Analysis
The Chinese Military’s Challenges in the 2030s
The People’s Liberation Army is growing stronger along four main axes. The United States and its allies must carefully examine how best to confront these strengths.
Rarely does a week go by without more grim news about China’s growing military power and the deteriorating strategic balance in Asia. Projections of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into the 2030s, assuming deterrence holds between now and then, suggest that the operational environment will be even more hostile to the U.S. armed forces and those of its Asian allies. Although unpleasant circumstances a decade from now may seem a distant prospect, force planning decisions must be made now for them to bear fruit in time for that dangerous future. To do so, policymakers must come to grips with difficult choices and trade-offs about force structure and posture that are cost conscious and tactically relevant amidst uncertainty.
To wrestle with these choices and trade-offs, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) ran a series of force-rebalancing exercises in Washington and Canberra to forecast what the correlation of forces might look like a decade hence. Exercise participants used a one-of-a-kind web-based tool to rebalance the PLA and the Australian Defence Force in an interactive simulation. The goal was to test how local powers—by themselves and alongside the United States—might best prepare for and respond to the Chinese military’s most acute challenges in the mid-2030s.
During the exercises, the debates that took place among leading thinkers and practitioners in the United States and Australia surfaced a range of PLA modernization trends that will likely have significant implications for allied deterrence and warfighting over the next ten years. Four areas stood out for their likely strategic and operational impact—namely, China’s shore-based firepower, anti-submarine warfare, global power projection, and theater nuclear capabilities. The following assesses the trends in each area and offers preliminary thoughts on what those trends might mean for U.S. and allied policymakers.
Shore-Based Firepower
The PLA continues to pour enormous resources into expanding its ability to hold at risk distant targets at ever greater ranges from the mainland. The truck-mounted DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which can conduct precision strikes against targets at sea and ashore, has pushed forward the PLA’s threat envelope over large swaths of the Western Pacific. Boasting a range of up to 4,000 kilometers, the DF-26 can reach Guam, a hub of American naval and airpower that was previously considered a sanctuary from Chinese attacks. H-6 bombers armed with conventional land-attack missiles and DF-26 missiles, if they were deployed on the Spratly Island bases in the South China Sea, could target northern Australia.
The Pentagon recently reported that the PLA Rocket Force may have deployed a new land-based anti-ship and land-attack ballistic missile, the DF-27, with a range between 5,000 to 8,000 kilometers (approximately 3,000-5,000 miles). In theory, Alaska, Hawaii, and the Australian continent would fall within the missile’s reach. The PLA Air Force’s forthcoming stealthy H-20 strategic bomber, if armed with conventional munitions, will offer a new shore-based instrument to deliver Pacific-wide firepower. The Pentagon further acknowledged that China may be looking into conventionally armed intercontinental-range ballistic missiles.
Anti-Submarine Warfare
China has long struggled to defend the approaches to the mainland beneath the waves. Historically, the PLA Navy (PLAN) has lagged badly in anti-submarine warfare (ASW), owing to structural weaknesses. Until recently, Beijing had largely ceded this area of the competition to the United States and its allies. However, Chinese procurement patterns suggest that the PLA is seeking to contest U.S. and allied superiority in undersea warfare. Indeed, it has begun to acquire a range of air, surface, and subsurface platforms—as well as undersea sensors—to actively address this vulnerability, representing a major departure from the past.
The PLAN’s surface combatants are now equipped with modern variable depth sonars and towed array sonars for detecting submarines. The Chinese navy has acquired KQ-200 anti-submarine warfare aircraft, which first entered service in 2017. The PLA has also been building its undersea sensor network along China’s littorals. As Bryan Clark and Timothy Walton observe, the PLA is combining “a multidimensional surveillance network undersea,” a fleet of warships and civilian vessels, new sensors, uncrewed systems, and airborne assets to create a more effective anti-submarine barrier. They conclude that China’s “active and passive sonar arrays and shore-based, shipboard, and airborne weapons launchers” would pose a threat to U.S. undersea forces in ways that resemble how the PLA’s dense thicket of air defense systems along the Chinese coast endangers nearby U.S. air operations.
Global Power Projection
The PLAN, already the largest navy in the world by ship count, is on course to become a global force that will be able to perform missions across distant maritime theaters. Its new strategic concept, for instance, embraces power projection into waters beyond the first island chain, forward presence on the world’s oceans, and operations in the polar regions. Affirming this forward-leaning outlook, the 2020 Science of Military Strategy exhorts the PLAN to develop “an effective deterrence and strike capability against powerful naval forces in the ocean far away from the country.” It further calls on the navy to field a balanced expeditionary force able to fulfill blue-water missions.
