Mastro, an assistant professor of Security Studies at the edmund a. Wilson school at Georgetown University and american scholar at American Enterprise institute. Shes the author of the cost of conversation, obstacles to peace talks in wartime. And she is currently working on a book about chans challenges to u. S. Primacy. Next we hear from a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and adjunct senior fellow at the center for new American Security and president and ceo of solarium llc, a defense consulting firm. Hes previously served as president of the center for strategic and budgetary assessments in a department of Defenses Office of net assessment and on the personal staff of three secretaries of defense. Hes the author of several books, most recently publishing the declines of deterrents earlier this year. Our third panelist is dr. Michael green who is a Senior Vice President for asia and japan chair at the center for strategic and International Studies csis as well as director of Asian Studies at the edmund a. Wilson school at Georgetown University. Were overrepresented by Georgetown University. Dr. Green has authored numerous books including by more than providence, grand strategy and American Power in the asiapacific since 1783. I ask all of our witnesses to keep your remarks to seven minutes. Dr. Mastro, well start with you. Thank you for having me here today. Ill highlight a few aspects of my written testimony and the major developments in the last year in Chinese Military modernization and focus on the sinorussian relationship and what it means for competition moving forward. In terms of regional activities, the one two big things i want to highlight here. The first that taiwan is still the driving scenario for the pla, and what this means is that training, procure president , reforms and reorganization all have implications for taiwan, so in the testimony i list a number of platforms that are coming online in the next year. For example, china has begun two years ago the construction of a new Nuclear Attack submarine and also have a new type of destroy their are expected to come online soon. These platforms along with the with the platforms they already have such as aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, Amphibious Assault ships, all can be used in scenarios to coerce, blockade, invade taiwan. The Chinese Air Force has also made a Significant Development that would have implications for taiwan. They are currently developing a new strategic stealth bomber, and they have a whole series of bombers, fighters, airlift and helicopters for the Ground Forces that are all scheduled to be online and ready to go by 2020. The Chinese Military development in this area is particularly certain by xi jinpings strident rhetoric on taiwan. In his new years speech he said unification is the ultimate goal of any talks in the future and based on this speech and subsequent speeches it seems to me that xi jinping no longer just demands that taiwan does not declare independence. Hes now demanding that theres concrete steps towards reunification. What this specifically means theres great uncertainty, but at the very least china probably wants to restart bilateral talks, and to do this they hope that the Political Party thats most amenable to this, that being the winner of the presidency in 2020. Theres exercises and greater scope in order to intimidate taiwan. The most recent happened in july after the United States announced an arms package. While taiwan has been the focus of the pla, the South China Sea has been a focus. In the past year we havent seen as much militarization happening and thats because a lot of the Land Reclamation militarization had happened before and we do consistently see the rotation of certain platforms on the islands, the j10 fighters coming in and out of the woody island and they are extending radar capabilities. They are increasing radar tempo in these waters which suggests they are practicing to have a more persistent presence in there. In july of 2019 china conducted a series of antiblimp tests in the islands this is the first time they conducted such a test over waterways versus over land. Beyond east asia, China Military activities have increased significantly during xis paper. The chinese 2019 white paper, china participated in 11 International Humanitarian aid and Disaster Relief operations, 100 International Joint exercises with 17 Different Countries and organizations and has been active in five peacekeeping operations overseas. In 2019 alone they have already conducted 13 of these joint exercises and humanitarian aid Disaster Relief operations which suggests this pace is increasing. Of significant concern i think is chinas increased military presence in africa which is primarily expanded through their first and only military base in djibouti. They also sell a lot of military equipment, drones and other surveillance equipment to africa. I think this is an area to be watched Chinese Military exports abroad. Also, future developments in china and the Pacific Islands and the arctic deserve to be watched, but right now, especially in the arctic, the focus to be mainly on energy, and china is increasing their corporation, military cooperation with the european nations, but, again, most of this is more for the image of improved relationships. The area think that is most concerning to people when you look at security developments is the chinarussia relationship and theres been a number of notable trends in this space that have been greatly covered in my testimony and other venures. Its true that china increased exercises, arm sales and diplomatic platitudes when it comes it their relationship with russia. I think this is not sufficient to suggest they are moving away from a relationship of convenience, and there are a number of obstacles to closer ties. Specifically china seize russia as a liability and is interested in being seen as more of a legitimate great power. Also, china russia still has relationships that china has poor relationship such as india and vietnam and while i think were being too alarmist about the relationship becoming cloergs, were not concerned enough about what even the smallest degree of improvement in this relationship would mean for the United States military, so i think the first thing is that it seems russia has accepted a junior partnership and this will change how we think about the cooperation moving forward. I always assumed it would have to be symmetric and while china is not willing to put its neck out for russia, russia wouldnt be willing to help china achieve its goal and with the joint patrol that the two did over the ilabs that maybe russia is willing to help china even if china is not willing to reciprocate this. Sparks a new trend in the relationship that might mean greater Russian Military involvement in asia which will complicate further u. S. Operations there. For china they like to posit themselves as being a force of peace in the world. Chinese defense white paper is not a National Security strategy in the way that the United States has a National Security strategy. Its written by for audiences and had a few main themes that they wanted foreigners to novem the first is that the Chinese Military is becoming much more comfortable with the global role and china and the party is becoming more comfortable with the pla becoming more involved in promoting and implementing this role. China also promotes itself as a force for peace while United States is an instigator of strategic competition and regional conflicts, arms racing, power politics, et cetera. And also the the white paper is interesting because while it tries to assuage concerns about its military modernization it had very harsh rhetoric for the first