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Author : Ronald De McLaurin
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (318 download)
Download or read book The United States and the Defense of the Pacific written by Ronald De McLaurin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1989 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Robbin F. Laird
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1440830460
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (48 download)
Download or read book Rebuilding American Military Power in the Pacific written by Robbin F. Laird and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines how the U.S. military must rebuild in the wake of Iraq/Afghanistan, and refocus its power projection to face the new challenges emerging in the Pacific and with China. Rebuilding American Military Power in the Pacific: A 21st-Century Strategy provides an all-encompassing look at the challenges facing the United States in shaping a 21st-century Pacific strategy: dealing with the growing Chinese colossus, the unpredictable nuclear challenge presented by North Korea, the dynamic of the Arctic opening, and maintaining the security of the conveyor belt of goods and services in the Pacific. Can the United States successfully train and prepare for the 21st century, and break free from the mindset that determined its strategies in the previous century? The authors of the work explain why a carefully considered, fully modernized Pacific strategy is a key element for the evolution of American military power—and why shaping an effective air and maritime strategy in the Pacific as well as globally is the crucial challenge facing the U.S. military and the policy community. Written by authors with significant access to the media, think tanks, and high-level politicians, the book provides an insider's look at how American military leaders are building out relevant capabilities in the Pacific to defend America and its allies, and it contains extensive interviews with those leaders.
Author : Waldo Heinrichs
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190616776
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)
Download or read book Implacable Foes written by Waldo Heinrichs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day-shortened to "V.E. Day"-brought with it the demise of Nazi Germany. But for the Allies, the war was only half-won. Exhausted but exuberant American soldiers, ready to return home, were sent to join the fighting in the Pacific, which by the spring and summer of 1945 had turned into a gruelling campaign of bloody attrition against an enemy determined to fight to the last man. Germany had surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese would clearly make the conditions of victory extraordinarily high. In the United States, Americans clamored for their troops to come home and for a return to a peacetime economy. Politics intruded upon military policy while a new and untested president struggled to strategize among a military command that was often mired in rivalry. The task of defeating the Japanese seemed nearly unsurmountable, even while plans to invade the home islands were being drawn. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warned of the toll that "the agony of enduring battle" would likely take. General Douglas MacArthur clashed with Marshall and Admiral Nimitz over the most effective way to defeat the increasingly resilient Japanese combatants. In the midst of this division, the Army began a program of partial demobilization of troops in Europe, which depleted units at a time when they most needed experienced soldiers. In this context of military emergency, the fearsome projections of the human cost of invading the Japanese homeland, and weakening social and political will, victory was salvaged by means of a horrific new weapon. As one Army staff officer admitted, "The capitulation of Hirohito saved our necks." In Implacable Foes, award-winning historians Waldo Heinrichs (a veteran of both theatres of war in World War II) and Marc Gallicchio bring to life the final year of World War Two in the Pacific right up to the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, evoking not only Japanese policies of desperate defense, but the sometimes rancorous debates on the home front. They deliver a gripping and provocative narrative that challenges the decision-making of U.S. leaders and delineates the consequences of prioritizing the European front. The result is a masterly work of military history that evaluates the nearly insurmountable trials associated with waging global war and the sacrifices necessary to succeed.
Author : Brian McAllister Linn
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 080782321X
Total Pages : 362 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)
Download or read book Guardians of Empire written by Brian McAllister Linn and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a comprehensive study of four decades of military policy, Brian McAllister Linn offers the first detailed history of the U.S. Army in Hawaii and the Philippines between 1902 and 1940. Most accounts focus on the months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By examining the years prior to the outbreak of war, Linn provides a new perspective on the complex evolution of events in the Pacific. Exhaustively researched, Guardians of Empire traces the development of U.S. defense policy in the region, concentrating on strategy, tactics, internal security, relations with local communities, and military technology. Linn challenges earlier studies which argue that army officers either ignored or denigrated the Japanese threat and remained unprepared for war. He demonstrates instead that from 1907 onward military commanders in both Washington and the Pacific were vividly aware of the danger, that they developed a series of plans to avert it, and that they in fact identified_even if they could not solve_many of the problems that would become tragically apparent on 7 December 1941.
