Nicholas Anderson and Daryl Press argue that the current U.S. approach for operating airpower to defend Taiwan risks catastrophic defeat. They have created a new, unclassified, and transparent model that explores multiple scenarios in a Taiwan conflict. They find that in such a conflict, the United States would likely lose hundreds of aircraft to Chinese strikes on airfields. They also suggest that the U.S. Air Force’s proposed solution to this possibility, the Agile Combat Employment doctrine, would likely fail while raising the risk of escalation. Instead, Anderson and Press’s model indicates that hardened aircraft shelters may offer a way to blunt Chinese attacks.
Guests: Nicholas Anderson is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. Daryl Press is Faculty Director of the Davidson Institute and Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.
International Security Article: Nicholas D. Anderson and Daryl G. Press, “Access Denied? The Sino-American Contest for Military Primacy in Asia,” International Security, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Summer 2025), pp. 118–151, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC.a.7.
Originally released on October 10, 2025
Jeff Friedman: Hello and welcome to the International Security Podcast. We are produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics. I'm Jeff Friedman from Dartmouth College. Today our guests are Nick Anderson and Daryl Press. Nick is an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University. Daryl is professor of government here at Dartmouth, where he directs the Davidson Institute for Global Security. Their recent article is titled “Access Denied? The Sino-American Contest for Military Primacy in Asia.” I should note that “Access Denied?” has a question mark in the title, although I think their answer is a little bit more declarative than that. The article models the United States’ ability to use theater, land-based air power to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack. It concludes that the current US approach for operating air power in East Asia during a major war with China is likely to fail. And it discusses potential methods for mitigating that vulnerability. Nick, congratulations on the article,
Nick Anderson: Thanks for having us, Jeff.
Jeff Friedman: And Daryl, good to see you as well.
Daryl Press: Good to see you too.
Jeff Friedman: Okay, Daryl, set the stage for us. You begin the article by describing how recent advances in Chinese technology are eroding Washington's regional advantage. Can you give us a sense of what those trends look like and why they might be worrisome?
Daryl Press: Yeah, I mean as we all know, the technological landscape is changing in the world in basically every manner that we can think of. In this article, we focus on two families of technology and their implication. There are two families of technologies which have the, I think, the biggest impact in the short term in East Asia. The first is a whole set of technologies that greatly enhance China's ability at remote sensing, at locating US military forces wherever they're located in the region during a conflict. And you could think of sensors that they're putting on satellites and sensors that they're putting on ships and on UAVs and under the oceans and ground-based radars.
And when you put all these things together, it's making it harder and harder for the United States to hide where military forces are located in the region. The second set of technologies are the things that combine to greatly enhance what people call long-range precision conventional strike. And it means that once China locates where US air power is or where US ships are located, they have more and more missiles that are more and more accurate and can bring fire to bear with great effect against those targets. So when you put these two things together, they are significantly changing the military calculus in the region.
Jeff Friedman: You focus the analysis on the United States’ ability to use theater, land-based air power to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack. Obviously, the focus on Taiwan makes a lot of sense for geopolitical reasons, but why do you think it is that theater, land-based air power is such a key piece of the equation for whether the United States can defend Taiwan?
Daryl Press: Yeah, it's a good question. It takes walking through a couple short steps, but I think the first thing to focus on is that it is China that needs to maintain air superiority, not merely over Taiwan, but out to a few hundred kilometers in a bubble around Taiwan, if it's going to accomplish most of the plausible military operations that it might want to accomplish against Taiwan.
If it's going to launch an amphibious assault, or if it's simply going to do a blockade using surface ships or submarines around Taiwan, China's going to need to control the airspace and not just control it for a few hours, control it for several weeks. And the simple reason is whether it's conducting an amphibious assault or a blockade, it's going to depend on many, many ships, bringing troops ashore, bringing supplies ashore, or many, many ships conducting a naval blockade. And those ships are inherently vulnerable to air power. And so China has to protect its shipping, and that means controlling the air. That's step one. Step two is the United States is really good at air operations and if the US Air Force can operate pretty freely from our base infrastructure across East Asia, it is going to be a terrible conflict for Chinese shipping and therefore for China. And so if the United States can operate what we call theater air power, short-range air power, F-35s, F-15s, F-16s from our base network in East Asia, it's going to be a very difficult war for China.
