Published by the National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs. From the foreword by Hans Binnendijk: "The first half of the 21st century will be dominated by the relationship between the United States and China. That relationship is likely to contain elements of both cooperation and competition. Territorial disputes such as those over Taiwan and the South China Sea will be an important feature of this competition, but both are traditional disputes, and traditional solutions suggest themselves. A more difficult set of...

The second half of the 20th century featured a strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. That competition avoided World War III in part because during the 1950s, scholars like Henry Kissinger, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, and Albert Wohlstetter analyzed the fundamental nature of nuclear deterrence. Decades of arms control negotiations reinforced these early notions of stability and created a mutual understanding that allowed U.S.-Soviet competition to proceed without armed conflict. The first half of the 21st century will be dominated by the relationship between...

As the world careens into the 21st century, the capacity and means by which the American Armed Forces defend their nation are entering a paradigm-breaking transition period. Previous transitions have been driven by the technologies of weapons and their platforms: from sail, to boiler, to turbine; from foot, to horse, to vehicle; from balloon, to manned aircraft, to unmanned aircraft. This is not so in the 21st century. We need to reset our "warfighting gyro," so to speak. To this end, taking the information revolution as a starting point, Battle-Wise argues that only by strengthening the...

Once again, the world is faced with a mass-killing situation-U.S. leaders have called it "genocide." And again, like Rwanda in 1994 and so many other cases, the international response to Darfur's plight has been humanitarian assistance, condemnation, demands for the killing to stop, and a peacekeeping force with neither the means nor the mandate to defeat the killers. This response has neither convinced nor forced Janjaweed militiamen or their patrons in the Sudanese government to stop their assault on defenseless civilians. Even though the chance for action to prevent mass killing in Darfur...

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is investing heavily in information systems to support net-centric military capabilities and joint operations. With such programs as Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion (GIG-BE), Transformational Satellite Communications Systems (TSAT), Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), and Net Centric Enterprise Services (NCES), DOD is creating a global information backbone and striving to get useful bandwidth and information services to the warfighter. After declining in the 1990s, spending on communications and intelligence has grown by 50 percent since 2001....

The U.S. defense sector is not experiencing economic gains from the use of IT like those of other IT-rich sectors. In the economy at large, remarkable improvements in IT price-performance over the last quarter-century have yielded greater productivity and better IT-based products and services at lower costs. In contrast, increased defense capabilities, despite their growing IT content, have meant increased costs.

China's emergence begs a fresh look at power in the world affairs-more precisely, at how the spread of freedom and the integration of the global economy, due to the information revolution, are affecting the nature, concentration, and purpose of power. Perhaps such a luck could improve the odds of responding wisely to China's rise.