The reason China is the pacing challenge for the Defense Department is because they have such a range of tools and considerable leverage that they can draw on.
It's rarely, at least in my experience, something that's exclusively in kind of this gray zone or regular space that they're operating. They often operate in more traditional ways as well. And I think the two flashpoints that we often focus on from a military perspective, of course, Taiwan and the concern that at some stage in the not too distant future, there may be a decision by the PRC to retake by force Taiwan. And so
as we look at some of the lessons we've gathered and I'm sure the PRC have gathered as well on Ukraine, there's certain aspects of how Taiwan would have to defend itself that we're actively leaning in on and I know others are as well. But there's fundamental differences as well. But at the end of the day, this is about
deterrence, I think, from our perspective. And that's a cognitive thing. And so here, I think we're carefully calibrating what we're doing at any given time to as much as possible establish that deterrence dissuade from a military operation into Taiwan. But recognizing China is an important trading partner of ours, too. And this gets out of my depth, not my job, but this is where this gets particularly complex. Jeff Selden with VLA.
- You talked about the information space and some other US agencies have warned about China in particular, but other countries like Russia, ceding the information space in an effort to really debilitate the US will to fight should there be a crisis, whether it's Taiwan or somewhere else.
How far ahead or how advanced are the Chinese efforts to cede the information space or the Russian efforts to do that in ways that would limit the ability of the U.S., whether regular warfare or regular warfare, to respond to a crisis? - I think Russia and China, yes, they're gonna be a lot more aggressive. They're gonna take a lot more risk. They're gonna try to message our population in ways that, frankly, we would find completely inappropriate and threatening.
How much that actually lands is, I think, a big open question. I tend to be very bullish on the U.S. population that when presented the facts, particularly presented the facts by the United States government or key allies and partners, they're going to take that as a given. It nonetheless doesn't mean that there won't be short-term advantages that the PRC and Russia can extract, particularly in a conflict situation.