And what that fundamentally means is that China, in order to use effective force against Taiwan, has to find a way to significantly suppress the operation of US theater air power in the region. If it can suppress them, then perhaps it can succeed in a war against Taiwan. If it cannot suppress US air power in the region, it is going to be a very difficult war for China and for Chinese forces.
Jeff Friedman: And then you say in the piece that the key to China suppressing US air power in the region is targeting US aircraft on the ground, in bases in the area. Tell us why that's important and also, how many bases are we talking about here? What’s the geography of this set of forces?
Daryl Press: Modern fifth-generation aircraft are very difficult to fight and very difficult to target when they're in the air. They're stealthy. They've got amazing sensors. In the US case, they're flown by pilots who have probably the best air-to-air tactical training in the world. And so in the air, they're incredibly capable.
On the ground, they're static, non-moving, vulnerable, thinly skinned pieces of metal. They're incredibly vulnerable. And so China identified, frankly, a couple decades ago that the key vulnerability for US air power in the region was not the aircraft who were operating in the air, but the aircraft that are being maintained and refueled while the pilots rest on the ground.
And so really the kind of the focus of a great deal of Chinese military technological investments has been that technology we talked about a couple minutes ago. The ability to find not just the airfields, but the aircraft at the airfields and the ability to strike them soon after they find them. And that's where these sensors and these missiles come together.
In terms of the number of airfields in the region, the model, which Nick will talk about I think in a few minutes, the model looks at 72 airfields in maritime East Asia, which includes all the major airfields the United States uses, all the major airfields which we don't use, but which our allies possess and they might let us use, and it also includes a great many of the civilian airfields, which might be useful to the United States in such a conflict. But at any given time, the United States would probably be using at maximum two dozen of them, just because of the difficulty of operating across such a large area.
But so, in short, that's the geography of maritime East Asia. It's giant expanses of water, small archipelagoes of land, and probably about 75 airfields throughout the entire region, of which the United States might be using a couple dozen.
Jeff Friedman: One of the things I think is really effective about the piece is the way it boils down this extremely complicated thing like the military balance in East Asia down to a very specific question about how survivable is US air power at a certain subset of bases, or at least it shows that that's a big part of the equation. And let's throw it over to Nick to see how you modeled that. Nick, give us a sense of how this model works. So how do you have a sense of estimating China's ability to target US air power on the ground at a few dozen bases in the region, like Daryl was talking about?
Nick Anderson: Sure, so the model is run in Microsoft Excel. It's available on Harvard Dataverse. So you know, listeners and readers of the article can go and there's a link in the article that they can download it, take a look, you know, play with it themselves. It basically consists of a bunch of fairly straightforward math equations across a number of sheets in an Excel spreadsheet. But there are three key components. The first is simulations of basically China's air force, the PLA air forces flying sorties over and beyond Taiwan to try and defend Taiwan's airspace. Second key component is the US Air Force flying sorties to contest China's control over Taiwan's airspace. These US aircraft are deployed throughout the region in the way that the user chooses. And then there are the PLA or China's missile forces firing missiles at the bases that are being used by US forces. These three kind of key components all are interrelated. They all speak to each other, so you know, the PLA Air Force mission over Taiwan leads to some attrition of US air forces when they kind of clash in the air. US air forces lead to some attrition in the air of Chinese air forces when they clash over Taiwan. And then the missile estimates lead to destruction of aircraft on the ground. It runs over 30 days of simulated combat and tracks a bunch of outcomes.
But the ones that matter most for our analysis are the number of US aircraft losses and effectively the number of US opportunities to strike ground or surface targets in and around Taiwan.
