China's Nuclear Shadow
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How can China achieve its political aims using military force without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? To discuss today, we have Fiona Cunningham, a professor at Penn. She's the author of the new book, Under the Nuclear Shadow, China's Information-Aged Weapons in International Security. Mike Horowitz, another Penn professor who served in Biden's Department of Defense, joins to co-host. Fiona and Mike, welcome to China Talk.

Thank you so much, Jordan. Great to be here. Always a pleasure. So Fiona, why are PLA studies cool and important? One of the biggest issues of the day is going to be what are the prospects for conflict between the United States and China? How would a conflict like that go if it were actually to occur? And what can both sides do better to improve their chances of not only succeeding in the conflict, but stopping the conflict from taking place in the future?

And of course, like US allies, countries in the region, everybody wants to know how that is going to happen. So that's one thing that makes it super important. The other thing is that the PLA is a really important domestic actor in China. It plays a really important role in the party's history. It is the ultimate backstop that keeps the Chinese Communist Party in power because it is, after all, the armed wing of the Communist Party. It's not a state military. So you can think of this as like if

the Republican Party or the Democratic Party only in the United States had control of the US military. And so that makes it a super important actor. And for that reason, we want to know everything we can about how it works, why it works the way that it does, how it does its business in gaining weapons, developing its war plans, ultimately what it thinks about what the US and other countries are doing.

The TLDR there is, from a U.S. national defense perspective, is this is the most important part of the most important country in the world. Mike says it better than me. Not better, just shorter.

So there are obvious epistemic challenges when you are studying an adversary communist system's military, particularly in the open source. But regardless, you were able to write 300 very footnoted, very detailed pages with over 200 interviews and an enormous amount of kind of documents and reading, which like apparently you can just read.

find about Chinese domestic debate and kind of like doctrinal evolution about how they think about the most sensitive thing of all, which is nuclear war and how to prevent and avoid it. When people say, oh, how can you ever know anything about the PLA? What's your retort to them besides waving your book in their face, Fiona? Like most militaries, the PLA has to talk to itself. They have to teach their students what's going on.

So that's one thing is military has to communicate to itself and to the extent that you could, you know, at least 10 years ago, walk into certain bookstores in China and, you know, these are books with ISBNs that you could pick up and read and understand what the PLA was saying.

researching and what it was teaching its students about almost every aspect of warfare, not just the ones that I researched for the book. So that's one thing, like it's got to talk to itself. So that's one way we can know things about the PLA. The second thing is like paradoxically with nuclear deterrence and actually a suite of other capabilities that China uses for deterrence,

You do need to communicate certain things about these capabilities because in the end, the objective is that you don't use them, but you use the threat of using them to shape your adversary's behavior. And so you have to disclose certain things about what capabilities you have, how you plan to use them, like...

Are your forces actually organized in ways that make those threats credible? Otherwise, you're not going to get the kind of bang or the, I guess, not bang for the buck that you spent to develop them. So that's sort of piece two of just how you can know certain things. But look, I will be the first to acknowledge that there are certain gaps that open source researchers like me can never fill and that other folks might be able to fill, like

what's in China's war plan, like what are the actual specifications of any of the weapon systems that they are using, what are the precise details of certain Chinese or PLA organizations. But then

But then there's also things that are just kind of fundamentally unknowable, like what were in Chinese decision-makers' heads when they made certain choices? What choices will they make if there's a crisis over Taiwan? And then, you know, how are all of the plans that I was sort of trying to understand through these doctrinal debates, how are they actually going to function when you end up in a war? So...

There's sort of things you can know. There are things that you can know in the open source. And then there are things that I just don't think that you can know even if you have the best information under the sun. So...

The PLA does have to talk to itself, but it doesn't necessarily have to talk to Fiona Cunningham. I mean, it certainly doesn't talk to me, except for actually I was at a conference right after I left the administration and saw somebody from China, which is probably the first time I'd seen somebody from China since, you know, in like years and years, even like COVID and then, you know, being in the Defense Department, et cetera. And the person was like,

I was like, "Hi, it's nice to meet you. My name is Michael Horowitz." They're like, "Hi, we know who you are. We read all of your things."

And I was like, well, that's scary. I'm going to back slowly away now. Sort of like the Homer Simpson meme. I mean, I will say that that is, Mike speaks truth because I remember picking up a set of journals in one of the university libraries and I was, you know, flicking through and seeing what the PLA was researching recently and there were tons of articles on lethal autonomous weapons and AI applications of, of,

in the military. And there's like English language footnotes, which is like Michael Horowitz, like Texas National Security Review, like what was it in 2018 or 2019 article? And I was like, yeah, I'm like, I have I have the the the smartest colleagues who are influencing how the PLA is thinking about these super important questions at the cutting edge of war was really cool. They don't excite me. So yeah, but well, let's stay on that then. So like,

I think it's fair to say that Chinese defense analysts, like there is a much larger cottage industry of Chinese defense analysts studying America than there is Western defense analysts studying China. So I think, you know, I'd say a couple of things about this. Like one is just, you know, the U.S. military is...

you know, recognized by not just the PLA, but by pretty much all militaries around the world as being the one to beat.

And if you're trying to learn from the best, then you are going to spend a lot of time developing skills, people, organizations whose mission it is to just study the lessons of what makes the U.S. military the kind of fighting force that it is and all the back end in terms of the ability of the United States to leverage its technological and other advantages to do that.

So there's that kind of incentive piece as well, right, that for China, the US is not just the potential opponent in the most important conflict that they have to face, but it's also the model of how to kind of do this best.

And so for those two, you know, they've got two really, really, really good reasons to study the United States. And, you know, Mike can probably speak to this a little bit more, but I think that the United States probably learns less from China as an example of how it could do things differently and is more interested in studying the PLA to understand China.

how a, you know, one of the two most serious opponents the US has to sort of prepare to fight is going to, is going to fight in the future.

That is certainly correct, but the U.S. does spend enormous time and resources studying everything we can possibly find about China's military. From a learning lessons perspective, I think one of the challenges is, I mean, Fiona, you know this better than either Jordan or I, I mean, China hasn't fought a war since what, like the late 1970s, essentially. And so the

if we're putting ourselves in the thought experiment of what would be lessons that the US would be learning from China,

from China in a military sense, in some ways those lessons are not going to be battlefield lessons simply because there's not like battlefield data, as it were, that you would be learning from. The lessons would become maybe things about like kinds of capabilities they're developing, like how they're thinking about acquiring things, maybe how they were thinking about force structure. If you got doctrinal manuals, something like that, which is different than

I think the way that say like the whole world, like looking at Russia and Ukraine and like very intently studying like everything they can about lessons learned from that battlefield and what it means for the future of war. And so I think the U.S. is trying to glean every single thing it can.

about China's military, but it's almost like lesson learning in a different way. Yeah. I mean, and I'd also just say it has to be said that the language barrier is pretty significant going back in the other way. I think that if you're in China, you are most likely learning English from when you were in what elementary school, Jordan? You probably know better than I do where things are at with the language instruction. But like

English is a very, very, very common second language in China. And so, you know, the language barrier to then go and study the U.S. military, if that's, you know, where you end up in your future career as a, you know, civilian analyst or a, or, you know, in a uniform in China. In the United States or in, you know, my native Australia, like studying Chinese is, is, is

It's not everyone's first choice as a second language because it's difficult to gain the proficiency. And I think there are fewer students who are of college age or high school age who would be learning Chinese than maybe 10 or 15 years ago because...

the incentives are more on the national security side than on the business side. So the language stuff matters. And then the availability of the materials is the other thing. Like the United States just puts a ton of stuff out in the open source about how it thinks about, you know, um, conflict. Like there's types of materials I would love to see in Chinese that you just don't really have in, um, in, in Chinese about the PLA that's available for, um,

for the Chinese to study about the US. Like, I'd love some joint publications, if you know what I mean, that I could cite in my piece. That would give me tremendous confidence that the doctrinal debates and materials that I was reading in the kind of text that I were have fidelity to what the PLA is actually planning, but that's stuff we can't see. All right. Let's start the clock again.

We'll do the 1960s to 1984 very fast. So China, you know, we have a Sino-Soviet split. We have some border fights with the Soviet Union. We almost have a nuclear war. And that is kind of the main focus for a long time.

Defense in depth. We're learning from the Soviets. Kind of cool. But then we fast forward to 1984 and Dung realizes that Gorbachev is for real and is not going to invade China anytime soon. And they can kind of like, I guess,

I guess, reprioritize defense relative to everything else that China has to focus on. So why don't you take us from there into this moment where, you know, folks were entertaining global nuclear disarmament and all the way through, you know, all the way up to 1995, 1996.

Yeah, so I mean, I think this is a really interesting period in thinking about, you know, Chinese defense strategy in China's, in particular, where nuclear weapons sit in China's national defense. So

Starting with, as I think Jordan said, mid-1980s, China starts to downgrade the possibility that they're going to fight a major war against one of the superpowers anytime soon. This is also a point at which the opening and reform period is really gathering steam within China.

And so the government wants to, if they can, put as many resources towards developing the economy rather than spending on national defense that they used to be doing. And at that point, China is also thinking about, like, what kind of conflict are we actually going to fight? Prior to 1988, it had been...

a general war in which you would have one of the superpowers potentially invading China. After 1988, this is a war on China's periphery, a local war to do with one of the many territorial disputes that China had. And I think what's worthwhile noting is that Taiwan was only one of those potential conflicts and there was

a certain degree of uncertainty about whether the US was going to get involved in that conflict at all.

