Competition with China and U.S. defence strategy: from net assessment to competitive strategies

What does the decision to designate China as a “long-term strategic competitor” imply for U.S. defence strategy? To address this question, we draw on net assessment and competitive strategies, two complementary frameworks developed in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) during the Cold War to understand and manage long-term competition with the Soviet Union, respectively. Net assessment and competitive strategies are tailored around specific competitors and follow a characteristically dialectical approach to strategic planning, based on complex, recursive calculations of move and countermove. We argue that the identification of China as a long-term strategic competitor has paved the way for an increasingly systematic application of net assessment and competitive strategies within DoD, even if obstacles to such application still remain.