Jeff Friedman: You and Daryl aren't the first person to model this kind of combat, so give us a sense of how your model differs from predecessors in the field.
Nick Anderson: Yeah, so there is lots of great existing research on these questions and on related questions, some of it published by academics in journals like International Security, lots of it done in policy research institutes like RAND. We, you know, benefited a lot from what was out there. We see ourselves improving upon existing research in a few key ways.
The first and maybe most basic way is that it's an update. We use the latest and most reliable open source data on US and Chinese military forces. And things have changed, as Daryl suggested, right? So China's missile force is larger. The missiles are more accurate. It now has a growing number of fifth-generation aircraft. So the inputs to a kind of situation or scenario like this could look quite different from even a few years ago. And so for that reason, it's worth kind of doing this again.
The second is that, you know, our analysis is fully transparent. As I mentioned earlier, you know, users can download the model themselves. They can change the inputs as they like, they could fully replicate the model if they wanted to. We've got a detailed appendix online that they can look at. Lots of existing research is done by places that contract with the Department of Defense. And therefore, while the general approach of what they're doing is public, a lot of what they're doing is classified. And so it's hard to know like exactly how to, you know, generate their results. And so, you know, the transparency I think is another kind of key benefit of what we're doing here.
And then I think the third kind of you know, reason why it was worth doing this again is the comprehensiveness of our approach. So lots of existing research would take one kind of narrower slice of a scenario like this. So they would look at just, you know, air sortie missions from Anderson Air Force Base over Taiwan, or they would just look at, you know, China's ability to target US aircraft on the ground at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. And those were great and we built upon them and benefited from them. But what we've done and what we've tried to do is kind of bring a lot of these kind of more disparate pieces together in a broader scenario to get a bigger picture what a larger clash would look like.
Jeff Friedman: You argue that this model shows the current US approach for operating air power in East Asia is likely to fail during a major war against China. That's a quote from the article. Put some numbers on that for us. What does failure look like according to this model?
Nick Anderson: Yeah, so based on what the model kind of estimates, you know, if the US aims to defend Taiwan's airspace, given its kind of current posture, it will likely see catastrophic losses, kind of on the order of sort of what we haven't seen since the Second World War. We look at a variety of different scenarios to get a sense of whether changing, you know, sort of the way that the US uses its forces would change the outcome, and regardless of whether the US kind of operates from sort of 6 large bases or disperses to 15 or 24 bases, so sort of spreading its forces more thinly to make them less vulnerable, the model still estimates losses on the order of 300 to 400 or more aircraft over the course of 30 days. Even with enhanced guidance, jamming and missile defenses, we're still talking about losses on the order of 200 to 300 aircraft. The main source of these losses, as you've already discussed a little bit with Daryl, is the vulnerability of aircraft on the ground parked in the open. China's warheads can carry submunitions that can cover very large areas. They're basically cluster munitions that send out smaller bomblets. And if these, you know, hit any of the aircraft, they can, you know, they can destroy them, but they can also just sort of what's known as a mission kill, kind of put them out of commission for the mission at hand. And, you know, they can spread over large areas the size of sort of four to five soccer fields at a time. And so basically they have the opportunity when these aircraft are parked in the open to hit multiple aircraft with a single missile.
Now, you know, this is what the model shows. In practice, we don't assume that the US would simply sit and suffer, you know, 300 to 400 aircraft losses in 30 days. I think what would be much more likely is that they would suffer really severe losses for a few days and then withdraw. But the model itself does give us a sense of the direction in which losses have trended and that direction is very, very bad for US air forces.
Jeff Friedman: Nick, I imagine any model like this is sensitive to assumptions. How much uncertainty would you put around the numbers you just gave us?
Nick Anderson: There is a lot of uncertainty, as you say, involved in analyzing military operations. There's lots of stuff that we don't know and frankly sort of can't know with at least, you know, complete certainty. So we don't know, for instance, how accurate China's missiles will be in practice. We don't know how effective US missile defenses will be. We don't know how skilled Chinese fighter pilots will be. There's just a lot that we can't know.
