The numbers game: why the US is losing ground to China in the first island chain

As the People’s Liberation Army marks its 99th anniversary on August 1, one year from the deadline for its centenary goals, its evolution highlights the past, present and future of China’s military strategy. In the second part of a series, Gabriel Dominguez examines how Beijing is pushing the envelope on its near-seas island arc. Beijing has urged the People’s Liberation Army to transform into a “world-class military” by the mid-21st century, intent on piercing US-led chokepoints along an arc of islands extending from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Known as the first island chain, they underpin a US-aligned security architecture that Chinese strategists see as both a constraint on the PLA’s freedom to manoeuvre in a conflict and the likeliest entry route for US and allied forces in a regional crisis. Long associated with Cold War-era strategy, the first island chain has become a principal arena of military competition between China and the United States, with the Pentagon’s latest China Military Power Report identifying it as central to Beijing’s regional strategy. A year ahead of its 2027 centenary goal, the PLA has shown progress in areas that could challenge the US defence line – specifically its dual-carrier operations, large-scale arms production and improved nuclear deterrence beyond the island chain. Meanwhile, the US and its allies have also ramped up their input, including the expansion of American base access in the Philippines and increasingly sophisticated defence drills involving Washington’s regional partners. More than geography Stretching from Japan’s home islands and the Ryukyu archipelago through Taiwan to the Philippines and Borneo, the first island chain forms the maritime boundary between mainland China’s near seas and the open Pacific Ocean. It encompasses narrow waterways and air corridors, including the Miyako Strait, the Bashi Channel and the Luzon Strait – the few routes through which the PLA can reach the wider Pacific. During the Cold War, the first island chain formed part of a broader US strategy to deter Soviet and Chinese expansion in the Pacific. Today, it links a network of forward-deployed forces of American and allied forces that have become more closely integrated in recent years. Japan has accelerated defence spending and strengthened its military posture along its southwestern islands with new anti-ship and air-defence capabilities, while the US has expanded rotational access to military facilities in the Philippines, including several sites facing Taiwan. Trilateral cooperation involving Washington, Tokyo and Manila has likewise evolved from largely symbolic exercises into sophisticated naval, air and amphibious training, transforming what was once a collection of bilateral alliances into a more integrated regional security architecture. According to Oriana Skylar Mastro, director of the Indo-Pacific Policy Lab at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute, expanded basing and overflight access represents a consequential shift. K. Tristan Tang, a non-resident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, a US think tank, echoed the sentiment, noting that large-scale joint military exercises like Balikatan and Resolute Dragon “increasingly rehearse multidomain sensing, command and control, coastal defence, integrated fires and the defence of key maritime terrain”. Chinese strategists increasingly view the island chains as “barriers, springboards and benchmarks”, said Andrew Erickson, a professor of strategy at the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute. This perspective also stemmed from the PLA’s transformation, Erickson added, from a force focused mainly on coastal defence into one seeking to operate across and eventually beyond the first island chain. That shift in thinking extends beyond military terminology. Chinese discourse had begun framing the objective in explicitly offensive terms, with Beijing “increasingly talking about ‘breaking through the first island chain’”, said Zhao Tong, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In Zhao’s assessment, the PLA now believes the military balance along the chain is gradually shifting in its favour and that it could steadily erode long-standing US military dominance to establish itself “as a power willing and able to advance its perceived core interests” through its expanding capabilities. In that vein, Mastro observed that Chinese thinking about the first island chain went beyond pure defence. “Part of the reason China wants freedom of manoeuvre in the first island chain is to defend against attack, but also to defend against responses to its own aggression,” she said. “It’s offensive. It’s defensive. It’s about power projection. It’s about great-power competition.” Going further, Tang argued that the first island chain had “become more, not less, strategically important over the past decade”. As the PLA’s power-projection capabilities grew, he said, “the chain’s value as a defensive barrier has therefore increased for all sides, even as it has become a central operational arena where control of key straits and air and maritime corridors could be decisive in wartime”. Beijing’s push In recent years, the PLA has undergone significant military changes that could help it better respond to the first island chain, ranging from naval expansion and doctrine to joint operations and deterrence. Zhao cited the PLA’s naval expansion as the single most important driver of that transformation, alongside China’s possession of the world’s largest arsenal of theatre-range missiles, enabling Beijing to threaten strategic targets across the region. Looking ahead, he said Beijing also appeared to be eyeing “a substantial expansion of its nuclear-powered submarine fleet”. By combining stealth, endurance and long-range strike capability, the force could challenge one of America’s most enduring military advantages, Zhao added. Once focused largely on coastal defence, the PLA Navy has evolved into the world’s largest naval force by hull count, conducting increasingly sustained operations east of Taiwan and Japan in waters that until recently lay largely beyond its routine reach. For Beijing, these deployments reflect a deliberate effort to build a navy capable of protecting its expanding overseas interests while operating in an ever more contested environment. According to Mastro, the scale of Beijing’s operations has already gone a long way towards eroding Washington’s traditional advantages in the northern waters of the chain, namely the East China Sea and Taiwan Strait. “China has many more bases. They have the mass,” she said, noting that Beijing could also produce ships, missiles and military