Thank you for your service. It is an honour to be here at Carlisle Barracks.
Carlisle has trained America’s military leaders since 1757, which makes it older than both your country and certainly mine.
At the outset I stress that I am speaking in my private capacity today, not my formal role as Australian Ambassador to the US.
When your War of Independence was yet a distant prospect, and before the British First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove in 1788, Carlisle was here, protecting the Susquehanna River and the approaches to the city of Philadelphia during the French and Indian War.
Carlisle’s motto is ‘Prudens Futuri’, or ‘strength and wisdom for the future’.
That strength and that wisdom was on full display when President Eisenhower – a graduate from the US Army War College class of 1928 – prevented catastrophic war between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China during the first and second Taiwan Strait crises in the 1950s.
We are in need of that same strength and wisdom today as we prepare for the great strategic challenges that now lie ahead in once more preventing a catastrophic war across the Taiwan Straits.
My purpose today is to offer a small contribution to this great task of how to deter China from resorting to unilateral military action to take Taiwan.
My particular purpose today is to outline what a strategy of deterrence through ‘denial’ might mean in practice, how such a strategy might be directed in relation to the Chinese leadership, and how in particular it might be perceived by the PLA.
This is a question I have considered for many years as a life-long China scholar, and it is in that capacity that I talk to you today.
The Necessity of Deterrence
Over the past year I’ve sought to explore the doctrine of deterrence (or as the Chinese call it, ‘weishe’ 威慑) in an effort to identify core differences between Chinese and US understandings of the concept.
At the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, then with INDOPACOM in Honolulu, then the National Defense University in Washington DC, and most recently at the US Naval War College in Newport, I have tried to unpack individual elements of the overall deterrence equation.
At the National War College, I examined the Chinese concept of ‘weishe’, which is much broader than the western concept of deterrence, as it includes a combination of deterrence, compellence and dissuasion through calculated escalation.
At the Naval War College, I looked at the Chinese concept of ‘effective control’, or youxiao kongzhi 有效控制, which represents the conceptual machinery for operationalising the Chinese theory of deterrence. I explored how China seeks, through maintaining ‘effective control’, to manage escalation seamlessly through the deterrence and compellence phases, including the possibility of limited kinetic activity to force an adversary to stop what they are doing, rather than just preventing them from doing it in the first place.
In my Honolulu address, I looked at specifically China’s grey-zone campaign against Taiwan in its pursuit of ‘all measures short of war’, and the lessons China may be learning as it encounters little to no real pushback in its grey-zone campaign, and where it seems deterrence has thus far proven to be ineffective.
Finally, from a US and allied perspective, at Annapolis I looked at the concept of integrated deterrence, including economic, technological, military, foreign policy and ideological elements, as well as the role of US allies and partners.
The Trump Administration and Deterrence
President Trump and his team have made clear that the core strategic focus of US defence and deterrence policy will be the Indo-Pacific.
Two weeks ago Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that one of his goals was to ‘re-establish deterrence in the warrior ethos’. He said that ‘if we want to deter war with China or others, we must be strong’. The Secretary said this meant ‘we need the defense spending, we need the capabilities, the weapons and the posture in the Indo-Pacific, which is where we’re focused’.
For Secretary Rubio’s part, during his confirmation hearing, he said of China that “a lack of deterrence is an invitation to war, an invitation to hostility… deterrence is critical not just to defending Taiwan, but also to preventing a cataclysmic military intervention in the Indo-Pacific”.
Mike Waltz, the President’s National Security Adviser, has been no less clear. After he was nominated to the position, NSA Waltz said that the US must “finally focus strategic attention where it should be – countering the greater threat from China”.
He said that the new Administration “should increase defence spending and revitalise the defence industrial base to make sure its armed forces are clearly capable of denying a Chinese attack on Taiwan… by doing so, the US can end ongoing conflicts and restore deterrence, stability and peace”.