And so I'll just point to, I think, two things that are interesting in thinking about the sort of local wars piece. First is like there's this big debate in China about what, you know, what do you do with nuclear weapons in a local war? Obviously, if another country is potentially invading you, you're facing an all-out general war. The role of nuclear weapons is relatively clear, even if for China they didn't really think about using nuclear weapons first to deter China.

conventional invasion but like what do you use them for in a in a local war um and i think maybe i gotta count back now um some decades ago

Harvard professor Alastair Ian Johnson wrote this really landmark article about this idea of limited nuclear deterrence that was emerging and being debated in the People's Liberation Army in the late 80s through this sort of 1990s period, where China was thinking about how you acquire tactical nuclear weapons and get basically more rungs on the escalation ladder for their nuclear forces to get pressure on a or to put pressure on a conventional conflict.

More sources have become available since he wrote that article, which I think was really important and really influential, to suggest that there was this other strand in debating China's future nuclear strategy of just saying, like, look, we need to wait and see what the Soviets and the US do, because maybe global nuclear disarmament will proceed such that we don't really need to invest in more nuclear weapons.

But what carries the day by about 1992 is that China's leaders decide, you know, we still need nuclear weapons. The US and the Soviets are not going to give them up entirely, but we just don't need a large number of them. The other thing that I think is kind of fun in this period of time is that because of the financial pressures on China's military, it

It turns to exports as a way of trying to keep the defense industrial base going. And one of the things that they do is develop conventional short-range ballistic missiles that are kind of slated for export to the Middle East. But then the U.S. puts a lot of pressure on China not to export these capabilities.

China's then nuclear-only missile forces, they're like, "Ha ha, this is a great opportunity for us to come up with a way to have a role in a local war. We can use short-range ballistic missiles to threaten Taiwan." That's the really contingent origin story of China's conventional missile force, which is a big problem for the US and its allies today.

Yeah, I do. I do love Chen Chesan, who I think most listeners will be familiar with. This is the, um, guy who got like, you know, McCarthy out of living in America and was the father of China's China's missile program. Basically, uh,

you know was one of the skeptics in the 80s you have a great quote saying that he was uh warning uh that rest of reports helic heralding a quote post-nuclear era were deceiving people and they are all false so the man is still uh you know not necessarily buying into the new world order 50 years after i'm uh uh you know seeing the west for what it really is um uh

I think another thing that's worth emphasizing here is the level of layoffs that we saw. I mean, they're shedding almost a million people from the PLA in this time period, right? That's a pretty dramatic thing for an army to try to reorient around.

I mean, the other thing that, I mean, I don't cover this in tremendous detail in the book because others have, I think, looked at this in a lot of detail, but China's conventional military modernization really, I think, starts to kick up after the Gulf War in which China...

you know, comes up with a conventional military or like understands what it's going to need to do to be able to. Right. Like sees what the U.S. does. Yeah. Sees what the U.S. does. And is like, if we're going to fight future conventional wars, like we need to work out how to do some of this stuff too. But this is a decades long project for the PLA and the choice to kind of

conventional military strategy in ways that will allow China to fight these local wars under high technology conditions. That's the kind of the strategic guideline

That's inspired by watching what the U.S. does rather than perceiving a threat from the United States. And I think Taylor Fravel's book, Active Defense, does a great job of kind of laying out that decision. It was a very influential book while I was writing my dissertation. So, Mike, let's do the one on one on why the 1991 Gulf War blew so many people's minds.

I mean, the 1991 Gulf War blows everybody's mind because it's the war, and thinking about this in the context of debates about the future for today, it's the war where the second offset hits the public stage. So all of those developments in stealth technology, precision strike, advanced weapons, things that we now take for granted today. I mean, I remember, I think I was in middle school when that war happened, and seeing

the images of precision in sort of like green screen, you know, like greeny, like kind of like faded, like, like missiles, like hitting specific buildings in Iraq. I mean, it was like, it's like, it seemed like magic, the ability of the US military to, to strike targets. And I think that that was a real shock to the rest of the world. I mean, the Soviets, I mean, I guess at that point, I guess they were becoming the Russians at that point. But the, the

The Soviet slash Russians sort of knew what was up, but had been unable to execute it. But I mean, this was really different than how people thought wars would happen toward the end of the Cold War. And it was a real illustration of just sheer technological superiority on the part of the United States. And that was a shot across the bow to the PLA.

And I think it's also important to mention that, like, the U.S. even surprised itself in how good it was. I mean, I think we might have talked about this before, but...

Maybe this is in your book, Mike, but like the you know, there were all these like very advanced projections of like just how many casualties it would take to to conquer Iraq and the Senate. You know, when Congress was debating whether to authorize war, they were thinking 50,000 American American casualties. And it turned out to be like for something like three or four figures right at the end of the day, which is just like.

Oh, you're talking about 2003. I'm even talking about, I think I'm talking about like 1991. I guess we invaded the second time, not the first time. But, but I think, but, but frankly, like in both cases, the like projections of the danger to US soldiers ended up being like dramatically overestimated.

And the in in in retrospect, I mean, part of that, a lot of that is operational art, frankly, like force employment and the ability of the U.S. to use force and how much the American military excelled. But also critical were these these defense technology breakthroughs and the ability of the American military to integrate them in a way that was a real shock for the rest of the world.

All right. So we have China understanding that they need a new playbook. Also understanding that it is a decades long game in order to be able to, you know, try to, you know, in order to be able to approach getting on the level of what the world superpower is able to do in the early 90s.

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So check it out the next time you need something transcribed. All right, Fiona, take us to the 95-96 Taiwan Straits crisis. What triggers it and what does it do for China's conception of what it needs to be a nationally secure state?

So the Taiwan Straits crisis, it kind of has two peaks. There's one that sort of happens in mid-1995 and one that happens in, kind of flares up again in early 1996. So the first thing that triggers the Taiwan Straits crisis is that the United States issues a visa to Taiwan's first democratically elected president, Li Denghui, who

who China is concerned is agitating towards independence and they view the issuance of this visa as the US creeping towards more support for Taiwanese independence. And then the second sort of peak of the crisis comes in March of 1996 when President Li is seeking a return to office in an election and China seeks to influence the outcome of that election. And on both occasions,

China engages in military exercises across and around Taiwan that include launching some of these short range ballistic missiles that it has sort of fortuitously acquired some years earlier. Fortuitously acquired? That's like is that like is it like a euphemism for like China's beginning a buildup after the Cold War?

No, well, it's fortuitously acquired because they wouldn't have acquired that set of capabilities if, first of all, China's defense industry hadn't been told they needed to make money and then the U.S. blocked the export of these capabilities. That's actually super interesting. So essentially the capabilities that China uses in that crisis to threaten Taiwan are developed because of export incentives, right?

that are then, and then those exports are blocked. And so then they have the weapons to threaten Taiwan. Yeah. So there's a really interesting kind of sequence of events in the late 1980s where the rocket force, which then only operates nuclear weapons, they get like called into meetings with China's leaders who say like, what are you going to do in a local war? And they're like, um,

actually, we've got a great idea. We're going to be armed with conventional missiles. And so they put forward this proposal in the late 80s, and largely for, it appears, organizational purposes, right? That they're looking for a way to survive in this changed environment where most of the conflicts China was going to face are not ones in which nuclear weapons are going to have much of a role. So you see these classic

organizational incentives for militaries to seek a new role when the threat environment changes. So yeah, they're kind of fortuitous. That's why I say fortuitously, hopefully that persuades. But what happens between the set of exercises in 1995 that follow the Cornell visit and those in 1996 that are designed to influence the outcome of Taiwan's presidential election

is that China starts its five-year plan kind of defense component where they're working out what they need to sort of build in terms of defense equipment in the upcoming years and conventional missiles and what they call shashoujian or assassin's mace weapons, largely referring to missile type weapons.

get a prominent role in that defense plan. And, you know, you see a series of meetings that China's leaders hold in kind of late 1995 onwards after that set of exercises. And so, you know, from that, I think we can surmise that China's leaders start to see what the rocket force was seeing back in the early 1990s, which is that this is potentially a really powerful capability for intimidating China's adversaries

And dealing with this new reality China has that if there's another Taiwan Strait crisis, which, you know, there is in 96,

they are not going to have the, you know, Gulf War equivalent conventional military to address the threat or the pressure posed by the United States. And that's going to make it much more difficult for China to, you know, use force if it feels like its red lines in Taiwan are crossed. And so these missiles provide it with coercive leverage, a way of, you know,

threatening to escalate a conflict against a very powerful nuclear and conventional adversary when China really doesn't have any better options. And interestingly enough, too, Chinese leaders decide that threatening nuclear first use, which is the other really obvious option, is a no-go for them.

Yeah. So let's stay on that. What is the no first use policy? Where does it come from and how does it kind of constrain our Chinese doctrinal thinking? Well, I will make my best case for why I actually do think it operates as a constraint on the PRC even today following its, how many years are we in now? Five or six years into a pretty significant nuclear buildup.

Okay, where does it come from? The no first use policy was in a statement that accompanied China's first nuclear weapons test in 1964, where it pledged that China will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, it will only use nuclear weapons if it is first attacked with nuclear weapons by another country.

