We assume that China will try to replace America as a global military power because we think that the Chinese are as stupid as we are. America has carried the burden of empire without the associated benefits. Rome took up to a quarter-million slaves per year for its latifundia, the Spanish Empire looted the precious metals of the New World, and Britain covered its current account deficit by selling Indian opium to China. We’ve spent $7 trillion since 9/11 to remake the world in our image, with nothing to show for it. The same sort of narcissism infects our thinking about China: because we project power in a certain way, we believe that any strategic competitor will do the same.  

In Upstart: How China Became a Great Power, Oriana Mastro offers a salutary corrective to this kind of thinking. She argues persuasively that China has taken a different path to power than the United States, suited to its own capabilities and conditions. A soldier-scholar at Stanford’s Institute for International Studies who enlisted in the Air Force early in her academic career, Mastro lays to rest some preconceived notions that afflict American thinking about Chinese military objectives. China, she writes, has adopted “an entrepreneurial strategy,” meaning that China does things its own way for its own purposes. China has a unique set of objectives and military doctrines to support them; it does not seek to emulate America’s global power projection. To the extent that it has—for example, in building aircraft carriers—it has misspent its resources. 

***

The U.S. followed its own entrepreneurial strategy after World War II. Rather than establish colonies as the European empires did, observes Mastro, “Washington decided…to rely largely on projecting power sporadically from bases located in allied countries.” These absorb 13% of active-duty personnel (down from 26% in 2008), in “approximately 120 bases and major installations in forty-five countries.” 

China, by contrast, has just one overseas military base in Djibouti, with 800 Marines deployed for anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. “A global military presence would not cater to China’s competitive advantages,” Mastro avers. The gravest dangers America has faced have usually been far from its shores. China’s leaders see the worst threats to their country nearby in East Asia. It is simply not in China’s interest to spend lavishly on far-flung military excursions and overseas commitments. 

For that reason, writes Mastro, “China’s expeditionary capabilities have also remained relatively limited.” China first introduced a large transport aircraft in 2016. To protect overseas interests it relies “on host nation security forces, overseas police presence, private security contractors,” and other means. China wants five overseas bases by 2030, according to an intelligence assessment leaked to the media. “The US anxiety about Chinese basing is predictable,” Mastro concludes, but “it is important to note that despite all the concern, nearly twenty years after the first alarms rang about China’s desire for a ‘string of pearls,’ or a network of bases throughout the Indian Ocean, there is still only one permanent overseas presence” for its army. Mastro might have added that China has just 30,000 Marines against our 177,000, and just 12,000 Special Operations personnel against our 70,000. 

***

China is enhancing its overseas capabilities, but in a fashion very different from our own. Although Chinese firms, for example, operate terminals near many strategic chokepoints, Mastro argues “it is clear from Chinese discourse and behavior as well that the country has deliberately avoided mimicking US strategy over the past thirty years.” An exception that proves the rule is China’s aircraft carrier program, which will field ten ships by 2049. Mastro thinks this is “inadvisable emulation” because “the carrier is no longer the fortress it once was; the advent of sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) networks and precision-guided munitions seriously undermines the aircraft carrier’s utility for power projection.” 

Antiship missiles give China a decisive advantage in its home theater, Mastro explains:

Most countries cannot target from their shores a moving ship at sea, especially one as heavily defended as a carrier. But China is an exception. The PLA’s terminally guided ASBM [anti-ship ballistic missile] is designed to neutralize “slow-moving targets at sea,” which are almost certainly US carriers. Given the DF-21D’s estimated range, China may be able to keep the US carriers and their aircraft well outside their most effective operating range in a regional contingency. Even if US aircraft manage to get in the air, they will still be at risk from a robust Chinese air defense system. 

The result, according to Mastro, is that “by denying the US the ability to conduct air operations over the Taiwan Strait, China could blockade the island and continue launching strikes on Taiwan and US Navy ships indefinitely.” 

That is a critical point. American strategists like to speculate about a prospective Chinese landing on the island, with landing craft traversing 90 miles of the Taiwan Strait, because they can make a credible case for defense against an invasion. China isn’t foolish enough to play by these rules. With several thousand precision-targeted ballistic missiles, several hundred fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft, 60 submarines, and a very large supply of cruise missiles, China can blockade Taiwan, which has about three weeks’ storage capacity for the natural gas that provides most of its electricity. 

***

Mastro’s assessment runs counter to conventional wisdom in the conservative camp on several counts. Elbridge Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Trump Pentagon, argued in the journal Nikkei Asia last year:

The military forces Beijing is constructing are manifestly designed for distant power projection, not solely for flexing muscles in China’s neighborhood, let alone mere territorial defense. Beijing is developing nuclear-powered submarines and large aircraft carriers. These are the quintessential elements of a blue-water navy able, like the U.S. Navy, to project decisive power not just in near seas but far and wide beyond them…. China is developing long-range aircraft and the refueling tankers to sustain their operations, a stronger marine corps and the rest of the appurtenances of a long-range military…. China is also actively pursuing the establishment of military bases far beyond its shores.