The China Challenge in the Decade of Living Dangerously
The scale, scope and speed of China’s military build-up is without historical precedent.
Just last week, at China’s annual Two Sessions, deputies approved a 7.2 per cent increase to China’s defence budget.
This is well above China’s annual GDP growth target of 5 per cent, and even further above China’s actual GDP growth rate, which is probably closer to 2 or 3 per cent.
China’s lack of transparency means that the real figure of its defence spend is likely to be much higher.
China’s development of a blue-water navy, its growing number of platforms such as aircraft carriers with significant force projection capabilities, in addition to its missile force with ultra-long-range nuclear and conventional strike capabilities, does not square with Beijing’s professed intent to merely protect its interests in its near abroad.
China’s pattern of military exercises also give rise to strategic concern.
This includes last month’s live-fire exercises a few hundred miles off Australia’s eastern seaboard, and a week before, unsafe encounters with Australian aircraft in the skies above international waters in the South China Sea.
China has made plain across multiple public statements its fundamental opposition to Australia’s steadfast support for, and active engagement in:
- Our Alliance with the United States, which reaches back three- quarters of a century;
- Our AUKUS partnership with the US and the UK to buy and build nuclear powered, conventionally armed attack class submarines;
- Our Quad strategic partnership with the US, India and Japan;
- Our Royal Australian Navy operations in the South China Sea in support of freedom of navigation principles under international maritime law, and, most relevant to this address;
- Our regular Royal Australian Navy transits of the Taiwan Straits.
Recent PLA naval operations should therefore be seen in the wider context of our expanding operations with the United States across the Pacific theatre.
While China’s growing military capabilities and deployments test us all, it is Taiwan which remains the focus of China’s planning.
And China’s program of political, economic and military coercion against Taiwan continues to expand.
If we were to plot most indices of China’s campaign of grey-zone coercion against Taiwan on a graph, it would look over the last few years like a 45-degree line, going inexorably up.
The PLA Air Force has eroded the concept of a centre-line in the Taiwan Strait.
The PLA Navy has rehearsed a blockade around Taiwan’s main island.
China’s Coastguard has drilled a quarantine of incoming and outgoing commercial shipping around Taiwan.
The PLA Rocket Force has fired missiles over Taiwan’s main island.
The PLA Army has run urban warfare simulations where it battles in full-scale replicas of Taipei’s downtown, including Taiwan’s Presidential Building.
And every week there is another report of a Chinese balloon drifting over Taiwan, something that may sound familiar to residents of rural Montana.
China is building the infrastructure required of a joint force operation across the Taiwan Straits.
Last month, media reported that China was building in the Beijing suburbs a military command centre at least ten times larger than the Pentagon.
It is increasingly apparent that the PLA is not simply exercising, but rather rehearsing and preparing for a forced unification with Taiwan.
China has studied US joint warfighting doctrine and practice and is also applying those lessons to its own forces.
Timetabling over Taiwan
That is not to say that China is pre-committed to take military action or to start a full-scale war.
Rather, that China wants to be ready if and when Beijing concludes the use of force appears to be the only available option – and for them a viable option – to achieve what they define as the critical national goal of unification.
Our job is for Beijing to see that option as too costly to itself.
As we move towards the end of this decade, China will increasingly look at its military capabilities, those of the US and its allies, and those of the Taiwanese armed forces, all against political developments in Taiwan itself.
It is worth recalling that China’s domestic Anti-Secession Law of March 2005 states that China will take military action against Taiwan when all possibilities for peaceful unification are exhausted.
It will also be recalled that in October 2020 at the 5th Plenum of the 19th Central Committee, President Xi set the date of 2027 as the date for the Chinese military to “achieve the centennial military building goal” – ie. the centenary of the founding of the PLA in 1927. And the accelerated modernisation of the force across mechanisation, informatisation and intelligentisation.