And this policy kind of converts Mao's views about nuclear weapons into something that looks like a policy that then becomes the strategy that's given to the second artillery, China's missile forces, when they, you know, many actually almost a decade later start to formulate their, you know, how China's actually going to implement or develop a nuclear

strategy for using nuclear weapons. And so you see like before 1964, a lot of statements from not just Mao, but other Chinese leaders saying like, we need conventional weapons for conventional conflicts and nuclear weapons to deter nuclear weapons use. And so, you know, you can see a number of reasons why back in the Cold War, China went by

acquiring or developing this policy. It differentiated China from the nuclear superpowers, so both made perhaps its nuclear weapons less of a challenge to that of the Soviet Union and the United States. But it's also related to China's geography. They don't really need to engage in nuclear first use if there's a conventional invasion because it's a huge country. They're just going to exhaust any adversary that tries to do so.

So China can kind of survive a conventional conflict, but a nuclear conflict is kind of a different story. So that's the kind of where does it come from? It is because China's kind of

China's nuclear policy is not just a military thing. I think that's also worth saying, like it's a civilian policy that's given to the military by the top leaders. And so military leaders can't change China's no first use policy. And that because it's a Mao and Deng sort of holdover, if you like, it becomes an orthodoxy that's really hard for even civilian leaders to change within China. And if you look at the doctrinal materials that we have available and

And I'll caveat this by saying, unfortunately, we don't have any that are really probative for the last two decades or so. It's pretty clear that the no first use policy constrains how China plans to use its nuclear weapons, although it's been debated a number of times whether or not you need to change it, you need to place conditions on it. And I think even now there are real questions from the inside within China whether other countries see it as credible.

Yeah. So so all so all that can be true. And I guess in some ways like that, that's like where you ended in some ways is the question is like the certainly seems plausible. I mean, not more than more than plausible. Like you have persuaded me that that China's military can believe it is constrained by no first use policy and policy and civilians have to make those changes.

In a crisis, it would seem like given, depending on the stakes, depending on the extent to which, say, Xi thought regime survival was at risk, there could be incentives for China to strike first with nuclear weapons. I think the question would be, to what extent do you think the no first use policy would constrain China's military in the kind of conflict where those civilians who can make the policy changes are protected?

paying attention and thinking about it.

So I think a couple of things are worth noting. First is like if you plan to use your capabilities in accordance with a policy like no first use, your ability as a rocket force to develop operations that involve a set of options for first use is more constrained. That's not to say you can't do it, but it just means that that... It's not as simple as just like, oh, launch the missile. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It would be like launch the missile and it'd be like, well, this isn't what we practiced or something along those lines. But it's not to say that you couldn't do it, but that's sort of one piece of it. And I think in the book, I detail this really intense debate over adding conditions to China's no first use policy in the early 2000s. But the reason...

I think that set of debates is really interesting is because you see writing in leaked Chinese missile force kind of teaching materials or manuals saying that we can talk about lowering the nuclear threshold. We can talk about nuclear deterrence, which is effectively like signaling nuclear signaling operations.

What they do not do, though, is then lay out a nuclear first use campaign that's going to follow that set of signals if an adversary doesn't back down yet. You do see that, though, in... Oh, that's interesting. Okay. You do see that proposal for an occasional first use campaign in... This is, you know, one of the fun materials I found. So there's this dissertation written by a missile force, you know, now is, I think, a deputy base commander.

who basically says, look, we can talk about the signaling and all these pieces, but what would the first use campaign actually look like?

And one of the options that he talks about is detonating a nuclear weapon in space if the conflict over Taiwan isn't going all that well. And interestingly enough, China then, in the years to follow, develops non-nuclear anti-satellite weapons. But there's not the description of what the warning shot or the nuclear first use piece that's going to follow those weapons.

in those kind of more, I'd say more

more like officially produced materials, things that come out of the Second Artillery. We don't have this kind of visibility on what the debates are going on in China right now, though I think other scholars have found evidence of the rocket force now exercising for launch on warning. And I certainly noticed in my now 10 years of doing interviews in China about nuclear strategy issues,

Like, this happened actually really, really back in like 2014 through 2016. This change in tune of like, oh, you know, launch on warning is a violation of a no first use policy. That was an attitude some people held. What is launch on warning, Fiona? So in its simplest form, launch on warning is that you receive warning that your adversary has launched a nuclear weapon that is heading towards you.

And rather than waiting until that nuclear weapon detonates on, you know, your territory, target, whatever it happens to be, you choose to launch your nuclear weapons in the period between your adversary launching a nuclear weapon and that nuclear weapon detonating on your territory.

So can we talk about this a little bit in terms of China's current nuclear modernization? Since in some ways what you've laid out is a paradox in a way because the launch on warning is generally something you would think about doing if you're worried that your nuclear forces are going to be decapitated. Meaning that one side, somebody launches nuclear weapons at you, those land on your territory, they destroy your nuclear arsenal and ability to retaliate.

Whereas you wait to absorb the strike if you feel have more secure second strike capabilities, you can strike back. If China's been rapidly modernizing its nuclear arsenal, in some ways that should make them arguably more secure rather than less secure about that. So why then if you were the PLA, would you be thinking more about launch on warning now as your nuclear capabilities are becoming more sophisticated?

So I think it has to do with what capabilities deliver your secure second strike.

If the capabilities that deliver your secure second strike are going to be road mobile land-based missiles or submarine-based ballistic missiles, think of these as nuclear missiles that are mounted on the back of trucks. Those trucks are driving around in the hinterland of this very large country called China. They

They may hide in caves at certain points in any given conflict, but they're really relying upon mobility and concealment to avoid an adversary, you know, using its satellites effectively to like find them and destroy them while they're driving around. Similar sort of set of principles with submarines, but, you know, obviously different techniques for finding them.

If you instead your pathway to survivability is through having a large number of systems that are easier for your adversary to find, then

then you're looking at a very different kind of mindset, if you like, about how you get a secure second strike. So if the plan is I have a very large number of fixed silo-based missiles, my adversary can see them and knows where all of them are,

But I'm relying on the fact that it can't destroy all of those weapons because of all of those silos because there's so many of them. But the silos themselves are not going to do much for my second strike capability unless I plan to launch them before my adversary's nuclear weapons would land on top of them. So the launch on warning piece, I think, is a little bit about what capabilities make up your secure second strike. But it's also about the immediacy of deterrence.

So you can think a little bit of, like, how effectively do I deter my adversary if I, like, wait weeks until...

I pull my, you know, my road mobile missiles out of a cave and retaliate against Washington, D.C. So you go more on the hair trigger to increase your probability, increase the credibility of the threat from like a shelling kind of perspective and increase the probability of deterrent success. And look, the other thing that's that surprised me when I've done a little bit more interview work on China's nuclear modernization,

post book publication is that, uh, Chinese experts will actually say like, look, um, the U S has improved its capabilities to find those road mobile missiles now. And if you look at some of the, uh, the, um, the types of sensors, the United States is now looking to place in space. Chinese, um, strategists are probably, um,

reasonably worried about the fact that the U.S. is going to do a better job of finding capabilities they used to think were really, really secure and really survivable. So a few things to just keep in mind. So America, you know, we had like 20,000 nukes towards the end of the Cold War. And, you know, there have been some

a lot of them have been decommissioned, but we're still in like the high four figures. China was at like double digits and we're now approaching like four or five, 600. So this is a challenge, right? When you don't have, you know, nuclear submarines and bombers and ICBMs to like, I don't know, be very sure that you can completely destroy a country. I also think that just the idea of like playing three card Monty with like the fate of

of like tens of millions of people by like driving missile trucks around like rural China is just like, I don't know. It's like hysterical and horrifying. Look, road mobile weapons are really hard to find. I mean, that's why like everybody that has had to face down the United States like since the beginning of the Cold War has, you know, whether conventionally, whether like Iraq, you know, like as a shout out to 20 minutes ago, like in discussion of the Gulf War, like, or Iraq,

the Soviets or China or probably like North Korea, if it ever came to it, is like thought about mobility as a solution to the overwhelming American firepower. You couldn't do it in the U.S. hinterland, but China is a different story. Yeah, the regulatory environment in the U.S. would not. It'd be so dead. That's like not.

Like not that would not be a thing for us. I mean, like maybe maybe this is like our trucking. You know, once a Waymo comes for all the truckers, the only humans on the road will just be the people like, I don't know, randomizing their drives around Nebraska. All right, Fiona. So let's let's close the loop on Chinese nuclear military modernization.

So the last thing I'll just say is that the book I wrote is about how you put pressure on an adversary in conventional wars by threatening to escalate.

I think there's a lot of discussion about the fact that China's nuclear modernization means it is seeking that option with its nuclear forces, especially because it now has more of the theater range precision options that are like, you know, getting towards the better types of capabilities you would need if you wanted to make these credible threats of nuclear first use. But where I come down in the book is that

China has not necessarily made a decision that its nuclear modernization is now going to replace all of the non-nuclear capabilities as its main source of coercive leverage against conventional conflicts. I see the drivers of China's nuclear modernization as being more about

how you gain a more robust second strike against the United States. But also there's kind of a political leverage piece to it that you just, you want more capability

because you think that it's going to make the United States behave more prudently, even if you're not making very exact calculations about how a nuclear exchange is going to go or making very precise changes to your force posture to enable these really credible threats of nuclear first use. And my interviews in China more recently are suggesting this, that there's a kind of psychological political leverage rate

rationale to the modernization that doesn't really translate to changes to posture to make first use more possible or really trying to help China do better in a nuclear exchange. There's kind of different schools within China that point to different reasons for the modernization, but first use is not clearly one of them.