Author : Ralph F. Wetterhahn
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 147666997X
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (766 download)
Download or read book The Early Air War in the Pacific written by Ralph F. Wetterhahn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first 10 months of the war in the Pacific, Japan achieved air supremacy with its carrier and land-based forces. But after major setbacks at Midway and Guadalcanal, the empire's expansion stalled, in part due to flaws in aircraft design, strategy and command. This book offers a fresh analysis of the air war in the Pacific during the early phases of World War II. Details are included from two expeditions conducted by the author that reveal the location of an American pilot missing in the Philippines since 1942 and clear up a controversial account involving famed Japanese ace Saburo Sakai and U.S. Navy pilot James "Pug" Southerland.
Author : Hal M. Friedman
Publisher : MSU Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)
Download or read book Governing the American Lake written by Hal M. Friedman and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this carefully crafted and meticulously researched book, Hal M. Friedman contends that US fears after World War II led the nation into military domination of the Pacific Ocean, turning it into an "American lake" in the hope of keeping the mainland safe from attack. According to Friedman, with the country still reeling from a bad case of "Pearl Harbor Syndrome," four departments of the Executive Branch --War, Navy, State, and Interior-- succeeded in creating a new US strategic sphere in the Pacific Basin. However, while the departments agreed on the goal, there were many arguments about the means of reaching it. Friedman recounts disagreements about the best ways to secure the Basin against potential enemies, particularly a resurgent Japan and a hostile Soviet Union. With the United States unofficially claiming jurisdiction over a vast ocean and all of its human occupants, there were titanic clashes of opinion about how to exercise this newly-declared power. Working from primary sources, including declassified materials, Friedman describes the many conflicts between military and civilian services in the period immediately following the war. He provides an indepth analysis of the policies that were thrashed out, often after intense interdepartmental infighting, to turn the Pacific into an American lake. In addition, he investigates the civil administration of Guam and American Samoa, along with the governing of the islands of Micronesia and the Ryukyus, which were formerly occupied by the Japanese. While a few scholars have studied post-war American imperialism, only Friedman has investigated the bureaucracy of policymaking and its consequences on Pacific islands and peoples with this much detail. Not only does Friedman examine the bureaucratic history, but he also illuminates the equally important impacts of Americanization that accompanied the imposition of US ideas about government, economics, and culture far beyond mainland America. This is a revealing examination of how the US took over the Pacific Ocean after World War II.
Author : John Dower
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 : 0307816141
Total Pages : 411 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)
Download or read book War without Mercy written by John Dower and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”
Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 928 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (89 download)
Download or read book Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951: Europe written by and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Louis Morton
Publisher : CreateSpace
ISBN 13 : 9781515023258
Total Pages : 792 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (232 download)
Download or read book Strategy and Command written by Louis Morton and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-07-11 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the United States, full involvement in World War II began and ended in the Pacific Ocean. Although the accepted grand strategy of the war was the defeat of Germany first, the sweep of Japanese victory in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor impelled the United States to move as rapidly as it could to stem the enemy tide of conquest in the Pacific. Shocked as they were by the initial attack, the American people were also united in their determination to defeat Japan, and the Pacific war became peculiarly their own affair. In this great theater it was the United States that ran the war, and had the determining voice in answering questions of strategy and command as they arose. The natural environment made the prosecution of war in the Pacific of necessity an interservice effort, and any real account of it must, as this work does, take into full account the views and actions of the Navy as well as those of the Army and its Air Forces. These are the factors-a predominantly American theater of war covering nearly one-third the globe, and a joint conduct of war by land, sea, and air on the largest scale in American history-that make this volume on the Pacific war of particular significance today. It is the capstone of the eleven volumes published or being published in the Army's World War II series that deal with military operations in the Pacific area, and it is one that should command wide attention from the thoughtful public as well as the military reader in these days of global tension.
