillance of lane locations the binding requirements, not mine numbers. The paper states the PLA counter to each measure, the scenarios in which each contributes little, and the conditions under which its conclusions would change.