Just the idea that it's worth spending the money to make sure that there is no one in the Pentagon who thinks that they could do, you know, a first strike on China and America get away unscathed seems to me, I don't know if I was sitting here, you know, if I was like a captain in the rocket force or something to be like a worthy, a worthy investment. But yeah, definitely clear that like how far that goes and what that means from, you know,

How quick will we be on the trigger finger perspective is one of these unknown unknowns that we talked about in the beginning. And maybe this is a transition in some ways to talking a bit about more conventional capabilities. But one of the things that's really remarkable about what China's done over the last decade in particular is China's rapidly modernized in every military area. It's not...

I mean, there was a point where he was like, oh, China's choosing this, choosing that, or whatever. And Fiona's book, I think, brilliantly discusses this. And when they were trying to make some of those choices in particular, a little earlier on in the context of conventional missiles. But now, the story of the last decade is really everything, everywhere, all at once from a Chinese military modernization perspective. Yeah.

I love the, maybe, maybe let's, we'll start with cyber. Cause I love the way it opens in the early nineties where they're like, Oh, like we don't have computers. So, um, I guess we are resilient to cyber attacks. Um, and then, you know, we have informatization of warfare and, uh, this whole kind of like doctrinal development about the use of offensive, uh, cyber capabilities, um, to threaten things when threatening, um,

nuclear warfare isn't necessarily credible. So, yeah, let's do a brief history of cyber weapons in China, Fiona. How is the PLA thinking about its utility evolved over time?

So the big turning point with offensive cyber capabilities that China has thought about using for coercion, which is like you can think penetrate adversaries' critical infrastructure and try to create power outages or problems with transportation or that sort of set of targets or using offensive cyber operations to try and disable, disrupt your adversaries' use of military equipment.

command systems, especially at kind of higher levels. So that's the sort of set of capabilities that I focus on in the book. And the big decision to sort of make a focus of

preparing for those operations to put pressure on a conventional conflict for China comes in the wake of the 1999 US accidental bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade that is treated as anything but accidental from the perspective of China's top leaders. There's this great quote from Jiang Zemin where he's like, you know, I'm

I'm really indignant. This is not a trivial event. This is a big deal. And the Chinese people cannot be bullied. This is the irony, right? Because we have 1991 and everyone's like, oh my God, these Americans are God. They can like shoot out a window from 3000 miles away. And then like, oops, we just like bombed the Chinese embassy. Is there, where are we on the conspiracy theories on this? Fiona has like, are you convinced that

The way that I would look at this is that, you know, even the absolute best organizations can make mistakes. And that includes the U.S. military. And so I think from China's perspective, it's like, look, you know, this is a super advanced military and, you know, we just we don't believe that they could have made a mistake. But then the other part of it is also once the top leader decides it's a mistake, it's a mistake. Right.

Even if evidence emerges to the contrary afterwards, it's hard to sort of undo those narratives. So there's a set of meetings that then take place after the Belgrade embassy bombing where Jiang Zemin has basically said to China's top military leaders, you've got to come up with ways to improve our military capabilities, to fill this leverage deficit, to give us

You know, something that we can do in the short term that's going to allow us to make a future conflict across the Taiwan Straits in particular too dangerous and too risky for the U.S. to get involved in. And evidently, it turns out our plan to build out a massive conventional missile force just isn't going to be enough. So come up with more stuff to do.

Offensive cyber operations emerges as one of the promising capabilities, in part because China's military is studying what happened in that Kosovo air war. They're looking at what some of the Serbian militias were doing to deface NATO web pages, like not really sophisticated cyber stuff. But they see this as a way in which you can quickly and cheaply

get a lot of bang for your buck in creating problems for a more advanced military, a more advanced society. And it's worth noting that China's awareness of cyber operations to create those kinds of effects dates right back to the Gulf War, where they start looking at what they call computer virus weapons and

and noticed that the United States is sort of thinking about, aware of these capabilities in the Gulf War. And so they kind of know that this option is out there, but they don't really activate it until after that Belgrade embassy bombing.

Then they kind of let a thousand flowers bloom and everyone who's worth their salt in the PLA kind of gets into the cyber game and you end up with some capability being developed on the offensive and the espionage side, but it's not super coordinated. It's pretty disorganized. And so...

This becomes a problem for China's leaders starting in around 2010 when they're like, wait a second, we're seeing all these other countries using cyber operations for military effects that kind of demonstrate the promise that we thought that they had. But also like we're also starting to get very dependent on information networks now.

in the military, in society, and economically. And so they start seeing all of these things happening in the cyber domain and say to the military, we now live in a glass house and you have to do something to correct your plans, your organization for using cyber operations offensively to take account of the fact that we'll be throwing stones from a glass house. All right, Fiona, so what happens then?

So what happens then is a process of changing China's cyber doctrine begins. In about 2012, the PLA starts holding a bunch of meetings where they evaluate where they've come from and where they might want to go. And there's all kinds of fun quotes that come from that meeting, like somebody saying, oh, we've made a lot of progress and capabilities, but everyone is fighting their own war. So we're not coordinated or anything.

You know, if we aren't careful with how we plan and execute these operations, then we're going to harm the national interest. But we still want to use them for these leverage purposes. And so over the process of about two years, China's PLA comes up with ways to change their cyber doctrine. And in around 2014, we see Xi Jinping in particular

put pressure on the PLA to change its organization. And this is around the time that the U.S. indicts a number of PLA officers for industrial espionage.

The following year, we see a white paper come out in China where they acknowledge for the first time that they have cyber defense capabilities. They still won't acknowledge publicly that they have offensive capabilities. And then at the end of 2015, China creates this new organization called the Strategic Support Force, and it consolidates all of these disparate pieces of the PLA's cyber enterprise into the one organization.

That hasn't gone so well. Hard to know. Maybe it's gone well, maybe it hasn't. But China disbanded that strategic support force just as I was completing the manuscript. We have sort of towards the end of this first bucket of narratives, we have the Obama administration trying to talk to Xi and establish these norms about what things are and aren't appropriate to Xi.

How does that kind of international layer interact with the things that the Chinese government is directing its ambiguously organized cyber force to to spend its time on?

So I think one of the things that's super interesting about China's cyber capabilities is for most of these capabilities that can have these, you know, direct strategic effects on adversary decision makers, China's top leaders like never delegate authority to lower level commanders in the PLA to decide how they're used. The only place where you see at least de facto some of that happen is in the cyber arena before

before the change that I just outlined in 2014-15. And so the things that the Obama administration was complaining about, which is basically members of the PLA hacking US corporations to get their kind of proprietary information and use that for commercial benefits,

looked a lot like it was happening without the authorization of China's top leaders or certainly their oversight. And so that international pressure, I think, helps China to

you know, reinforces the trend towards consolidating their cyber forces and subjecting them to much tighter oversight and command and control from the top. But I think in some ways the Obama administration was pushing on an open door and what you actually saw is some of that industrial espionage where it helped China's overall goals towards, you know, certain types of national priorities

those organizations or those sectors, you still see the industrial espionage. It's just happening from non-PLA actors in the future, and the PLA gets kind of focused on the military mission. So I'd say the administration was pushing on an open door in seeing some of that activity drop. And actually, if you line up the timelines, some of the major declines in PLA cyber activity that

organizations like FireEye, this private security, cybersecurity company, were tracking. They happen at times like when the Central Military Commission was meeting and deciding on a major military reform package. So it's hard to disentangle whether it's like, you know, the U.S. threat of sanctions over cyber espionage or these bigger trends in reorganization, the PLA were doing the work. But it certainly suggests that, you know, this is not the U.S.,

alone that led to China changing its behavior. We've seen a lot of high-profile acts by the Chinese government over the past...

decade plus now. But the thing that we haven't seen is something like Stuxnet or, you know, a Russian cyber attack on the Ukraine power grid or 2024 or the Viasat in 2022, where, you know, you're not just getting into critical, you know, infrastructure. You're actually really trying to turn the lights on and off. Fiona, is that just downstream of the fact that like China hasn't

been in a big war? Or, you know, there hasn't been something as pressing as, you know, Iranian nuclear capabilities? Or is there a sort of like broader hesitance to really break stuff as opposed to just steal stuff and spy on stuff and, you know, lay the groundwork for World War III? I think there's certainly willingness within the PLA to lay the groundwork to break stuff. And that's where, you

In, I think, late 2023, if memory serves me correctly, you started to see all of these reports come out about the vault typhoon intrusions where PLA actors were, or I should say Chinese actors. There's sort of not a lot of public attribution to PLA units specifically, but it's totally in line with the doctrine that you would penetrate an adversary's critical infrastructure

as a way of putting pressure on them in peacetime, in a crisis or in a conflict that shapes their behavior and worrying that they're going to see these systems disrupted. So what China hasn't done, though, is demonstrate that if it wanted to hit send on some of those capabilities, it would actually work to disrupt an adversary's critical infrastructure. And I wish...

