The Implications of Military-Technological Complexity for the US-China Military Competition.

Mauro Gilli and Nina Silove

2019 - 2021

This project addresses the implications of the exponential increase in the complexity of military technology for the United States and China’s respective military industrial strategies, and how responsive US and Chinese investments in military technologies appear to have been to those conditions.

Key debates about US and Chinese investment in military technologies center around a series of common questions. In both cases, there are questions about the relative balance between investment in so-called “legacy” systems: enormously demanding, expensive, manned, advanced weapons platforms (such as fourth and fifth generation fighters, stealth bombers, and aircraft carriers), some of which are becoming increasing vulnerable to cheap countermeasures; versus investment in what may be the “next generation” of weapons of war, platforms which are intended to be unmanned, to have lower individual unit costs, and to be produced in higher qualities, such as “drones,” anti-ship ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare capabilities.

To determine how responsive US and Chinese military industrial strategies have been to conditions of complexity, we will detail these conditions and identify the key challenges each state faces in contending with them. Some of these challenges are common to both states and some apply more to the one than the other, given the vast differences in their current military-technical development and their respective goals. These challenges include: The requirements necessary in the defense industrial base to manage complexity and the options available to China in particular to develop its base accordingly; the probability of successfully developing weapons platforms that are one or both of simpler and cheaper given conditions of complexity; and whether and how the United States in particular can exploit complexity to its advantage.

This research details US and Chinese military-technological investments since the end of the Cold War and evaluates these investments to assess how the United States and China have each responded to the aforementioned challenges.

Partner: Andrea Gilli, Senior Researcher, Research Division, NATO Defense College.

Related Publications

Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli (2019), external pageWhy China Has Not Caught Up Yet: Military-Technological Superiority and the Limits of Imitation, Reverse Engineering, and Cyber Espionage, International Security, Volume 43, Issue 3, Winter 2018/19