An assessment of the U.S.-Chinese reconnaissance-strike competition

The United States and China are developing competing complexes for penetrating, precision strike as part of the broader military competition in the Western Pacific.;After the United States' display of aerospace prowess in the 1991 Gulf War, the most perceptive Chinese military thinkers realized that something significant had changed about modern war. China had not fought a major war with the West since Korea, and the Gulf War demonstrated that military size alone was insufficient for repelling a high-tech adversary. Thus, under General Secretary Jiang Zemin, China hastened the replacement of Mao Zedong's "people's war" or "grand army" military model in favor of preparation for "local war under high-tech conditions." China's increasingly formidable reconnaissance-strike force is the modern manifestation of its local-war doctrine. Although the Chinese reconnaissance-strike complex (RUK) looks very different than the U.S. RUK, both exploit the same military-technological developments. Specifically, RUKs are made possible by progress in guided munitions and advanced targeting networks. At its most basic level, reconnaissance-strike is merely the operational integration of these two technologies. This paper assesses the competition in reconnaissance-strike between the United States and China. Specifically, it assesses how the interaction of asymmetric reconnaissance-strike complexes shape incentives for future investment in the U.S. and Chinese reconnaissance-strike complexes.