Taiwan’s next presidential election will be in January of 2028. 2028 could well be a key milestone for Beijing. If Beijing interprets the results of that election as a further setback in its quest to bring Taiwan into China’s orbit, then it could well be tempted to deploy unilateral military options as outlined in its Anti-Secession Law.
It is then that China may well consider when and where its Overton window for action against Taiwan might lie.
As noted above, the factors that would likely be embraced within China’s decision-making framework on unilateral military action would include the following:
- China’s own military capabilities to successfully execute the mission;
- Taiwanese capabilities to resist, at least in the first instance;
- US and Japanese capabilities to resist, disrupt and defeat;
- US, Japanese and Taiwanese political will;
- Wider allied and international military and economic and foreign policy reactions.
One further consideration in all of the above is that at Taiwan’s next election in January 2028, China’s President Xi Jinping would be 74 years old. Not old in Chinese terms, certainly, especially when his mother is still alive at age 98. Deng Xiaoping lived until he was 92.
But also no longer with time to waste. His concerns about his legacy would be growing.
It could start with a test of Taiwanese immediate resolve.
Beijing may move against a small offshore island or maritime feature such as the Jinmen, Matsu, Taiping or Pratas islands administered by Taiwan to demonstrate Taipei’s relative impotence in sustaining its territorial claims.
These islands did not fall under the historic protection of the previous US-Taiwan Mutual Defense Treaty. And there is nothing within the US Taiwan Relations Act about them.
This would test Taiwanese resolve – and be designed to demonstrate to the Taiwanese people - through absence of an effective response - that their government was powerless and that it was better to seek political terms from Beijing.
Seizing an offshore island would not preclude other, more substantive military actions such as imposing a military blockade.
Nor would a blockade ultimately substitute for a full-scale military invasion of Taiwan if Taipei’s response to escalatory grey-zone and then openly military actions was still to reject political negotiations on political union with China.
Calibrating Deterrence Towards the Chinese Leadership
This brings us to the question of who exactly in China we are seeking to deter.
Is deterrence aimed at China’s political leadership?
At the Central Military Commission?
At the Eastern Theater Command?
Or all of the above?
The specialist literature from scholars like Heginbotham and Mazarr suggests that effective deterrence must reach across all layers of leadership.
We need to create a deterrent architecture that speaks to every echelon of decision-making in Beijing.
That requires clarity, consistency, and credibility. So how then do we deter?
Colleagues at the RAND Corporation have identified five possible theories of victory for the US and its allies in any conflict with China.
But one credible theory of deterrence to emerge from this study is anchored in a strategy of denial.
In other words, to deter China, Beijing needed to be convinced that it could not successfully take Taiwan as the capabilities that directly supported the invasion, such as sea- and air-lift assets, would be destroyed.
We must emphasise again the distinction between deterrence through denial of the physicality of an invasion; and deterrence through post-facto retaliation against and/or punishment of the aggressor.
Denial means making aggression physically infeasible – through superior defense, technology, and posture, thereby deterring the would-be aggressor from acting in the first place.
Importantly, deterrence by denial would not offer the pyrrhic satisfaction of a total surrender by the opposing force and/or the removal of the opposing regime (ie. the CCP).
Successful deterrence by denial will be an ongoing process with no real end-point in sight, absent the peaceful resolution of the conflict by political means.
As part of a doctrine of deterrence through denial, various levels of strategic reassurance must also be part of the equation.
We must pair our deterrent posture with credible diplomatic reassurance mechanisms concerning Taiwan’s future – namely that the rest of the world does not support a legally independent Taiwan.
Nor do we support public assertions by Taiwan that could be judged by Beijing to amount to declarations of independence.
Nonetheless, language aside, China will act not on what we say, but on what we do, and what the Chinese leadership believe we will do.
They are watching our domestic politics, our military budgets and our strategic alliances.
They are reading our formal capability assessments and they read our op-eds.
Every signal matters across the overall deterrence equation.