Author : John C. McManus
Publisher : Dutton Caliber
ISBN 13 : 0451475046
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (514 download)
Download or read book Fire and Fortitude written by John C. McManus and published by Dutton Caliber. This book was released on 2019 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "John C. McManus, one of our most highly-acclaimed historians of World War II, takes readers from Pearl Harbor--a rude awakening for a ragtag militia woefully unprepared for war--to Makin, a sliver of coral reef where the Army was tested against the increasingly-desperate Japanese. In between were nearly two years of punishing combat as the Army transformed, at times unsteadily, from an undertrained garrison force into an unstoppable juggernaut, and America evolved from an inward-looking nation into a global superpower."--Provided by publisher.
Author : Ashley Townshend
Publisher : United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney
ISBN 13 : 1742104738
Total Pages : 104 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (421 download)
Download or read book Averting Crisis: American Strategy, Military Spending and Collective Defence in the Indo-Pacific written by Ashley Townshend and published by United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America no longer enjoys military primacy in the Indo-Pacific and its capacity to uphold a favourable balance of power is increasingly uncertain. The combined effect of ongoing wars in the Middle East, budget austerity, underinvestment in advanced military capabilities and the scale of America’s liberal order-building agenda has left the US armed forces ill-prepared for great power competition in the Indo-Pacific. America’s 2018 National Defense Strategy aims to address this crisis of strategic insolvency by tasking the Joint Force to prepare for one great power war, rather than multiple smaller conflicts, and urging the military to prioritise requirements for deterrence vis-à-vis China. Chinese counter-intervention systems have undermined America’s ability to project power into the Indo-Pacific, raising the risk that China could use limited force to achieve a fait accompli victory before America can respond; and challenging US security guarantees in the process. For America, denying this kind of aggression places a premium on advanced military assets, enhanced posture arrangements, new operational concepts and other costly changes. While the Pentagon is trying to focus on these challenges, an outdated superpower mindset in the foreign policy establishment is likely to limit Washington’s ability to scale back other global commitments or make the strategic trade-offs required to succeed in the Indo-Pacific. Over the next decade, the US defence budget is unlikely to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy owing to a combination of political, fiscal and internal pressures. The US defence budget has been subjected to nearly a decade of delayed and unpredictable funding. Repeated failures by Congress to pass regular and sustained budgets has hindered the Pentagon’s ability to effectively allocate resources and plan over the long term. Growing partisanship and ideological polarisation — within and between both major parties in Congress — will make consensus on federal spending priorities hard to achieve. Lawmakers are likely to continue reaching political compromises over America’s national defence at the expense of its strategic objectives. America faces growing deficits and rising levels of public debt; and political action to rectify these challenges has so far been sluggish. If current trends persist, a shrinking portion of the federal budget will be available for defence, constraining budget top lines into the future. Above-inflation growth in key accounts within the defence budget — such as operations and maintenance — will leave the Pentagon with fewer resources to grow the military and acquire new weapons systems. Every year it becomes more expensive to maintain the same sized military. America has an atrophying force that is not sufficiently ready, equipped or postured for great power competition in the Indo-Pacific — a challenge it is working hard to address. Twenty years of near-continuous combat and budget instability has eroded the readiness of key elements in the US Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps. Military accidents have risen, aging equipment is being used beyond its lifespan and training has been cut. Some readiness levels across the Joint Force are improving, but structural challenges remain. Military platforms built in the 1980s are becoming harder and more costly to maintain; while many systems designed for great power conflict were curtailed in the 2000s to make way for the force requirements of Middle Eastern wars — leading to stretched capacity and overuse. The military is beginning to field and experiment with next-generation capabilities. But