I had, you know, the interview where someone was like, this is exactly why we haven't done that. But these are really, really, really hard questions to ask people about within China. They may not necessarily know the answers to them, but it is, you know, I think even in the US context, one of the big puzzles as to why China hasn't engaged in a major...

public demonstration that it can break things in a way that should make you worry in a future conflict. I don't know if you have thoughts on this one as well, Mike, but to me, the reasons for that are, you know, they're also in line with the fact that China wants to control the use of these capabilities very, very carefully to avoid the blowback

But again, you know, demonstrating your capabilities is something countries usually want to do, especially with something as uncertain as offensive cyber operations. So the I mean, first, like shout out to the names that people that like we give to things since in the official U.S. government release on Volt Typhoon, it also called that group Vanguard Panda, Bronze Silhouette and Insidious Taurus.

which I think is unbelievable. Are these American code names or do like the groups call themselves like golden? I don't know. It's like AKA Vanguard Panda, Brock Silhouette. There's like a couple other names that are like less funny, like, like dev zero dev dash zero three nine one. But, uh, and, and then, and then insidious Taurus. Um, but the, so I guess it's less, it's less puzzling to me why China hasn't,

like try to break things if since I think I think about what China is trying to do in this context as building the capacity to break things and in some ways the demonstration that they are in US and other countries networks like is the signal of capabilities since like the actual like using cyber tools to break things is

is pretty rare actually. Stuxnet in some ways is the oversighted one-off in a way, and relied on a lot of very specific kinds of things, but that the PLA demonstrated that, or sorry, that China demonstrated that it was deep in energy infrastructure and water infrastructure at the state level across the United States

certainly illustrates the capacity to destroy, especially because the way that they had gained access through routers and VPNs and a bunch of really common electronic devices that lots of critical infrastructure facilities have and lots of, frankly, Americans have. And

And so, I mean, this to me points to one of the issues surrounding cyber capabilities in general and gets back to something we talked about last time I was on Jordan in the context of, you know, like offensive cyber strikes and in a world of advancing AI. And that I think that there's sometimes a tendency to think about offensive cyber as this like magic thing you can press go on when in reality, because the accesses are so limited,

And once you use them, they can go away. The, I think, incentive structure, even for very competent offensive actors like China, is often to hold back on the breaking things because the more you do that, the more it becomes all hands on deck to completely knock you out. And frankly, in some ways, I have no doubt that...

even in the aftermath of the Volt typhoon revelation that China has other access that we don't know about, sort of, that we don't know about, frankly. And that's from like a parochial American perspective, that's incredibly dangerous. And, you know, the question then would become in what sort of circumstance China would try to turn that on and like what the impact would be. And frankly, both of those seem like a

There's a fair uncertainty parameter surrounding both of those things. But that uncertainty is one of the reasons why it makes the threat to use them credible, right? It may be a total fizzle and a flop, but it might also be really bad. I agree completely. I think what's interesting to me is that a lot of what China had written and now that behavior with Vault Typhoon is...

It sort of runs contrary to a lot of the way that U.S. discussions about the utility or U.S. academic discussions, I should say, about the utility of cyber operations have gone in the last, I'd say, five to eight years.

And so it does raise these questions of if the US, and I think you see this in US Cyber Command as well, sort of saying, well, look, the real strategic value of cyber operations lies in the death by a thousand cuts under the threshold of armed conflict. It's not this cyber Pearl Harbor-ish stuff that the PLA looks like it's preparing for. Do you actually get the leverage that China thinks it will get from China?

preparing for something the U.S. has said it doesn't really see as being that big of a problem.

I don't know how you how you what you think. It depends on what they can actually it depends on what they can actually do. I mean, like part of the I mean, think about some of the things that we know that or allegedly know that Russia has done and and the way that they've sort of like disrupted the lives of Americans. Part of this depends on what the goals are. There's like the death by a thousand cuts of cyber of cyber as it's an enabler to other kinds of operations.

Side note, this also maybe says something about some of the academic literature on cyber, but we don't need to talk about that. There's also the question, so there's cyber as enabler for other kinds of operations. There's in some ways like cyber as, I mean, distraction is the wrong word, but disruption and illustration of possibility for cost of position in some ways, like precisely because there is

a bit because there's uncertainty and like it might fizzle, but it might be really important. If you could do, I think the theory would be if you could do like a little bit of disruption to the lives of average Americans in the context of maybe a Taiwan crisis, then it would highlight, it sort of like brings the costs home.

In a slightly different way. And then the question becomes like, well, like how much disruption and like how much, you know, like what? And like the the I think the big issue is the terminal impact of that. If what you're trying to do at the end of the day is influence American behavior as much in some ways more so than, say, like the U.S. capacity to fight in the Indo-Pacific, the the and you're trying to influence public attitudes and public perceptions. There's just a.

No one really knows how that would go, including us and including them. Yeah. And I think that's like, that's a key thing with a lot of this. And I do like your, your sort of framework of like brinksmanship, you know, what are we doing with our force Posh Bar? Are we doing brinksmanship? Are we doing calibrated escalation or are we, you know, actually preparing to fight a war? And the problem with this is like, the more forward you are with this stuff, the more likely you are,

to get America to take it seriously. So, you know, there have been a number of these capabilities where like, okay, China starts taking cyber seriously. You see Volt Typhoon, that's going to, that,

that's going to lead to more kind of awareness investments and more, you know, local water plant, you know, owners like updating their systems or what have you. And the same thing with the Taiwan context where like, okay, you know, you really think that like turning off the lights in Texas is going to, is going to like turn out

better for Beijing? I mean, this is almost like the Japan 1941 logic where like, oh yeah, they'll really want to make peace with us after we bomb Pearl Harbor. Like it, it could go both ways. Um, and you know, depending on how, how, how focused you are and, and what time lives you are and how, like, I don't know, like, uh, you know, feminized you think America is or whatever to use, um, she's term, not mine. Um, uh, or to use Putin's term, not mine. Um, uh,

It impacts the way you're going to think about what you show and what you don't do on the world stage, which is tricky. I mean, just to be clear, countries have made that mistake about the United States like forever. You know, think about like like the Japan calculation, like, oh, we'll hit the US and then and then they'll be like, all right, cool. We'll just go home. You know, like Saddam sort of said, you know, said the same thing. I think bin Laden at some point sort of like said the same thing. And people like forget that we're nuts.

And and if you like really come after the U.S. like hard, like we will come at you and we will not stop. And I think like arguably like those that understand that we're maybe like a little bit a little bit crazy. The that that there's an argument that's good for deterrence in some ways, like classically. But but no, I think I'm curious what Fiona thinks, the extent to which the.

the how how maybe either China in general sort of or the PLA sort of like thinks about us in that context, because like I see this I saw this conversation a lot in the in sort of defense conversations over the last couple of years, you know, like is it essentially is the is China's assumption if they hit the U.S., the U.S. is coming all in.

Or is the assumption like, oh, we think we could cause enough pain that the U.S. is like, all right, cool, we'll go home. I think there are probably three things that matter. The timing, the stakes and the nukes. On the timing piece, like maybe if you hit the U.S. really hard in the midst of a conflict, then things go very badly for you because the United States then is really all in.

But if that threat is lingering before a crisis, during a crisis, maybe that does lead to the kind of care and prudence in one's behavior. And China's strategic deterrence approach across all of these weapons is not just designed, like it's a wartime plan, but it's designed to influence U.S. behavior all the way back in peacetime, too.

I think the second thing from China's perspective is that I do think they see a stakes imbalance. It's kind of not explicit in a lot of the literature that I consumed and read, but Taiwan is an immediate threat.

tangible interest that is deeply bound up in the Communist Party's sense of its own mission and place as China's leader. It can live, I think, with the situation that currently exists of kind of de facto separation and has for a number of years. But for the United States, this is a

an island to which it does not have a formal treaty alliance anymore. And it's very far away from the US homeland and it's not essential to the United States retaining its sense of its right to rule the continental United States and any outlying islands. So there's that kind of imbalance of like, look, just the outcome of this conflict is going to matter more to us

And, you know, I think the U.S. can have just as strong interests, but they're sort of more diffuse and indirect, while for China it's very specific and it's very direct that this is about, you know, Taiwan and about our unfinished mission from the Chinese Civil War, as opposed to like this is about the U.S.'s position in the world and its alliance structure. Then the final thing I think that China, and perhaps they mirror image here,

is this idea that, you know, you don't want to fight a nuclear war and no one really wants to fight a nuclear war. And so what a lot of its information age weapons, these non-nuclear weapons with strategic effects are designed to do is to push the U.S. up to the threshold of nuclear weapons use and then call its bluff that it doesn't want to use them.

And I really, to me, that's an open question as to whether the U.S.'s little bit crazy that, Mike, you were talking about goes all the way to nuclear weapons use. To me, that's the $64,000 or maybe, you know, that's the million dollar question. And I think another sort of

argument on that side of the ledger is like, we've now seen two presidents in succession take Putin's nuclear use threats seriously, where arguably like this is a much less credible threat. Um, and not, not as directly, you know, in the, uh, in the crosshairs of something that like the U S has a big strategic interest in, and you've still, you know, clearly that impacted Biden's calculation. And just a few weeks ago with, with Trump, uh, I mean,

for his whole campaign. And then in the meeting with Zelensky, he's like, you're flirting with World War III. You're flirting with World War III, right? So, um...

Yeah, I mean, it's a it's it's one thing to do like Jacksonian insanity when you're fighting wars overseas. It's another when, you know, there's there's something in the back of your head that really thinks that Los Angeles could no longer exist. I think there I think there's something interesting there, probably not for this, this this conversation in particular about about about actually President Trump and how he thinks about nuclear war and like risk.