The key then is for us to signal sustained military strength reinforced by sustained political resolve.
This can be done without being reckless, although the line between deterrence and provocation is thin and we must walk it with care.
To do this, deterrence should be accompanied by direct and senior political engagement with, and messaging to, Beijing.
China’s Ideological and Strategic Intentions
If, like me, you choose to spend your spare time trudging through the turgid texts of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideological journals, you will see that it is still a profoundly Marxist-Leninist party.
It has a rigid ideology.
And its overall Marxist-Leninist-Nationalist worldview we ignore at our peril.
All CCP leaders are taught Mao Zedong’s dictum that power flows from the barrel of a gun.
As a corollary, at their core, all Chinese leaders are Clauswitzians – they view war as the continuation of politics by other means.
For some, it has became fashionable to say that China’s leaders are risk averse.
But China’s leaders are not risk averse.
They are not reckless risk-takers.
They are calculated risk-takers.
Look at the calculated risk strategy underpinning China’s campaign of land reclamation in the South China Sea in 2014-2015.
The CCP’s focus is constantly on calculating risk, which they – uniquely among major powers – purport to be able to determine scientifically on the basis of military science informed by an underlying dialectical analysis of contending forces.
Our central deterrence task is therefore to ensure that, in each of China’s calculations, across their total risk spectrum, the possibility of being defeated is still too great for them to pull the lever in the first place.
That is deterrence by denial in practice.
Or what I call the doctrine of SMTX. The ‘Shaving Mirror Test of Xi Jinping’, whereby every morning President Xi asks himself if China could succeed in a military operation across the Taiwan Strait. For which the desired response for preserving the peace is ‘no’.
How does China see the United States and its allies?
In the Taiwan context, China sees the US network of alliances and partnerships as a force multiplier against it.
China recognises that Japan’s role is pivotal – not only in logistical and operational terms, but as a strategic fulcrum of US deterrence architecture.
It sees Japan’s revision of its pacifist constitution, its new strategy of ‘counterstrike’ capabilities, its strengthened deployments to its southern islands, and its acquisition of more potent land strike capabilities as the introduction of worrying new uncertainties by an old foe.
China sees the Quad as a worrying development, particularly in terms of future deployments of Indian capabilities – both along the Sino-Indian border, in the Indian Ocean, and beyond.
Similarly, China sees initiatives such as AUKUS and the arrival of a new fleet of Australian attack class submarines as problematic.
As allies, we must not merely support deterrence.
We must shape it, adapt it, and signal its credibility through real commitments.
This means more multilateral exercises, integrated command structures, and resilient supply chains.
Geopolitical shifts around the world, the covid pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the election of the Trump Administration and the new dynamics injected into the military equation by artificial intelligence, unmanned platforms and robotic warfare, have also introduced new uncertainties into China’s risk-calculation matrix.
For example, the PLA sees the war in Ukraine as a strategic lesson (ie. the diffusion of US strategic effort). It sees it as a tactical opportunity (to learn from the battlespace, particularly as it relates to drones). It also sees it as a political warning in terms of the unexpectedly robust response from a coalition of the willing which is seen as an unwelcome precedent in China’s eyes.
Across all these geopolitical risk and opportunity factors (be they political, military and technological), the object of deterrence through denial is to cause all layers of the Chinese political and military leadership apparatus to conclude that the risks of use of force or war continue to outweigh the opportunities for Beijing, even as their think-tanks go to work on the opportunities they may see as opening up for unilateral military action after 2027.
This is how deterrence through denial needs to work in practice over the next two to three years.
Because should deterrence fail, leading to crisis, conflict and war, the consequences for us all (China, the US, Taiwan and the world at- large) would be catastrophic.
The PLA as an Object of Deterrence
So how does the PLA view its unique strengths and weaknesses in the realm of conventional deterrence?
Is the PLA on track to achieve force modernisation while also undergoing its own relentless internal anti-corruption campaign?