equipment far faster than the US. “The United States is losing that numbers game, and we have for quite some time.” Yet, further south, Mastro sees the balance as less favourable for Beijing. China could increasingly complicate US operations across the wider first island chain, but projecting and sustaining military power over greater distances remained far more demanding than denying access close to the Chinese mainland, she said. “Keeping the United States out of Asia is much easier than projecting power across those distances,” Mastro added. According to Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the PLA, the calculation is much simpler. Zhou said the first island chain’s importance was slipping as China’s military capabilities expanded, even as Washington continued to reinforce its forward presence. From coastal defence to power projection Analysts have noted an important shift in Beijing’s strategic purposes in the region, from keeping adversaries away with anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) strategy to operating farther from home and remaining there. The strategy is underscored by Beijing’s pursuit of carrier strike groups, amphibious assault ships and replenishment vessels, as well as a growing overseas logistics network. In 2024, the Liaoning and Shandong aircraft carriers conducted the PLA Navy’s first dual-carrier operations, while transits through the Miyako Strait into the Philippine Sea have become more routine. Those deployments allow the PLA to rehearse the difficult requirements of sustained blue-water warfare, from coordinating multiple carrier strike groups to integrating escorts, carrier aviation and logistics over extended distances. The launch of the Fujian, China’s third and most advanced aircraft carrier, is expected to substantially expand the PLA Navy’s carrier aviation capabilities, while the KJ-600 airborne early-warning aircraft promises to extend fleet air defence well beyond the reach of shore-based radar. Tang regarded the Fujian and the maturation of China’s carrier strike groups as the most consequential development to watch. “China’s earlier ski-jump carriers faced limitations in sortie generation and carrier-based fixed-wing airborne early warning,” he said. “The Fujian’s electromagnetic catapults and KJ-600 aircraft can extend the fleet’s sensor coverage and improve the efficiency of sustained air operations in the Philippine Sea.” As those capabilities matured, Tang added, forces positioned along the first island chain might have to prepare for pressure “coming simultaneously from the Chinese mainland to the west and carrier forces operating to the east”. Learning to fight as a joint force A more fundamental change has been under way in joint combat. Instead of treating the navy, air force, rocket force and support elements as largely separate services, the PLA now trains and organises to fight as an integrated joint force. The effort is instrumental to denying US and allied forces the ability to operate effectively around the first island chain. Central to that approach is the concept of “system destruction warfare”: prioritising the disabling of an adversary’s sensors, communications, command networks and decision-making processes rather than destroying individual platforms one by one. The philosophy is reflected across the PLA’s force structure. Long-range ballistic and cruise missiles are intended to hold forward-deployed forces at risk, bomber patrols through the Miyako Strait and around Japan have become frequent, and Beijing continues to expand its reconnaissance, surveillance and command networks across multiple domains. In addition, as US allies strengthen cooperation along the first island chain, Beijing has sought closer military coordination with its strategic partner Russia through expanded joint bomber patrols and naval exercises around Japan and across the western Pacific. Mastro described the arrangement as an “alliance grey zone”, saying Russia could, for example, close portions of its far-eastern airspace or provide logistical support to help China sustain operations during a prolonged crisis. As Zhao sees it, the value of defence coordination for Beijing lies less in Russia’s capability than in the signal of “strategic coordination, shared objectives and mutual resolve in countering US military influence”. Mastro said Chinese strategists had told her privately that closer coordination with Moscow was intended to send a signal to Washington and Tokyo about the potential costs of deepening US-Japan defence cooperation. Beijing has simultaneously strengthened its strategic deterrence to show it could complicate US defence considerations beyond the first island chain. In 2024, China publicly launched an intercontinental ballistic missile into the Pacific for the first time in decades. And last month, it tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile in international waters, signalling the operational readiness of its sea-based nuclear deterrent. According to Tang, these capabilities reinforce deterrence in complementary ways – carrier strike groups extend China’s conventional operational reach beyond the first island chain, while the submarine-launched ballistic missile strengthens the credibility and survivability of its nuclear second-strike capability. His research suggests the Central Military Commission, which commands the armed forces, concluded by late 2024 that the PLA had largely achieved its objectives for “near-seas comprehensive operations”, with training shifting to “far-seas mobile operations”. That said, having such capabilities is different from successfully employing them in combat. Zhao pointed to a question that could ultimately prove decisive: which side will make more effective use of emerging technologies such as drones, autonomous vessels and AI-enabled weapons? China “appears to enjoy certain advantages stemming from its industrial base and capacity to manufacture and field systems at scale”, he said. But the US and its allies “may retain important advantages in innovation, operational adaptability and a more agile defence ecosystem”. The PLA still had “comparatively limited operational experience” testing its new capabilities in large-scale joint operations, Zhao added. “The jury is still out on which side will ultimately gain the more decisive military leverage along the first island chain.”

The numbers game: why the US is losing ground to China in the first island chain

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The PLA is rapidly progressing towards its 2027 ‘world-class military’ goal in ways that could challenge US defence lines, analysts say

The PLA is rapidly progressing towards its 2027 ‘world-class military’ goal in ways that could challenge US defence lines, analysts say