time about taiwan and the maritime disputes. The last point ill make is about the peer hand near peer compete for. I was asked whether china has reached the level of the United States, and i will just say that china does not need to be as sophisticated to challenge the United States. Were fighting a different war and have different challenges and im happy to go into that in the questions and answers. Also because deterrence resolves capabilities and resolve. If we have a balance of capabilities, that means we dont have a deterrent because china is much more resolved. They are willing to accept higher costs than the United States is in most contingencies and to maintain deterrence the United States actually has to have better capabilities so wed suffer less than china would. Also theres a difference in how to assess trends of today and the future. The issue isnt that china has overcome or surpassed the United States, the issue is given certain trends in the region china will soon be able to outmatch the United States and as we know on the global stage china is nowhere near being a peer competitor to the United States. So i have a number of recommendations in my testimony. Most of them focus on the South China Sea issue and the competition on the military sides between the two sides, i think the United States needs to prioritize a diplomatic solution with or without china, get all to agree on the sovereignty of the islands and what rights those islands give them and then have International Enforcement of them. I think the United States should consider protecting exclusive Economic Zone rights in their Alliance Commitments more clearly and improve or posture in Southeast Asia. Right now weve optimized for conflicts in northeast asia, not Southeast Asia and it will take a great deal of political will to have access in Southeast Asia, and think thats whats really needed at this time. Understandably, states dont really leaders are worried about doing this because they want to avoid a war with a european competitor but in my way the only way to prevent a war is deter chinese aggression. If chinas doubt our ability to fight they are more likely to rely on coercion and aggression and this is what will drag our two countries into a war. Because of this the United States needs to put all of its military resources behind maintaining a regional order even if it means taking a few risks to ensure its success. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to present my views on u. S. China relations. I give my background and expertise and ill focus my remarks on the military aspects of the relationship, and in particular look at three issues. First the military balance in the indopacific. Second the openended and longterm military competition between the United States and china and, third, aspects of deterrence. Its my opinion at present that the indopacific military balance appears favorable to the United States. That said, i havent seen anything in the Public Domain or in terms of military literature that comes close to the kind of analysis and assessment of the military balance that, for example, you saw during the latter stages of cold war between the United States and the soviet union. I think for us to really get a handle on what the true military balance is, there needs to be a rigorous set of regional and functional net assessments done looking at various key aspects of the competition between the United States and china. As the competition with china is openended, we also need to take a long view. Its not just a snapshot of the balance, its trends that are going to shape the balance over time and how can we improve our position, and using sir Michael Howards four dimensions of central artery. The logistical social operational and technical, its my preliminary assessment that the trends right now do not favor the United States, so while the current balance may be favorable, the trends are generally unfavorable. If you look the social dimension, the ability to mobilize and orient your population in dr. Watersels term to eat bitterness, if necessary, it seems as though the chinese have a distinct advantage over the United States, both in terms of our elites and in terms of the u. S. Public in general. Logistical or this beats to the scale of the challenge. If you look at lets just look at gdp. I know its just one element of national power, and we can get into others, but if you look at gdp alone, chinas gdp according to Current Exchange rates and the world bank is roughly twothirds that of the United States, and if you add russia, its about 80 . If you look at some of the historical data, which i admit is imperfect, you see that imperial germany in world war i, the axis powers in world war ii and soviet russia in the cold war never really exceeded roughly 40 of u. S. Gdp so if youre looking at the scale of the challenge, its roughly double in gdp terms in relative sense to what we saw in the great power challenges that we confronted during the course of the 20th century. And then when you add to that, looking at the cold war, for example, our advantage in allies, our advantage in manpower relative to soviet russia and also our advantage in technology, those advantages have either we areled considerably relative to china or perhaps have gone away entirely. What also interests me is given the scale of the challenge, if you look at some of the recent reports on u. S. Fiscal standing youll find that according to the Congressional Budget Office interest on the u. S. Debt which was 236 billion in fy17, will unless things change rise to about 915 billion or roughly 650 billion more over the course of the next decade. Thats tax money coming in thats got to go out to service the debt. The Social Security and Medicare Trust funds late 2020s, early 2030s will be exhausted, and state and local governments have roughly 5 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities. Cbo in my estimation estimate is about 2. 5 of usgdp will be available for defense in a cold war against a 40 soviet russia, we averaged over 6 , so were going to average less than half of that against a set of rivals that is roughly 880 of our gdp. So in terms of scale, it seems as though the trends are negative. In terms. Technical and operational dimensions, one of the things that Senior Leaders in the pentagon worry about is circumstances in which there could be a disruptive shift in the military about. All of a sudden things look very different, and we find that with the difficuefusion there are potentially two disruptive shifts in the balance that the u. S. Military has to worry about. One is what the pentagon calls the maturing precision strike regime. We had a near monopoly and precision strike warfare since the first golf war. The chinese are clearly catching up. We havent seen them put it into practice and certain a number of capabilities and what they have accomplished are impressive and so with our military, looking for the precision strike reseem were losing a Major Military advantage. So is this the new normal . Are we going to be shut out of certain parts of the indopacific as the chinese capabilities mature, or is there a different way to project power in the second disruptive shift could occur with an emerging military revolution. Everything from Artificial Intelligence and manufacturing and advances in the biosciences and directed energy, hypersonics, Nano Technology an kwaundium computing and advanced robotics suggests that theres quite a high likelihood that the kind of warfare waged in the mid2030s will be very different, even from what we anticipate today, and so that is a source of Great Potential advantage for us but also a potential source of great weakness if the chinese get it right before we do. Opera