Is the PLA ready to execute a blockade or amphibious invasion of Taiwan, given the vast challenge of geography and the possibility of American intervention?
The Centre for China Analysis at the Asia Society among a number of other US think-tanks has been hard at work on these questions.
The PLA is the Party’s army, and the Xi Jinping era has been marked by a greater degree of personalised command than any leadership period since Mao.
Shortly after ascending to China’s Presidency, Xi moved decisively to deal with three key problems in the Chinese armed forces. He saw a loss of focus of the core mission of the PLA; he saw declining morale; and he saw rampant corruption.
Xi sought to remedy these problems by making the PLA able to “fight and win battles (neng da shengzhang, 能打胜仗),” and bolstered its political reliability, or what Xi calls “having a good work style” (zuofeng youliang, 作风优良).
In 2015, Xi re-organised the PLA to create joint theatre commands, to create greater Central Military Commission control over the PLA, and to modernise the PLA to become a modern, tech-infused military.
Against these three objectives, problems however persist to this day.
During a CMC political work conference in Yan’an in June 2024, Xi demanded “strictness” in the PLA ranks, saying: “strictness can only correct discipline, strictness can only strengthen the military's prestige, and strictness can only produce combat effectiveness.”
During the meeting, Xi also called on the PLA to “forge a high- quality cadre team that is loyal, clean, responsible,” and to “eradicate the soil and conditions for the breeding of corruption.”
These are clear signals that absolute loyalty to the Party has not yet been achieved, and that significant pockets of corruption remain a problem.
In just the last two years, for example, Xi has removed over a dozen senior PLA officials.
These include, most prominently:
- the purge of Admiral Miao Hua, former director of the CMC Political Work Department;
- the purge of the two most recent Ministers of National Defense, Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe;
- as well as senior members of the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF), including PLARF commander Li Yuchao; and
- the Equipment Development Department of the PLA, responsible for defence procurement.
To put this into context, Xi has removed seven current and
former members of the CMC since becoming Chairman of the CMC in 2012. That’s a lot.
Indeed, it is unprecedented in modern Chinese history.
Corruption within the equipment procurement process will invariably affect weapons systems cycles and the integration of those systems within the PLA.
Moreover, if the downfall of PLARF commander Li Yuchao and his subordinates is related to intelligence leaks, as media reports have suggested, then there could also be further trouble within China’s nuclear forces.
Corruption in the top echelons of the PLA remains a central challenge for Xi, and he is devoting significant time and resources to shore up discipline in the PLA.
But challenges around corruption and questions around PLA loyalty would not in and of themselves dissuade Xi from pulling the lever on Taiwan if he felt compelled to act – or if other factors across his overall calculus suggested adequate PLA capability combined with the right strategic context.
New technologies, notably AI and autonomous systems, are central to China’s own evolving deterrence strategy as Beijing seeks to impose new costs for the US in the event it was to intervene in a military contingency.
The PLA is focused on what it calls “intelligentized (zhineng hua,智能化)” warfare, leveraging tech-laden systems to enable faster decision-making and enhancing command-and-control capabilities.
This could potentially give China a greater confidence in its own deterrence posture.
China’s advancements in cyber and space capabilities further reinforce Chinese concepts of deterrence against the US by expanding the PLA’s ability to disrupt US operations and nullify US technological superiority while securing its own military networks.
The weaponisation of space further complicates deterrence dynamics by threatening strategic assets critical for both conventional and nuclear stability.
Chinese public scholarship also highlights US concerns that AI- driven early warning systems could indeed accelerate the nuclear decision-making process, and thereby increase the risk of miscalculation.
This means that in any future conflict over Taiwan, emerging technologies may blur the conventional-nuclear threshold, making it more difficult for planners in Beijing and Washington to clearly ascertain deterrence signals and intent.
Intelligentized warfare, cyber operations, space-based capabilities, and integration of AI into new platforms create new uncertainties about escalation control.