So in order to try and account for this, we do two things. First, we do comparative statics sensitivity analysis. So basically what we do in this case is take 36 variables from our model, so 36 of the kind of key inputs, things like, you know, the accuracy of China's missiles, or the effectiveness of US missile defenses. And we vary them one by one, sort of within reasonable bounds from what is the most plausible highest value to the most plausible lowest value. And basically look at how that changes the outcomes. And what we find is that our results are actually fairly stable for the most part, with, you know, a few key exceptions. The results are fairly stable. The situation still looks quite bad. The things that sort of move the needle more than others are missile defenses, the number of Chinese missiles, and the accuracy of China's missiles. But if we're close to correct on those things, then you know, the situation shouldn't change very dramatically.
The other thing we do is what's known as a Monte Carlo simulation. The principle is kind of the same, but instead of moving one variable value at a time, you move them all at once. You set a bunch of ranges of values, I should say, and have the model run itself again and again and again with changes in all of the variable values at once, to get a sense of like, okay, if there are kind of unexpected combinations of variable values, what does this do to the outcomes? You know, if, if China's missiles are both very accurate and US missile defenses are, you know, more effective than we assume, you know, it does that kind of thing. And that generates a thousand, we ran it a thousand times and present those results in the article. And again, the results are stable around our estimates.
Jeff Friedman: Thank you for that. Daryl, let's go back to you. I assume the US Air Force is aware of how important theater, land-based air power is, I assume they're aware of some vulnerabilities with it. What do you, what is the Air Force currently doing to reduce that vulnerability, and do you think those measures are likely to be successful?
Daryl Press: I think the US Air Force and increasingly the US military is highly aware of this growing problem and you know, the services are competing for alternative ways to provide this mission. The Air Force itself is working hard to try to innovate and create ways of operating theater air power in the region safely and effectively.
The most recent approach that they've created is something that they call Agile Combat Employment, or ACE. And the idea behind ACE is that rather than simply disperse to those 15 or 24 airfields that Nick was talking about, and then stay there through the duration of a war and operate from those bases, the Air Force's current plan is to distribute its air power during a war to some number of bases in the region, and then to leapfrog from base to base, either every few hours or every few days, to make it harder and harder for China to identify where they're currently operating from and therefore target.
Now, people have raised all kinds of questions about ACE, because as you could imagine, if you're preparing to operate from dozens and dozens of airfields in the region and simply leapfrog aircraft from one to another, it creates major logistical challenges and nightmares. But what Nick and I found through the modeling is that this ACE strategy, while innovative, has two huge problems at its heart.
Problem number one: If you're going have any strategy like ACE, which depends on operating from bases that China doesn't expect because you're into some bases, out of others, and then you switch around, by definition, it means you can't just operate from your biggest and best bases. Because that's the first place they're going to look.
And so what ACE means and any strategy which depends upon hiding where you're operating from, it means you're going to operate from a mix of very good big bases, and some medium-quality bases, and a bunch of pretty primitive bases, which in maritime East Asia are basically postage stamps. And so when you model ACE, to our surprise, what it means is US losses either remain constant or they go up.
And they go up because even if China can't find where we're operating from exactly, if they simply inefficiently blanket the bases we've prepared with missile fire, they waste a lot of missiles, but the aircraft that end up being deployed at small or medium-sized bases are just so vulnerable to the attacks that Nick was describing that the US losses are catastrophic.
So it really doesn't look to us that ACE works on its own kind of basis, on its own logic. The bigger issue is that if the way that we're going to operate air power safely in East Asia is depending on us preventing China from knowing which bases we're going to use, then it requires the United States to essentially turn off China's intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance capabilities, and its command and control, from the earliest moments of war.