the deferment or cancellation of new weapons programs over the last few decades has created a backlog of simultaneous modernisation priorities that will likely outstrip budget capacity. Many US and allied operating bases in the Indo-Pacific are exposed to possible Chinese missile attack and lack hardened infrastructure. Forward deployed munitions and supplies are not set to wartime requirements and, concerningly, America’s logistics capability has steeply declined. New operational concepts and novel capabilities are being tested in the Indo-Pacific with an eye towards denying and blunting Chinese aggression. Some services, like the Marine Corps, plan extensive reforms away from counterinsurgency and towards sea control and denial. A strategy of collective defence is fast becoming necessary as a way of offsetting shortfalls in America’s regional military power and holding the line against rising Chinese strength. To advance this approach, Australia should: Pursue capability aggregation and collective deterrence with capable regional allies and partners, including the United States and Japan. Reform US-Australia alliance coordination mechanisms to focus on strengthening regional deterrence objectives. Rebalance Australian defence resources from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. Establish new, and expand existing, high-end military exercises with allies and partners to develop and demonstrate new operational concepts for Indo-Pacific contingencies. Acquire robust land-based strike and denial capabilities. Improve regional posture, infrastructure and networked logistics, including in northern Australia. Increase stockpiles and create sovereign capabilities in the storage and production of precision munitions, fuel and other materiel necessary for sustained high-end conflict. Establish an Indo-Pacific Security Workshop to drive US-allied joint operational concept development. Advance joint experimental research and development projects aimed at improving the cost-capability curve.
Author : Robert J Haddick
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
ISBN 13 : 1682478033
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (824 download)
Download or read book Fire on the Water, Second Edition written by Robert J Haddick and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Robert Haddick wrote Fire on the Water, first published in 2014, most policy experts and the public underestimated the threat China’s military modernization posed to the U.S. strategic position in the Indo-Pacific region. Today, the rapid Chinese military buildup has many policy experts wondering whether the United States and its allies can maintain conventional military deterrence in the region, and the topic is central to defense planning in the United States. In this new edition, Haddick argues that the United States and its allies can sustain conventional deterrence in the face of China's military buildup. However, doing so will require U.S. policymakers and planners to overcome institutional and cultural barriers to reforms necessary to implement a new strategy for the region. Fire on the Water, Second Edition also presents the sources of conflict in Asia and explains why America's best option is to maintain its active forward presence in the region. Haddick relates the history of America's military presence in the Indo-Pacific and shows why that presence is now vulnerable. The author details China's military modernization program, how it is shrewdly exploiting the military-technical revolution, and why it now poses a grave threat to U.S. and allied interests. He considers the U.S. responses to China's military modernization over the past decade and discusses why these responses fall short of a convincing competitive strategy. Detailing a new approach for sustaining conventional deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region, the author discusses the principles of strategy as they apply to the problems the United States faces in the region. He explains the critical role of aerospace power in the region and argues that the United States should urgently refashion its aerospace concepts if it is to deter aggression, focusing on Taiwan, the most difficult case. Haddick illustrates how the military-technical revolution has drastically changed the potential of naval forces in the Indo-Pacific region and why U.S. policymakers and planners need to adjust their expectations and planning for naval forces. Finally, he elucidates lessons U.S. policymakers can apply from past great-power competitions, examines long-term trends affecting the current competition, summarizes a new U.S. strategic approach to the region, describes how U.S. policymakers can overcome institutional barriers that stand in the way of a better strategy, and explains why U.S. policymakers and the public should have confidence about sustaining deterrence and peace in the region over the long term.