Since if you if you if you look at his public comments in some ways, they suggest that he might even think about nuclear risk in a little bit. He almost more more worried than some in some ways. Other presidents, even other presidents that have worried about nuclear war. I mean, I'm sure every president since the observant is worried about nuclear war. But Trump seems very focused in some ways on the risk of nuclear escalation.

Well, it'll be interesting, like, if we ever get a generational change of a president who didn't, yeah, you know, grow up living through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and that wasn't sort of front and center of their mind. But, um...

Back to the PLA, perhaps. Fiona, let's do a little bit on counter space. This is one where we've had a lot of like more interesting and explicit demonstrations of capabilities over the past few years from the Chinese perspective. Yeah. So I have to give away a little personal secret on this, which is that I think one of maybe one of the reasons why I was interested in writing this book is because of

This any satellite weapons test that China did back in 2007, it destroyed an aging weather satellite with a conventional missile. I was in college at the time and I remember like seeing the Sydney Morning Herald having this on the front page and I was like, wow, this is

"What is this?" And so I can answer that question now of actually what this is. Awesome. But the book opens with the ASAT weapons test in 2007, perhaps for that kind of unwritten reason. China, again, pursues the counter space weapons capability for this kind of coercive mission to put pressure on a conventional conflict that might erupt between the US and China over Taiwan.

after the Belgrade embassy bombing. And so this is one of the trickier decisions to pinpoint in the book. And, you know, looking at Jiang Zemin's speeches, I place that that decision was probably made sometime between late 2000 and late 2002. But China recognizes that any satellite weapons can be used to disrupt an adversary's use of space capabilities, disrupt its

desire to achieve space control, which is, I think, a longtime objective of the U.S. military. And then it goes about pursuing a whole range of counter space capabilities, including lasers that can dazzle the optical sensors on U.S. satellites. Actually, it goes about dazzling a national reconnaissance office, U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

satellite pretty quickly thereafter around 2005 and then tests this missile which destroys a satellite and creates a lot of debris and generates a lot of, I think, public opprobrium against China. But they're looking to kind of develop a whole suite of weapons that can attack US satellites in orbit, that can disrupt the transmission of data between those satellites and Earth.

that ranges, you know, everything from these non-kinetic reversible effects like lasers and electronic warfare kind of jamming to these irreversible effects like destroying the satellite completely. And then, you know, more recently we've seen China go about developing co-orbital capabilities. What that means is just like other satellites in orbit that can do maneuvers that will, you know,

grab onto another satellite and tow it to another place or can collide with it or, you know, sidle up really closely to another satellite and engage in jamming or dazzling or something like that from that close proximity.

China makes this decision to build out this suite of capabilities. What's curious is that they don't actually make that decision to pursue counter space capabilities earlier. I think there's this conception that China worked out that attacking US satellites would be great as a tool of coercive leverage following the Gulf War. When I went and looked for the sources,

China doesn't actually start contemplating the idea of counter space attacks until the late 1990s, so after that '95-'96 Taiwan Straits crisis. Before that, in the context of the Gulf War, China is more recognizing that if it wants to fight like the United States, it's going to need its own military satellites to guide weapons to their targets, to make sure whatever it wants to destroy is being destroyed.

But that desire to build its own military support capabilities in space constrains how China then thinks about using counter space weapons because it has always emphasized that counter space hostilities or space hostilities should be limited and

doesn't sort of talk about an all-out space conflict or all-out use of force in space the way that it seems to contemplate using, for example, its conventional missiles. So that's kind of the doctrinal capability story that I think has emerged. Yeah, I mean, I love the whole...

you show a capability and then America freaks out about it and like actually develops a response for it. I mean, this is, this is the tricky thing with all of these sort of like sub-nuclear stuff is the more you show you can do, the more your adversary adapts to it. Right. And sort of by the end of this, uh, you know, by the end of the cyber chapter and by the end of the counter space chapter, you know, you've got quotes from these, uh, uh,

you know, Chinese analysts being like, oh, maybe this didn't quite do exactly what we wanted to. Like, America's got 10 times more stuff than we expected they would have 10 years ago. Thoughts on that dynamic, Fiona? I think in many ways it's

It matters, but maybe it doesn't matter as much as we might think, because in the end, some of these capabilities were designed to give China quick, credible leverage back when it was a lot weaker than it is right now. And so if those capabilities turn into a wasting asset over the course of 20, 30 years, they have still perhaps bought China away

something, some sort of way of dealing with the dilemma of deterring and coercing the United States when its conventional capabilities just really were not much of a threat. Now, I don't think that China's conventional capabilities threaten decisive victory against the United States and the Indo-Pacific, but there are

huge amount better than they were 20, 30 years ago. This is a bad day for the US military if it fights China today, or a much worse day, I should say, than it was 20 years ago. But China pursuing these capabilities has...

has pushed the US to develop countermeasures. And that's in some ways a sign that China's made the right bets, right? That these capabilities did deliver on their promise because they made the US change the way that it thought about fighting or thought about organizing its capabilities in these other domains. The cyber changes we talked about earlier is one piece, but like

The US pulls out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in part because of China's conventional missile force growth. And now there's this whole question for China of like, if the US starts developing intermediate range conventional missiles in the region, how does that affect China's security? And it's the same sort of piece in space that China's counter space capabilities have pushed the United States

to rethink how it architects its own satellite capabilities that the US used to have big, juicy targets, as people will often describe.

of sensing capabilities or signals intelligence satellites that can really assist the United States to fight conventional conflicts and demonstrate those kind of precision strike capabilities Mike was talking about. Now the United States has smaller, less juicy satellites that complement the big juicy targets. But, okay, not everywhere, obviously, right? Like some capabilities you can't proliferate, but...

Or haven't yet. Right. But China then has a lot more targets to deal with if it wants to use counter space capabilities. It can't just, you know, have a handful of missiles that are going to destroy the U.S.'s most important sensing capabilities. And the United States now also talks much more openly about needing

a variety of its own counter space capabilities. So China has really triggered a reaction in the space domain. And I think for China, they are now really worried about a set of things the U.S. is doing that includes, you know, these distributed or proliferated satellite constellations, U.S. counter space, but also the way that the U.S. is putting up satellites that monitor or, you

kind of surveil what other countries are doing in orbit and about the U.S. partnership with commercial space companies to really augment its power. And they now worry a lot more about nuclear escalation occurring because of stuff that happens in space. And that's a new development from the last five years or so. I mean, so another way to think about this more broadly is you develop, everything Fiona said is right, and you develop

There's a reveal-conceal dilemma when you develop capabilities, and generally you reveal capabilities to deter or coerce, and you conceal to fight. So one way to think about what China's done in space is revelation, essentially specifically to impose costs, which they have.

by driving in some ways, in no small part, a bunch of changes to U.S. space architecture, either that have happened or are planned. But there are also some areas where it is hard to conceal, even if you want to. And space is arguably one of them because of some of the more, I mean, it's easier in some ways, harder in other ways. And so, and, you know, and I get the sense that we don't know

Exactly what China, we know what they were, we know they were trying to develop capabilities to disrupt our capabilities, the extent to which when they do things like dazzle our assets that they're, whether they're doing that on purpose to reveal versus whether they're doing it, whether they would like to conceal it, but can't, and they just need a way to test whether these systems work.

And you just have different options than with terrestrial missiles that you can test and sometimes test in relative isolation. Thus, it changes the dynamic a bit. Just to add one more piece onto this.

In descriptions of PLA space deterrence doctrine, you will often see descriptions of this kind of tiered approach where you start by signaling what you're capable of doing or moving capabilities around to make them visible. So I think what Mike is saying is really pertinent because even if you match it up with the PRC doctrine, you can see there's a place for the

the you know the the movement the revelation of the capabilities that's intended to send an effect and so discerning what exactly it is that they're doing whether they're following the doctrine or just you know couldn't hide what they were trying to check out is i think a key point um all right let's do dog fighting mike do you want to take the dog fighting piece

Well, no, I mean, there's this article that comes out recently that says that China, from a US Space Force official talking about China doing dogfighting in space. And in some ways that shows the way that we project our views of one domain into another and how we talk about it. But I think it's actually a very clear illustration of what Fiona's book

demonstrates about the capabilities that China has developed and the way, and to the discussion that we've just had, the way that they're testing them. And then simultaneously, the way that the U.S. Space Force, even despite a lot of changes over the last several years, still feels constrained in its ability to do some of the kinds of testing that

that China does and where there are questions of what would be allowed operationally. And so I think one way to read this discussion of Chinese dogfighting in space is the space force, the US space force is saying like, hey, what the PLA is doing here is legit.

If you want us to be able to deter and defeat it and not just sort of exhaust it through proliferated assets that make it like hard to much harder to disrupt American capabilities, you need to give us more authority.

To be able to operate in space and do things in space that maybe people, you know, that people have thought were actually like a little bit dangerous for decades. I mean, I think that the report on the dogfighting, if I'm not mistaken, is that there were a handful, like more than three dogs.

Chinese satellites that ended up basically surrounding another satellite. And so that demonstrates, I think, some pretty advanced capabilities with rendezvous and proximity operations, this way that you get things close to each other in space. And so I think that's the sort of piece that Mike is talking about, about constraints, about, for example, how close you might be able to get in doing these kinds of operations. But

What exactly the dogfighting piece means, I'll just say that I don't know how you say dogfighting in Chinese, and that probably suggests that the dogfighting term doesn't show up in their doctrine.