Because if they can just look down at those bases and see where you're operating from, you can move around all you want in the theater and they're just going to see you as soon as you get to your new base. So the implication that Nick and I really highlighted there is that if we have an intense crisis over Taiwan, even if it's not a shooting war, and the United States does the responsible thing and reinforces its air power position in the region, US leaders are going to face tremendous pressure during that crisis to take the first step and blind Chinese ISR in the region because otherwise you're just leaving the better part of our air force exposed on airfields and vulnerable to basically a 21st century Pearl Harbor. So ACE seems to us to be both likely ineffective and highly escalatory in the sense that it pushes crises into wars.
Jeff Friedman: What do you think the Air Force should be doing instead of ACE? Does the model point to any more productive directions for protecting theater, land-based air power in the region?
Daryl Press: We tried everything, all those 36 different variables that Nick talked about, we dispersed to more or fewer bases. We operated from close air bases. We operated from the furthest back air bases. We clustered them, we dispersed them. We improved missile defense. We jammed local Chinese guidance. And I would say that they all produced different flavors of disaster, that none of those methods worked.
The only thing that the model told us had real promise is actually something that's a little bit counterintuitive, a little bit surprising, which is building old fashioned, hardened aircraft shelters at these bases. It's funny because it's, you know, reinforced concrete. It's concrete and rebar as a solution to 21st century electronics and missiles.
But hardening and building aircraft shelters is extremely effective, basically for two reasons. Number one is whereas aircraft in the open can be destroyed in mass, whereas a single missile positioned well can destroy three or four or five aircraft on the ground if they're sitting in the open, aircraft in shelters can still be destroyed, but the shelter has to be hit precisely.
And so what it essentially does is it changes the situation in which a single Chinese missile has a reasonable chance to destroy multiple US aircraft to a situation in which many Chinese missiles will be required to destroy a single US aircraft. So it's just a game of probabilities. If you put aircraft in shelters, they're still vulnerable. But it goes from one missile killing many to many missiles killing one. The other thing, and it's kind of more in the weeds, is by building shelters, you force China to change the kind of warheads on their missiles from these submunitions that blanket entire bases to unitary warheads that are designed to try to destroy a single shelter and a missile.
And when you put this together, you go from a world in which, as I described before, it's different flavors of disaster to a world, if we have a few hundred shelters at airfields across East Asia, it becomes quite plausible that the United States could accomplish a mission of defending Taiwan.
Jeff Friedman: Could China address that by just simply building more missiles? What's the economics of the arms race between the hardened shelters and the more missiles to take them out?
Daryl Press: Yeah, it's a great question. It turns out it's hard for China to build its way out of the shelter problem. And the simple reason is, it's close enough to say a nice shelter and a nice missile cost about the same amount of money. Maybe, you know, maybe one is twice as much as the other, but they're basically the same order of magnitude of expense, a good shelter and a good missile.
And yet, if you can do even a reasonably good job of jamming the guidance in the immediate vicinity of the air base, it might take seven or eight Chinese missiles on average to destroy each shelter. And so building shelters requires China to build many, many, many more missiles in response. And the economics just really don't work out for China.
Jeff Friedman: Nick, why do you think the Air Force is relying on the ACE method as opposed to hardening, if the latter seems to more liable to succeed?
Nick Anderson: To caveat, you know, this is speculative. We didn't do research on this question. We have, you know, some thoughts on it. So there have been some in the US government who have called for base hardening. So Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when he was in the Senate, sort of semi-regularly would give speeches or, you know, basically make calls for hardening America's air bases in Asia to deal with this problem.
So there are people around who are clearly aware this is a problem. I think there's a couple of possibilities why, you know, the US Air Force, US military hasn't gone this route. One is that, you know, it's basically spending millions of dollars to create construction jobs in places like Guam, Japan, and the Philippines, which is just like a hard sell in American domestic politics for, you know, legislators or for anybody else who has to make these decisions or fund this kind of program. So I think it's just not a politically popular, from a domestic politics standpoint, kind of pitch to harden bases across the region on non-US territories.
The second kind of possibility is that the US military over the past sort of, you know, generation has become very kind of what's known as sort of platform-centric. So sort of centered around these big, exquisite, fancy weapons systems. Things like, you know, aircraft carriers, things like fancy fifth-generation aircraft like the F-35. And every dollar you spend on reinforced concrete in Guam is a dollar that you can't spend, you know, getting a new F-35 or getting a new diesel-powered attack submarine.