Author : Tai Ming Cheung
Publisher : Rapid Communications in Confli
ISBN 13 : 9781604979459
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (794 download)
Download or read book The Gathering Pacific Storm written by Tai Ming Cheung and published by Rapid Communications in Confli. This book was released on 2018 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book delivers maco-level analysis of the geostrategic, geo-economic, technological, and military context of the competition between the US and China for superiority in military technology and analyzes micro-level case studies of specific contested domains and technological sectors. It reveals a China committed to the rapid development of asymmetric technological capabilities that will allow it to respond to the perceived threat of the Third Offset without being drawn into an economically crippling arms race. It proposes that in response the US should seek to gain its own asymmetric advantage across the geographic, technological, and doctrinal domains. This is an important book for those in security studies and international relations."--Provided by publisher.
Author : Scott McDonald
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000326616
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)
Download or read book The Future of the United States-Australia Alliance written by Scott McDonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States-Australia alliance has been an important component of the US-led system of alliances that has underpinned regional security in the Indo-Pacific since 1945. However, recent geostrategic developments, in particular the rise of the People’s Republic of China, have posed significant challenges to this US-led regional order. In turn, the growing strategic competition between these two great powers has generated challenges to the longstanding US-Australia alliance. Both the US and Australia are confronting a changing strategic environment, and, as a result, the alliance needs to respond to the challenges that they face. The US needs to understand the challenges and risks to this vital relationship, which is growing in importance, and take steps to manage it. On its part, Australia must clearly identify its core common interests with the US and start exploring what more it needs to do to attain its stated policy preferences. This book consists of chapters exploring US and Australian perspectives of the Indo-Pacific, the evolution of Australia-US strategic and defence cooperation, and the future of the relationship. Written by a joint US-Australia team, the volume is aimed at academics, analysts, students, and the security and business communities.
Author : Jon Mitchell
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1538130343
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (381 download)
Download or read book Poisoning the Pacific written by Jon Mitchell and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this devastating exposé, investigative journalist Jon Mitchell reveals the shocking toxic contamination of the Pacific Ocean and millions of victims by the US military. For decades, US military operations have been contaminating the Pacific region with toxic substances, including plutonium, dioxin, and VX nerve agent. Hundreds of thousands of service members, their families, and residents have been exposed—but the United States has hidden the damage and refused to help victims. After World War II, the United States granted immunity to Japanese military scientists in exchange for their data on biological weapons tests conducted in China; in the following years, nuclear detonations in the Pacific obliterated entire islands and exposed Americans, Marshallese, Chamorros, and Japanese fishing crews to radioactive fallout. At the same time, the United States experimented with biological weapons on Okinawa and stockpiled the island with nuclear and chemical munitions, causing numerous accidents. Meanwhile, the CIA orchestrated a campaign to introduce nuclear power to Japan—the folly of which became horrifyingly clear in the 2011 meltdowns in Fukushima Prefecture. Caught in a geopolitical grey zone, US territories have been among the worst affected by military contamination, including Guam, Saipan, and Johnston Island, the final disposal site of apocalyptic volumes of chemical weapons and Agent Orange. Accompanying this damage, US authorities have waged a campaign of cover-ups, lies, and attacks on the media, which the author has experienced firsthand in the form of military surveillance and attempts by the State Department to impede his work. Now, for the first time, this explosive book reveals the horrific extent of contamination in the Pacific and the lengths the Pentagon will go to conceal it.
Author : James C Bresnahan
Publisher : Naval Institute Press
ISBN 13 : 161251068X
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (125 download)
Download or read book Refighting the Pacific War written by James C Bresnahan and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refighting the Pacific War looks at how World War II in the Pacific might have unfolded differently, giving historians, authors and veterans the opportunity to discuss what happened and what might have happened. Contributors to this alternative history include noted military historians William Bartsch, John Burton, Donald Goldstein, John Lundstrom, Robert Mrazek, Jon Parshall, Douglas Smith, Peter Smith, Barrett Tillman, Anthony Tully, and H. P. Willmott. In all more than thirty Pacific War experts will provide commentary, employing a roundtable panel discussion format. The reader will hear from the experts on how history could and could not have been altered during the course of the war in the Pacific. With multiple opinions, the reader will be provided with an interesting collection of divergent views about the outcome of the war. Refighting the Pacific War focuses largely on naval battles and campaigns, including Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. While the main concentration is on the major naval actions, the book also delves into key island battles, like Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, as well as pre-war and post-war political issues The panelists debate questions like whether the Japanese could have inflicted even greater damage on the U. S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and how Yamamoto might have won at Midway and how such a victory might have impacted the direction of the war. The book extensively studies the opening year of the war when the Japanese war machine seemed unstoppable. Also explored is whether the Pacific War was inevitable and whether the conflict could have ended without the use of the atomic bomb.Vice Admiral Yoji Koda, Japan Maritime Self Defense Force (Ret.), provides the book's Introduction.