How these new and emerging technologies are integrated into strategic nuclear deterrence will become a central factor for any contingency involving China, Taiwan and the United States.
For these reasons, ‘human-in-the-loop’ protocols are urgently needed in both China and the US if mutual deterrence is to be strengthened, rather than undermined.
In sum, many in the overall deterrence equation, the PLA’s self- perception of its own capabilities is layered with both confidence and anxiety.
On the positive side of the ledger for the PLA, it enjoys stable funding, strategic focus, and growing capabilities in amphibious, cyber, space, and AI-enabled warfare.
On the negative side of the ledger, internal PLA assessments reflected in Chinese military journals reveal deep concern over joint operability, logistical sustainability, and an evolving but incomplete understanding of modern warfare's complexity.
Furthermore, the PLA lacks meaningful recent combat experience compared to the United States.
Despite technological strides, the PLA is likely to retain deep uncertainties about its capacity for sustained, multidomain combat operations – especially in a Taiwan contingency involving US and allied forces.
And of course all of the above sits against the backdrop of Xi’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign – a campaign that has created internal instability within the senior ranks, compromising cohesion even as modernisation accelerates.
Deterrence strategists must therefore understand this dichotomy: a force that is emboldened yet brittle, brazen yet insecure, professional but still burdened by corruption. It is not a simple picture.
And the balance between self-perceived strengths and weaknesses can easily be disturbed if there are sudden changes in the external threat perception environment – particularly in relation to any changes in American capabilities and intentions.
We must all, therefore, maintain absolute vigilance in sustaining and enhancing the credibility of our combineddeterrence posture.
The Way Forward
The PLA remains deterrable, but only if we stay ahead – militarily, technologically, strategically, tactically and psychologically.
In short, the signal attribute of effective deterrence is to deny China’s political and military leadership the level of certainty they seek before pulling the lever on unilateral action.
We must also recognise that Chinese strategic thinking diverges from ours in a number of dangerous ways.
Its doctrine assumes that its own deterrent actions can be escalated to the kinetic realm without losing control. Although China usually prefers to message threats through dialogue, it removes dialogue as a retaliatory tool, and then assumes that it can signal its intentions to the other side through aggressive military escalation in the absence of dialogue.
This rests on the flawed assumption that it can intimidate an adversary without provoking that adversary into action.
For China, this is a large strategic gamble, predicated on assumptions about US restraint, the hesitation of US allies and partners and an ability to intimidate, which are unlikely to be borne out in practice.
In fact, it is the strategic equivalent of lighting a match at a gas station.
That is why continued, effective deterrence based on a credible strategy of denial is fundamental to preserving the peace.
Let us be clear, if deterrence over Taiwan was to fail, it would have catastrophic consequences for the people of Taiwan. It would have catastrophic consequences for the global economy (not least through the denial of the semiconductor technologies uniquely provided by TSMC).
It would be catastrophic in terms of potential loss of life to US and allied militaries.
It would be catastrophic for China and the CCP to suffer defeat of any unilateral military action on their part.
And finally, if the US and its allies were instead defeated (or else, failed to respond) in response to a kinetic strike on Taiwan, it would effectively mean the collapse of the United States as a credible global power across the Indo-Pacific theatre and probably beyond as other powers then sought their security elsewhere or by other means.
Prevention of such a catastrophic conflict, therefore, is of fundamental interest to us all.
And the core strategic tool by which to prevent any such conflict remains deterrence through denial, reinforced by adept diplomacy to ensure that all necessary messages are being communicated at the highest levels and without ambiguity.
The US and its allies and partners must therefore continue to double down within the Indo-Pacific theatre on our capabilities, our integration of new technologies, and in the overall enhancement of our deterrent posture.
The goal is not confrontation.
It is, as President Trump has said, peace through strength.
Indeed, a sustainable peace through sustained military, economic and technological strength.