And I just think that when they make those decisions that, you know, the US military has gotten into the habit of wanting to buy the stuff rather than wanting to buy things like passive defenses. Again, this is more speculative, but these are some possibilities for why the US hasn't gone down this route yet.
Jeff Friedman: I want to ask you about some more questions just to start zooming out a bit from your analysis. Nick, I mean obviously theater, land-based air power, while important, is just one set of military assets the United States has in the region. Are there other kinds of forces the United States could invest in, in order to help compensate for the vulnerabilities of its air power?
Nick Anderson: So there are alternatives. I mean, for sure. The jury is out on how effective they would be. But there are other things that the US could consider doing. So an alternative to hardening your bases and trying to remain in the region might be to consider going sort of long range, undersea, and then more kind of uninhabited or unmanned as you go forward. So the US, as many listeners probably know, is investing in a new long-range bomber, what's known as the B-21. The plan is to buy a hundred of these things. You know, odds are decent, well, there may be more kind of on the order, but the point is these are the kind of aircraft that could operate from much further away. The cost you pay is that it takes longer to get where you're going if you're operating from further away. But the benefit is that you are out of range, you can be out of range for lots of these missiles that China has. So, operating from further back with things like the B-21 could be good. You could use attack submarines and stay undersea. These are really, really survivable kinds of platforms. Really hard to find. Very, very good at sort of staying away. The US actually has quite a limited number of these because they're very, very expensive. But it's another thing that you could do in order to try and operate in the region, given that access has and may continue to become very, very difficult. And then there's, you know, a variety of surface, subsurface, and aerial drones and other uninhabited or unmanned systems that you could use, that would be kind of paired with some of these other platforms. Basically, if you went with this kind of route or with this combination, the plan would be not to operate significant surface- or ground-based forces in the region. It'd be like a move from sort of Okinawa and Guam back to Australia, Hawaii, and Alaska. But the jury is out as to whether this would be as effective or effective at all.
Jeff Friedman: What role would US allies play in the region in terms of helping to shore up the viability of land-based air power?
Nick Anderson: In the model, we assume that the US is able to operate from Japan and the Philippines, which, you know, neither of those things are certain, but that's the sort of assumption we make. And I think there's at least a reasonable chance that that would be the case. We don't assume that the US is able to operate from South Korea. Korea has, you know, sort of strictly limited its role in the US-Korea alliance to things that are happening on the Korean peninsula, contingencies involving North Korea, has been very reluctant to get I think what it would see as sort of dragged into a broader fight with China over Taiwan. The thing that South Korea does have is a very large number of hardened aircraft shelters. They have, you know, close to 800 hardened aircraft shelters, and they appear to have 2 hardened aircraft shelters for every modern fighter aircraft that they have. They have something like 350 fourth- and fifth-generation fighter aircraft, and as I said, nearly 800 hardened aircraft shelters.
So, this could provide or present an opportunity for the US and for Korean forces to bridge the US to a future in which it has its own hardened aircraft shelters. But for the time being, it could present an opportunity for the US to use these shelters in any sort of contingency and, you know, obviously some sort of broader agreement would have to be struck.
There's things that the South Koreans may want from us in the form of kind of defense, different kinds of defense technology perhaps, and obviously things that we could benefit from them in the form of HAS [hardened aircraft shelters]. The question is whether a broader agreement could be struck.
Jeff Friedman: One more question for each of you. Daryl, for you: You've been deeply involved in literature on US grand strategy for the last couple of decades, and I wonder if you could, at the broadest level, give us some sense of how your model speaks to questions about what America's role in East Asia should be, or how the United States should think about its position in that region.
Daryl Press: Yeah, this is the big-picture question. I'm glad you brought it back to this. The model doesn't give any answers about this. The model doesn't tell us what our role in the world should be or which allies are worth defending or even how dangerous China is geopolitically as it grows more powerful.