Just everyone wishes they were still flying fighter jets over Korea. I think that's basically the lesson of all of this. I guess the question for Fiona is, and you've written about this a bit in the context of your book, sort of also in other things that you've worked on, to what extent

I guess, how sophisticated do you think China's conventional missile arsenal is at this point? China has, by my count, maybe six, at least six, relatively modern anti-ship missiles, including two different anti-ship ballistic missiles, something like the DF-17, an anti-ship hypersonic missile, along with the sort of YJ classes.

Like how big a deal is this? You know, this in some ways is the, you know, like coming out of the Pentagon in 2024, the like, how big a deal those missiles are is like one of like the maybe like top five questions facing the U.S. military or certainly the U.S. Navy today.

I mean, I think it's an air force issue as well, right? Because those same missiles can also hit things on airfields in the region. And if you look at the PLA conventional missile doctrine, it's actually, it's interesting because as the forces become more precise, the target set that they describe actually becomes narrower. So it's no longer like infrastructure or economic targets in the set, but it's like

your missile defenses, your electronic warfare capabilities, the radars, the airfields, those sorts of pieces, and the ships.

So I think for me there are some obvious advances that the missiles that China fields have themselves just become more accurate. I think it's difficult to find data on precisely how accurate the missiles themselves are if you aim for a particular point, like how likely and how frequently are you going to hit within a certain radius of that point.

But the big change for China, I think, is really coming on the sensing piece. And that's the other sort of side of, you know, having a precision missile capability. You don't just need accurate missiles, but you also need the sensing capabilities to find your targets and to see whether or not you have managed to destroy them. And that's a really hard challenge for the anti-ship ballistic missiles. And there'd been a lot of, I think, writing on

what kinds of space-based and ground-based capabilities China would use to find US carriers and that was sort of the big question mark is like could you find them and could you track them to make sure that the missile actually hit it and recently China did put up an optical satellite in geosynchronous orbit that's going to give it persistent coverage of that section of the world

Yep. And so that, you know, that does make a really big difference to this, you know, can you find your target piece for China?

The black box for me is what happens between the sensor and the shooter and what needs to happen in that place. Like that can be a very difficult process. I have less visibility on whether, you know, for something like an anti-ship ballistic missile with a big target, that's necessarily as big an issue as it is if you're looking at, you know, the terrorist's window. Yeah.

So that's a sort of question in the capabilities. And then the other is like with what kinds of U.S. countermeasures are not going to be a problem for China to hit moving targets, but also to hit fixed targets on bases. Because, for example, you could try in with the U.S.'s own counter space capabilities, disrupt some of these sensing capabilities that are important for China to

to find and track US vessels, but you still know where Kadena Air Force Base is, right? You may not know what's there, but you can still strike some of those fixed targets, even if you lose the sensing capability. And so that goes back to, you know, what else can the US do to disrupt China's precision strike capability? And then you start getting into the point of wanting to disrupt the missiles before they're launched.

which gets us to all of the hard problems with tracking mobile missiles that we were talking about before. So you can kind of see how they're all connected. And I'm not directly answering your question, Mike, because I think there is a lot of uncertainty about the steps in the chain that China needs to satisfy if it's going to hit some of those more difficult U.S. targets to hit.

And there is a lot of uncertainty about how effective U.S. countermeasures are going to be, both in terms of disrupting the PRC capabilities, as well as with hiding and distracting those missiles once they're launched and heading towards you. That's a great answer. That's super helpful. What about Chinese hypersonics in general? Obviously, China, I was going to say famously, but famous to people who listen to China talk.

China famously deployed, you know, tested some, you know, hypersonic as tested hypersonic systems that have, you know, maybe like set hearts aflutter for those that really like missiles, but also led to, you know, lots of concern that the U.S. could be like falling behind in hypersonics. Like put aside the put aside the falling falling behind piece. And I will say my personal rant about hypersonics for another day.

I'd love to hear it. No, come on. We're here. We're two hours in, Mike. The people are waiting for this. There's no capability that I left the Pentagon more disappointed in than for Sonex in some ways in terms of the relative bang for the buck of what it can deliver for the American military. I think they have their place, but in some ways have been overhyped a bit if you think about the relative investment in the overall architecture of missile systems. But

But that's not surprising to hear me say, given sort of my advocacy for sort of precise mass and more like a treatable autonomous systems. But the question for you, Fiona, is how much should we be how fearsome are China's hypersonics and how is it that they are able to deploy so many hypersonic systems in some ways like so quickly relative to the United States? I think it's a I mean.

So the short answer to the how come China has been so much quicker than the United States is I can't point to a line in a PLA, you know, manual or teaching text or something that's going to give you the answer. But if I were to hazard a guess, it's because, you know, this is the focus, right, for China itself.

Um, conventional missiles is one of the areas and just missiles in general. It's one of the areas that China has really put a lot of elbow grease into ahead of other sections of its conventional military modernization and certainly its nuclear modernization. And when you make something a priority, this is, you know, you are going to end up progressing, um, uh, perhaps more quickly, but it is also about the problem set that, um,

The United States has been deploying missile defense systems around China's periphery, especially with, perhaps most vividly with deploying that THAAD system in South Korea back in 2016, which caused a lot of political disruption in Northeast Asian security politics.

But China has the problem of having to think about how you defeat missile defenses. And if that is your problem, and that is your problem set in a theater range, then hypersonics are going to provide a potential answer because of both the speed as well as the maneuverability of those capabilities in the terminal phase that are going to make it harder for missile defenses to defeat them. How good they are? I mean...

They're tested in a test environment, unless and until you put them up against a...

a US missile defense system and also will depend upon how US capabilities to track hypersonic missiles progress. And that's a capability in progress with the kind of current space sensing architecture. So again, it's a kind of cat and mouse action reaction system

piece where China's investment may give it a fleeting advantage, but the US can potentially close the gap, whether it's by the precise mass that you're advocating, so a different way of meeting the challenge, or through countermeasures that are directly designed to address the problems that hypersonics solve for China.

I mean, to me, that's an and, not an or for the U.S., but no, that's super helpful. Just thinking about that exchange...

I was trying to come up with like ways you can get into Trump's brain to defend spending on basic research and science. And which were, which led to a chat GPT deep research question that surfaced the super duper missile and invisible aircraft. And, you know, we're sitting here recording this on Friday, March 21st, the NGA, the sixth generation fighters about to be announced. And like,

My kind of mental model of the things that Trump is going to be okay spending money on are things that are big and fast and, like, shiny. Shiny. Shiny. Not are, like, slow and attritable. And it's an interesting kind of tension that...

you know, a lot of the money, right, of the Palantirs and the and the Anderles, who obviously are very tied into the Trump world, is for one sort of like theory of acquisitions and theory of victory, whereas like, I don't know, like the like Trump brain is on things that are kind of like

You can like put like weird, you know, like dramatic action figure adjectives behind them, which is not necessarily, you know, like cute submersible drones or what have you. I mean, it might. I mean, the one of the things I think is notable about the 17 priorities that the Pentagon announced for its review of the FY26 budget that's still ongoing is the way that both some of those more sophisticated things and, you know, specifically like one way attack sort of that

Those more like precise math systems were explicitly called out as an investment priority. And so I think my instinct, I think my instinct is that you are probably correct. And also the now confirmed deputy secretary of defense of Feinberg is a big hypersonics advocate. And so-

The, you know, what you what you could see is for reasons that in some ways have to do with both Feinberg and the preferences of the president, you might end up pushing more toward this sort of high low capability mix where you both on the U.S. side invest in the biggest, shiniest, you know, like NGAD and hypersonics and then more of that that mass. But the to the extent that a bunch of U.S. capability investments for the last couple of decades have been more in that mid tier. Yeah.

It then would sort of raise some questions about those. But frankly, as an advocate of a high low mix for the force, that that's not like necessarily like troubling to me, even if how they get there might be different.

Fiona, were there any other ways this could have turned out? Could the PLA have sat in the late 80s and just thought, all right, let's invest more in our sort of nuclear modernization, make that threat more credible, and maybe not build out a giant conventional force and all of this, you know, cute stuff in space and cyber and with missiles. Like,

I guess, A, like, was that a path? And B, would that have led the world to be less scared of China's rise? Or do you see that as kind of an independent variable more on just like kind of economic growth than the kind of development and deploying of specific capabilities?

It's a really good question. It depends on what parameters you change. Because if you don't end up having these crises with the United States in the mid-1990s, and again with Belgrade, and I talk a little bit in the book about the EP3 crisis where

A U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese fighter collided over Hainan Island in 2001 as well. Remember how big a deal that was at the time? No, it was massive. In some ways, we've memory-holed it a bit, and especially given the craziness surrounding the world now. But at the time that that happened, that was a huge deal. Yeah. I was in...

I think what you would call in the United States middle school at the time, and it was another one of those events that I was following a little bit like the ASAT test because it was super early on in the Bush administration. And now you wonder why my childhood dreams to become a human rights lawyer in the UN got derailed by the news media. Yeah.

By your one true love for nuclear weapons? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, if I really love nuclear weapons, I would probably study a different country because they're not China's favorite. I mean...

It could be in the nuclear shadow, not under the nuclear shadow. That's the title of this book. And that might have been a story of how when China encountered these crises with the U.S. that revealed these deficits in its leverage, it said, you know what? We've got nuclear weapons. We saw what NATO did during the Cold War. We're watching what the Russians are doing contemporaneously in the 1990s.