The PLAN’s surface fleet, including large power projection platforms, is expected to be at the center of this global orientation. Consider its growth over a ten-year period. In 2012, the Chinese navy possessed one carrier, 23 destroyers, 52 frigates, and 29 amphibious transport docks and landing ship tanks. By 2022, the PLAN had two carriers, eight cruisers, 42 destroyers, 47 frigates, 50 corvettes, three landing helicopter assault ships, and 57 amphibious transport docks and landing ship tanks. Notably, cruisers, corvettes, and landing helicopter assault ships had not existed in 2012. According to a U.S. Navy projection, the PLAN is expected to have five carriers, 60 cruisers and destroyers, 135 frigates and corvettes, four LHAs, 14 LPDs, and 24 LSTs by 2030.
Nuclear Modernization
The pace of PLA nuclear modernization also continues to exceed expectations. The Pentagon estimated that China had more than 600 operational nuclear warheads in 2024 and was on pace to field more than 1,000 warheads by 2030. It previously projected that the PLA would possess 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035.
In 2024, the PLA Rocket Force had 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and 550 ICBM launchers and constructed three new missile silo fields to house some 300 ICBMs. China’s Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), which allow it to “maintain a constant at sea deterrent presence,” and the nuclear-capable H-6 bombers complete Beijing’s nascent nuclear triad. The next-generation Type 096 SSBN and the H-20 stealth bomber are expected to bolster China’s nuclear deterrent.
At the same time, the PLA now boasts a more diversified set of theater-range nuclear systems, including the DF-26 IRBM, the H-6 bomber, and the DF-27 IRBM/ICBM. The DF-26 IRBM is equipped with an advanced guidance system that would allow China to conduct nuclear precision strikes across the Western Pacific, the first of its kind. The H-6 bomber, armed with the air-launched ballistic missile, is reportedly able to launch “nuclear precision strikes against targets in the Indo-Pacific theater.” Because the IRBMs can carry out conventional land-attack, anti-ship, and nuclear missions, only a portion of the missile force is likely dedicated to the nuclear role, although how many might be nuclear-armed is not estimated in publicly available sources. Nevertheless, Beijing enjoys more tools to hold various regional targets at risk.
Implications
The trends in these four areas of the military competition show that China is doubling down on its longstanding strengths in anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities to hold enemy forces at risk and at bay, contesting U.S. and allied undersea advantages while mitigating its enduring weaknesses, and opening new maritime and nuclear fronts in the strategic rivalry against the United States.
As China continues to extend its concentric rings of firepower deep in the oceanic direction, the emergence of a “hyper A2/AD” posture could further encumber U.S. and allied freedom of maneuver. Although the PLA may only gradually cut into America’s generational lead in undersea warfare, its methodic ramp up in ASW suggests that the operational environment inside and near the first island chain will be more hazardous to U.S. and allied submarines than in the past. The bottom line is that the United States can no longer assume that its undersea capabilities, one of the crown jewels in its arsenal, will remain unrivaled indefinitely.
Even as the approaches to the mainland become more contested, the Chinese navy is constructing a balanced expeditionary force to influence events farther from home. Recent events bear out the potential consequences of China’s buildup of global forces. For example, the PLA Navy’s Task Force 107, comprising a Renhai cruiser, a Jiangkai frigate, and a replenishment oiler, circumnavigated the Australia continental, cruising just offshore for weeks. Notably, the Renhai cruiser is among the most heavily armed surface combatants in the world. This symbolic show of force is just a glimpse of things to come.
Finally, China’s theater-range nuclear delivery systems will furnish it with more coercive options. It might be better positioned to leverage its larger and more diverse theater weapons to engage in brinkmanship at the beginning of a crisis to keep the United States and its allies out of a cross-strait confrontation. The goals would be to undermine U.S. extended deterrence commitments and to isolate Taiwan during a crisis or a war. Specifically, Beijing could make tailored threats against regional targets to convince American and allied policymakers to back off or to hesitate long enough for the PLA to achieve its operational aims against the island democracy.
For policymakers in Washington and allied capitals, these developments collectively raise troubling questions about acceptable risk to U.S. forces operating west of the international date line, the prospect of fighting a multi-theater campaign against a globalized PLA, the growing pressures on U.S. extended deterrence in Asia, and the risks of nuclear brinkmanship and escalation in a crisis or a war. They will need to reckon with the emerging global and nuclear dimensions of Chinese military power and the likely demands on American statecraft. And they will have to anticipate how China might combine and sequence its A2/AD, ASW, global power projection, and theater-level nuclear capabilities to pose simultaneous challenges to the United States and frontline states in the Indo-Pacific should deterrence fail in the coming decade.