I think the broader geopolitical lesson that the model highlights is that, number one, the US foreign policy establishment, both kind of center-left Democrats, center-right Republicans, at least, have over the past five to ten years really signed onto this mission of managing China's rise, of bolstering our allies and our partners in East Asia and trying to shape and condition Chinese behavior in the region, to condition their behavior as a great power in the international system, which includes deterring and, if necessary, preventing partners who are attacked. I think that, at least at the civilian level, people haven't wrapped their heads around how difficult of a challenge this is. China is a superpower and we're talking about deterring or defeating attacks in their backyard.
And I would just highlight that the Soviet Union never had even 50% of US GDP. Wrap your head around that. The Soviet Union never had even 50% of US GDP. China has roughly 100%, and China is a world technological leader today. They're not a hundred feet tall. They have all kinds of vulnerabilities. There are all kinds of limitations in the current Chinese military, but the long-term challenge that we're accepting, of trying to deter attacks or defeat attacks in China's backyard, is one heck of a challenge.
And I'll tell you the truth—I'll speak for myself on this, not Nick; Nick can take a different view—I think that's generally a proper mission for the United States. I think it is important to manage China's rise in this region and to try to condition its behavior in the ways that we're talking about. But I think what the model says at the level of 20,000 feet is this will be an entire different level of difficulty than anything our generations have faced in terms of military challenges, and the model suggests that we shouldn't adopt these missions and we shouldn't posture these forces in a manner that is not fitting the level of challenge that we're facing.
So at the level of 10,000 or 20,000 feet, I would say: The model says that if we're going to do this mission this way, it's going to take a lot more effort, a lot more resources. Maybe it's time to try to think of more creative ways of doing this foreign policy mission. And if not, we have to ask ourselves, how committed are we as a country to managing the rise of China within East Asia?
Jeff Friedman: Thank you, Daryl. And finally, Nick, last question for you: What would you recommend listeners check out, read, listen to, if they want to learn more about the issue?
Nick Anderson: I have three book recommendations that I'll leave listeners with. The first is a classic in the area of military campaign analysis. It's Barry Posen's book Inadvertent Escalation. There is not a better introduction to campaign analysis and military modeling than this book. I would highly recommend, you know, listeners pick one up, and don't just read the book, read the appendix. And don't just read the appendix; I would strongly urge you to sort of break out an Excel spreadsheet or R or Python or whatever your software of choice is and try and replicate the things that Posen was doing in the late 1980s and early ’90s in this book. This is how I got into campaign analysis, like, sort of working my way through Posen’s book and trying to recreate what he was doing. And I think it's a great way for others to get introduced.
The second piece of literature I would recommend is The US-China Military Scorecard, a Rand Corporation—it's effectively a book, but it's a report. It's free online. Eric Heginbotham, who's also of MIT, is the lead author of that. And it's the—I think, you know, I speak for both of us when I say it's the best example of a sort of contemporary approach to these issues, you know, US, China, and Taiwan issues. I think it was by far the most important source of inspiration for us in this project specifically. So, strongly, strongly recommend that people read this. It was published in 2015, so in some ways it's showing its age in terms of the kind of, the specifics and the substance, but the approach is timeless, I think, in what they do here.
Third is a recent book by Fiona Cunningham at Penn. It's called Under the Nuclear Shadow. It's a really sophisticated account of China's development of missiles, cyber, and space and counterspace capabilities. The chapter on precision-guided missiles is especially relevant to what we're doing here, and it's one I will definitely return to again and again.
So I think those three books I'd highly recommend to listeners.
Jeff Friedman: Thank you Nick, and thank you Daryl. And thanks to everybody for listening to the International Security Podcast produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, published by MIT Press. If you like the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or share us on social media. That helps other people find the show. I'm Jeff Friedman. The executive editor of International Security is Jacqueline L. Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Thanks to Doug Scott at Tectonic Video for technical assistance. Our guests have been Nick Anderson and Daryl Press. See you next time.