Author : Ashley Townshend
Publisher : United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and Pacific Forum
ISBN 13 : 1742104924
Total Pages : 28 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (421 download)
Download or read book Operationalising Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific written by Ashley Townshend and published by United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and Pacific Forum. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific, the United States, Australia and their regional allies and partners face a myriad of strategic challenges that cut across every level of the competitive space. Driven by China’s use of multidimensional coercion in pursuit of its aim to displace the United States as the region’s dominant power, a new era of strategic competition is unfolding. At stake is the stability and character of the Indo-Pacific order, hitherto founded on American power and longstanding rules and norms, all of which are increasingly uncertain. The challenges that Beijing poses the region operate over multiple domains and are prosecuted by the Chinese Communist Party through a whole-of-nation strategy. In the grey zone between peace and war, tactics like economic coercion, foreign interference, the use of civil militias and other forms of political warfare have become Beijing’s tools of choice for pursuing incremental shifts to the geostrategic status quo. These efforts are compounded by China’s rapidly growing conventional military power and expanding footprint in the Western Pacific, which is raising the spectre of a limited war that America would find it difficult to deter or win. All of this is taking place under the lengthening shadow of Beijing’s nuclear modernisation and its bid for new competitive advantages in emerging strategic technologies. Strengthening regional deterrence and counter-coercion in light of these challenges will require the United States and Australia — working independently, together and with their likeminded partners — to develop more integrated strategies for the Indo-Pacific region and novel ways to operationalise the alliance in support of deterrence objectives. There is widespread support for this agenda in both Washington and Canberra. As the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy makes clear, allies provide an “asymmetric advantage” for helping the United States deter aggression and uphold favourable balances of power around the world. Australia’s Minister for Defence Linda Reynolds mirrored this sentiment in a major speech in Washington last November, observing that “deterrence is a joint responsibility for a shared purpose — one that no country, not even the United States, can undertake alone.” Forging greater coordination on deterrence strategy within the US-Australia alliance, however, is no easy task, particularly when this undertaking is focussed on China’s coercive behaviour in the Indo-Pacific. Although Canberra and Washington have overlapping strategic objectives, their interests and threat perceptions regarding China are by no means symmetrical. Each has very different capabilities, policy priorities and tolerance for accepting costs and risks. Efforts to operationalise deterrence must therefore proceed incrementally and on the basis of robust alliance dialogue. To advance this process of bilateral strategic policy debate, the United States Studies Centre and Pacific Forum hosted the second round of the Annual Track 1.5 US-Australia Deterrence Dialogue in Washington in November 2019, bringing together US and Australian experts from government and non-government organisations. The theme for this meeting was “Operationalising Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific,” with a focus on exploring tangible obstacles and opportunities for improving the alliance’s collective capacity to deter coercive changes to the regional order. Both institutions would like to thank the Australian Department of Defence Strategic Policy Grants Program and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency for their generous support of this engagement. The following analytical summary reflects the authors’ accounts of the dialogue’s proceedings and does not necessarily represent their own views. It endeavours to capture, examine and contextualise a wide range of perspectives and debates from the discussion; but does not purport to offer a comprehensive record. Nothing in the following pages represents the views of the Australian Department of Defence, the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency or any of the other officials or organisations that took part in the dialogue.