And we're just going to switch our nuclear posture and we're going to follow those scripts in Ian Johnson's famous limited nuclear deterrence article. And that's how we're going to end up solving this problem.

So that's another potential pathway. Another pathway is that you don't have the crises, and that means that China builds up its conventional military because its military modernization and conventional strategy is responsive to a different sort of set of variables of how other countries fight wars, how unified is the party, again, to channel Taylor Fravel, my advisor's work.

So you could see the conventional modernization happening without these investments in non-nuclear strategic deterrence. Or you could see things happen with the Chinese economy that I think would have really reshaped the way that its conventional modernization has gone. Because Jiang Zemin was pretty explicit in the late 1990s that the progress of China's military modernization

Sure.

And then, you know, point number three would be, you know, how much of where we are right now do you see as a function of Xi Jinping being a different kind of leader with a different vision for China's foreign policy goals and its defense policy as previous leaders? And I tend to see a little bit more continuity than change. But, you know, if you'd had a different leader, you...

had different objectives to Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin, but in the opposite direction, in trying to do more engagement, maybe have a different approach towards domestic politics. China might have gotten off this path as well.

It's so easy to say that everything was inevitable in retrospect. And like my instinct in some ways is that if it hadn't been the like Taiwan Straits crisis or like EP3, it would have been like something else in some ways because of the, I mean, which in some ways I'm going to make a much more structural argument that I think I'm like would generally be known for from an academic research perspective. But the, but that the like rise of the rise of China combined with these,

frequent demonstrations by the U.S. of conventional military superiority in the context of the invasion of Iraq and the forever war makes it, you know, in some ways like makes a create creates conditions where it seems like PLA accelerated PLA conventional modernization to try to counter that becomes very likely. The question is, what else do they do on top of that? Yeah.

And I think that's where the politics comes in. And that's sort of one of stepping back to me. One of the biggest conclusions of this book is that China's decisions about strategic deterrence and the capabilities that it really wants to use to put pressure on the United States, they are all linked to political dynamics. This is not about kind of U.S. capability dynamics necessarily, but it's those political crises that

create an urgent demand for more capability to scare the United States out of engaging in a crisis again. And so keeping that in mind, I think, is important because the U.S. doesn't always, I think, pay as much attention to these political dynamics. And from China's perspective, they're just paramount.

Let's close on three things, Fiona. First, one PLA book for the people, if they've made it to the end of this episode and want to learn more. Next, a Chinese phrase, your favorite one, maybe. That's like...

PLA adjacent. And lastly, which meeting of, you know, PLA history of recent or older vintage you would have liked to be a fly on the wall for? And maybe what organization you would have worked for in a time period? Maybe that one too.

I think I would pass on working for any of the PLA organizations. I don't think that uniform would have fit me very well. Okay, fly on the wall, fly on the wall. But the fly on the wall piece, in a recent time, the one I really wanted to know more about is why China's military leaders decided to disband the strategic support force in about, I think, March or April last year.

So it used to house the space capabilities, the cyber capabilities, and then the kind of network maintenance organization for all of the PLA's defense information networks. And they broke it up. They announced a separate force for the information networks, but there has been almost nothing done.

that has since come out about what happened to the cyber and the space component. So I really want to know why. Why did that happen? Why say nothing about the others? In terms of older meetings, back in, I think it was 1978, there was a meeting at which Deng Xiaoping said,

Something along the lines of we will still need to sort of see or think about tactical nuclear weapons and otherwise is making decisions about the future of Chinese nuclear forces.

It's really hard to find information about that set of decisions, but I would love to know what set of choices meant that China's leaders were still sort of thinking about whether shorter range, lower yield nuclear weapons were going to help them defend their borders against the Soviets and why eventually that idea slides and China sticks to this pretty recessed nuclear strategy. So that's the meeting piece.

PLA book recommendations. The other one that I would, I really liked and find myself going back to frequently is an edited volume put together by the National Defense University with editors Joel Withner, Phil Saunders, and a couple of others that's called Crossing the Straight. The PLA Prepares for War with Taiwan.

And it is just, you know, there are a lot of really, really useful chapters in there summarizing, you know, what's China's doctrine for a conflict with Taiwan. Joel Withnow's chapter in there about how the PLA command and control system might function. I just think it's a very helpful book for anybody who wants to understand Taiwan.

where China is at in this campaign or where it was at a year or two ago. It's a super worthwhile read and I think demonstrates some of the best that PLA studies and PLA analysis can give us in terms of trying to think about

dilemma and the question we started this whole podcast with, which is like, this is the main scenario and this is the most difficult problem for military leaders in the United States and allied countries as well right now.

And on the Chinese phrase, it would be 惩戒大吉, which is a phrase that appeared in some of the descriptions of China's counter space capabilities. It sort of translates to punitive strikes and disciplinary action. So 惩戒 is like punish and warn put together.

And the reason this phrase is my favorite is because it was the phrase that I read very early on in developing this dissertation topic that really rammed home for me how different China's approach was to the space domain and space deterrence compared to nuclear weapons. So in some ways it was the kernel of what political scientists would call a variation on the DV that, you know,

made this not just an interesting and policy relevant topic, but one that had legs as a political science dissertation. Can you use those words in like a teaching or a parenting context? So when I said, and you know, this is what I did when I was doing interviews in China, I was like, what does this mean?

And people would be like, oh, well, you know, one of these wars that has this kind of punitive and disciplinary element to it was like the Vietnamese war. But I would be like, OK, but is nuclear retaliation, is that and they'd be like, no.

So there's a footnote about it in the book if you want to look at this. But I asked about this term and no one ever said, oh, this tells me what I do when I am teaching my students or parenting my children. So I would probably keep it to a military strategy context for the time being. Fiona, you got to tell us a little more about

like just the vibe like of the Chinese defense analyst community in China, like how would you characterize them as like human beings to use some like very large generalizations? And I'm curious, you know, what they what they get out of talking to you.

So I think what they got out of talking to me is that when I was doing interviews for the book, most of them I did when I was a graduate student. And so, you know, they were helping a graduate student. And I think some of the desire to help students learn cuts across cultural contexts.

And I think also there's a genuine desire among a lot of experts in China that look, if you're going to make the effort to come to China to have spent many years learning the language, to develop the ability to kind of understand Chinese,

the lexicon and environment of strategic studies in China, that that's a good thing and that they want to help clear up misconceptions and ensure that people who are talking about this stuff in the United States have a more granular and nuanced understanding of what's going on.

If I were to guess, that's what I think they got out of talking to me, although...

It was pretty interesting. I was in China doing this work right in the middle of those 2015-16 PLA reforms that I mentioned. And at some point, my ability to ask questions about some of these issues, it was just like people would just be like, we don't know. Like until this reform package clarifies, like we don't really know. But as a group, I mean, the Chinese...

defence and strategic studies community is not that different, like, they're not that different from what you would expect in the United States. You know, there are women, there are men, there are people who are on the older side who are on the younger side. There are those who are, you know, more conservative versus less conservative. So, you know, there's a kind of mixed...

mixed piece there. But it's small. And so a little bit like in the United States, a lot of these folks will know each other relatively well and they'll know what each other's views are. Yeah, that's kind of the vibe, if that makes sense. Okay.

One more thing on the sort of defense community. There was this interesting beat in one of your recent papers where the civilian defense discussion consensus was like, we don't need to spend all this time and effort doing nuclear modernization. And she was like, I don't really care. And.

That's what ends up happening. But sort of before 2019, the discussion on a lot of these issues kind of like ended up like running very much in parallel to what the PLA ended up doing on a lot of different dimensions. I'm curious what you take from that example. Yeah.

Yeah. So one thing that one could take from this is that, you know, the expert community doesn't have a lot of influence or interaction with decision makers in the way that they used to. And I would say like some some people have drawn that conclusion in the nuclear space.

I have some work in progress that, and I sort of referenced this when we were talking about the drivers of China's nuclear modernization, which is that not everyone in China has the same view as to why you need to modernize your nuclear capabilities and what exactly you should do about it.

And so I think when I was writing that paper, I was focusing on one particular section of the PRC community that focuses on arms control that, you know, were concerned about threats to China's retaliatory capability, but didn't seem to suggest that a really big increase in the size of China's arsenal was what was needed.

But, you know, there are other voices within China, within the broader strategic and defense community that do think that China needs a bigger arsenal and it needs a bigger arsenal, not because of these intricate calculations about.

you know, how many warheads land on how many cities or intricate calculations about how you posture your forces to make credible threats. But simply just because more nuclear weapons gives China a sort of political leverage. It's not linked to military campaigns or outcomes, but it is the kind of psychological effect that you get from

having more or you could even think about it as like being a big nuclear power as a status thing and you can use that statusing kind of instrumentally and it's more that sort of mentality I think that can help us understand some of the the gap between what the arms control community might be suggesting in in in that piece of work that that you're referencing

or and you know what behavior China is engaging in. So more soon hopefully.

Well, open invitation. We can do shows in Chinese if folks want to come on and have Fiona and I co-host something about some odd corner of a PLA doctrine. I look forward to the translation of that episode. This was very fun. Fiona has written an awesome, awesome book that...

should transform our understanding of how China's military is acquiring advanced technology and thinking about the future of war. Everyone should go buy it and read it. Thanks for having us and thanks for letting me talk about my book. I hope you enjoyed the show.

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