These diametrically opposed views of China’s capabilities and intentions reflect the great gulf between the Air Force—where Mastro is a reserve officer and strategic planner—and the Navy, which wants to build more surface ships, despite their obvious vulnerability to Chinese missiles. Mastro argues convincingly that antiship missiles and ISR make a great deal of the surface fleet obsolete. She thinks that China’s carrier program is a waste of effort, while Colby cites it as evidence of China’s desire to emulate America’s global power projection. 

This is an old argument. When I consulted for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment in the early 2010s, its director, Andrew Marshall, insisted that Chinese antiship missiles could sink American carriers. Since then, China’s missile force has grown enormously in quantity and quality. The Navy dismissed this assessment by Marshall, who had closer ties to the Air Force. The interservice rivalry is understandable. If Mastro is right (and I am convinced that she is), the Navy has wasted trillions of dollars of taxpayer money building the wrong sort of fleet. 

***

The future of America’s defense posture turns on the resolution of this debate. Victor Davis Hanson observes in his book The Second World Wars (2017) that all the major powers built too many battleships and too few carriers until the Japanese and British demonstrated that inexpensive dive bombers and torpedo planes could sink what were then the costliest capital assets of every combatant. After Pearl Harbor, not a single keel was laid for a new battleship, and aircraft carriers ruled the seas. Technology has now written the obituary of the carrier, at least in conflict with a peer adversary. That is what makes Mastro’s book so valuable. She combines an expert understanding of the relevant weapons technology with deep insights into China’s strategic thinking, in contrast to the naïve assumption that China’s intentions are the Bizarro image of ours.  

Mastro also dismisses the notion that China’s economic policy can’t succeed because it is unlike ours. “China has achieved an impressive level of innovation thanks in part to its industrial policy,” she writes, citing research that China’s “innovation and advanced-industry capabilities” have risen to 75% of American levels versus 58% in 2010. She quotes a Pentagon report concluding that China’s commitment to telecom infrastructure “will allow China to promote its preferred standards and specifications for 5G networks.” Most of all, Mastro explains, 

China’s approach to innovation and economic ties with the developing world has diverged from the US model of free enterprise and foreign development assistance…. As a result, China is becoming less reliant on the world, and the world is becoming more reliant on China. This has created unparalleled leverage for Beijing that the West is struggling to replicate.

Since the COVID-19 recession of 2020, China has doubled its exports to the Global South. That has not only circumvented American tariffs on Chinese goods, as Chinese components pass through third countries for final assembly and sale to the U.S., but also cemented China’s economic relationships with the largest and potentially most productive developing nations, including Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand. American strategic analysts for the most part give scant attention to the developing world; Mastro, to her credit, emphasizes its strategic importance.  

Mastro presents a China that pursues its strategic interest after its own fashion, dominating its home theater with antiship missiles and related surveillance, embedding itself in the economies of the Global South, and excelling in an increasing number of high-technology industries. China, in her judgment, will avoid direct confrontation with the United States while building its global leverage through trade, technology, and investment. If anything, she underplays the challenge: China now graduates more engineers than the rest of the world combined and has massive resources to apply to civilian as well as military technologies. 

If Mastro’s characterization of Chinese intentions and capabilities is broadly correct, how should the United States respond? Her suggestions seem restrained in comparison with her depiction of China’s power. She would like to have more bombers based in Asia with more overfly rights in adjacent countries. She asks, “How can the US defense industry be restructured to allow for the mass production of the munitions needed for possible contingencies in Asia?” But she does not ask the obvious follow-up question: if China’s missiles control its coastline out to a thousand miles, how will we send those munitions to where they might be used? She proposes more support for countries like Australia which have been subject to punitive economic actions by China, and hopes that U.S. diplomacy will work in resolving disputes over the sovereignty of various islands in Southeast Asia. 

***

Every book can’t do everything, to be sure, and Mastro has given us sufficient information to draw the main policy conclusions. China’s rise to great power status and its preeminence in crucial technologies should spur us to a national effort to restore American technological leadership, on the scale of John F. Kennedy’s Moonshot or Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. 

Precision-targeted antiship missiles are a game-changer. We have built the wrong sort of navy to challenge China in its home theater, and the worst thing we could do is to double down on this misallocation of resources. Although Mastro does not discuss the economics of missile defense, it is a matter of arithmetic that the United States can’t go on using million-dollar interceptors to defend against $10,000 drones. Alternative technologies, including drone swarms to counter drone attacks as well as directed-energy weapons, are a possible solution. It is scandalous that the Pentagon’s budget for directed-energy weapons research is less than $800 million for Fiscal Year 2024, the price of a handful of fighter planes. 

At the peak of Apollo program spending in 1965, one out of eight dollars spent by the U.S. federal government went to research and development. Today, the total is closer to one in 50. Minor adjustments to the defense budget, like “prioritizing” Asia over Europe, won’t move the needle. We require a radical reorientation of our thinking about defense. Oriana Skylar Mastro deserves high praise for helping us to understand why this is so.