Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress

Updated August 28, 2024

Congressional Research Service

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https://crsreports.congress.gov

R43838

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Innovating for Great Power Competition: An Examination of Service and Joint Innovation Efforts

January 11, 2023 Thomas G. Mahnken, Evan B. Montgomery, Tyler Hacker

Following nearly two decades of counterinsurgency in the Greater Middle East, the United States Department of Defense finds itself looking to the Cold War for lessons on how to adapt to the operational challenges presented by China and Russia. To modernize its platforms, doctrine, and force structure to compete with and defeat 21st-century great power competitors, the military services and the Department of Defense as a whole are seeking to promote conceptual, organizational, and technological innovation within the U.S. armed forces.

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In Innovating for Great Power Competition, authors Thomas G. Mahnken, Evan B. Montgomery, and Tyler Hacker reflect upon the lessons from Cold War era innovation. They find that several factors play a crucial role in innovation, including recognition of the threat environment, senior-leader sponsorship and support, innovators and their advocates and networks, and organizational culture. Additionally, military innovation typically occurs in three stages: speculation, experimentation, and implementation. Should these elements of innovation be missing or insufficient, failure can occur in any of these three stages, as well as during employment on the battlefield. These ingredients and phases combine to yield a framework for diagnosing innovation in historic and contemporary military organizations. The authors then apply this framework to contemporary innovation efforts in both the individual military services and the Department of Defense as a whole. The study examines the relative success of these innovation efforts and suggests four possible outcomes based on the pace of service-level innovation efforts compared to defense-wide innovation efforts. Finally, the authors offer potential operating options for each outcome.

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Geostrategic competition and overseas basing in East Asia and the First Island Chain

Michael E. O’Hanlon and Andrew Yeo February 2023

Under the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, the Department of Defense (DOD) now enfolds East Asia within the broader regional framework of the Indo-Pacific. However, significant U.S. forward presence and the U.S. obligation to defend allied territory in Northeast Asia with ground forces means that the needs and dynamics of great power basing in that region will differ from the maritime theaters of the South Pacific and Indian Oceans. Although the DOD has been simultaneously criticized for being too ambitious or doing too little to address U.S. force posture, geostrategic competition with China dictates prudence in making any major changes to overseas basing in East Asia. Yet Chinese ambitions to strengthen its claims over Taiwan and the South China Sea may require some adjustments to U.S. force posture to surmount evolving challenges within China’s so-called first island chain.[1] For long-term geostrategic competition with China, U.S. force posture in East Asia may be sized correctly but wrongly composed and dispersed. That is, the numbers and strategic concentrations of U.S. forces today in East Asia may be largely right, but their specific capabilities may not always be sufficient — they should continue to evolve, not according to a single grand plan but according to ongoing strategic developments.