Why Pacific deterrence is failing from both ends at once
The assumption that US allies' political will and military capacity operate as separate variables—one of which might fail first—is wrong. They are degrading together in a feedback loop that may hollow out deterrence before anyone notices.
🎧 Listen to this article
The Runways That Won’t Survive
In December 2024, the Pentagon delivered a verdict that should have made headlines across every allied capital in the Pacific: China expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027. The document landed with a thud. Allied governments issued measured statements. Markets barely flickered. Life continued.
This muted response reveals something more troubling than complacency. It exposes a fundamental miscalculation at the heart of Pacific deterrence—the assumption that political will and military capacity operate as separate variables, one of which might fail first while the other holds firm. They do not. They are bound together in a feedback loop that is already degrading both simultaneously.
The question of what breaks first—allies’ political resolve or their ability to sustain a fight—contains a false binary. The honest answer is that they are breaking together, in ways that reinforce each other’s collapse. Japan’s historic defense spending surge cannot overcome the fact that its bases exist within range of Chinese missiles that could crater every runway in the first hours of conflict. The Philippines’ public hostility toward Beijing—76% now view China as their greatest threat—cannot manufacture the munitions its military would exhaust in days. Taiwan’s remarkable civil resilience cannot conjure the logistics capacity to survive a blockade when its strategic oil reserves last barely a month.
The architecture of deterrence in the Western Pacific rests on foundations that look solid from a distance but reveal hairline fractures under examination.
Where the Shells Run Out
Begin with the arithmetic that defense planners discuss in private but rarely acknowledge in public. Ukraine’s war has exposed the brutal production constraints facing Western militaries. The United States produced 240,000 artillery shells annually before Russia’s invasion—roughly forty days of Ukrainian consumption at wartime rates. Even with emergency expansion, American factories cannot approach the volumes that a Pacific conflict would demand.
This matters because Pacific allies depend on American supply chains for everything from precision munitions to the solid rocket motors that propel them. A RAND analysis of Chinese missile threats to US air bases concluded that existing defenses cannot prevent runways from being cratered in the opening salvos of any serious conflict. The math compounds from there. Cratered runways mean grounded aircraft. Grounded aircraft mean lost sorties. Lost sorties mean the air superiority on which American strategy depends simply evaporates.
Japan’s response has been impressive by historical standards. Defense spending reached 1.4% of GDP in 2024, the highest since 1958, with plans to hit 2% by 2027. The budget for fiscal 2024 was ¥7.7 trillion—150% of the ¥5.1 trillion allocated just two years earlier. This represents genuine political will translated into hardware procurement.
Yet the hardware arrives into a strategic environment that has already shifted beneath it. Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, the largest American air installation in the Pacific, sits 460 miles from Taiwan. Chinese DF-21 and DF-26 missiles can reach it in minutes. Defense analysts have warned that the base’s concentration of assets creates a target so tempting that Beijing’s war planners must view its destruction as an opening-move priority.
The Kadena conundrum illustrates a deeper structural problem. American force posture in the Pacific evolved during decades when China lacked the precision strike capabilities to threaten fixed installations. Bases were built for convenience and efficiency, clustered near ports and cities, optimized for peacetime operations. They were never designed to survive the missile environment that now exists.
Dispersal offers a theoretical solution. Spread aircraft across dozens of smaller airfields throughout the island chains. Harden facilities. Stockpile repair materials. The Agile Combat Employment concept envisions exactly this adaptation. But dispersal requires political agreements with host nations, construction of new facilities, pre-positioned supplies, and trained personnel at each location. It requires, in other words, the very political will and military capacity that are both degrading simultaneously.
Australia’s situation reveals the same dynamic operating at continental scale. The Lowy Institute’s 2024 poll found that seven in ten Australians consider it likely China will pose a military threat to their country in the future. Public opinion supports defense investment. The AUKUS agreement promises nuclear-powered submarines that would transform Australia’s strategic reach.
The submarines will not arrive until the 2030s. The threat timeline centers on 2027.
The Missile Gap Nobody Discusses
China’s missile arsenal has grown from roughly 1,200 short-range ballistic missiles in 2010 to over 2,000 today, supplemented by hundreds of medium-range and intermediate-range systems. The qualitative improvements matter as much as the quantity. Modern Chinese missiles carry maneuvering warheads, deploy decoys, and achieve circular error probabilities measured in single-digit meters.
This precision transforms the economics of conflict. A single DF-21D costs perhaps $10 million. A Patriot interceptor costs $4 million, but you need multiple interceptors per incoming threat to achieve acceptable kill probabilities. An F-35 costs $80 million. A runway repair takes hours or days depending on damage severity. The exchange ratios favor the attacker at every level of analysis.
Taiwan’s military planners understand this arithmetic intimately. The island’s strategic petroleum reserves cover approximately thirty days of normal consumption—far less under wartime conditions when military operations consume fuel at accelerated rates. The logistics capacity to sustain extended resistance simply does not exist in current force structures.
Yet Taiwanese public opinion has hardened remarkably against Beijing’s pressure campaigns. Surveys by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council consistently show majority support for the government’s cross-strait policies and rejection of China’s coercive tactics. The extension of military conscription from four months to one year—a significant sacrifice in a society that had grown accustomed to minimal service requirements—passed with sustained public backing.
Political will exists. Military capacity to translate that will into sustained resistance remains constrained by geography, industrial base limitations, and the sheer volume of ordnance that modern warfare consumes.
The Information Battlespace
China has not waited for kinetic conflict to begin degrading allied resolve. Disinformation campaigns targeting Taiwan operate continuously, exploiting social media platforms to amplify divisions, spread defeatism, and undermine confidence in American security guarantees. The operations have grown more sophisticated, moving beyond crude propaganda toward nuanced influence that exploits genuine grievances and amplifies authentic voices of dissent.
The Volt Typhoon intrusions revealed something more alarming than espionage. Chinese hackers established persistent access to critical infrastructure across the United States and allied nations—water systems, power grids, communications networks. The access was not designed for immediate exploitation. It was designed to create options for disruption at moments of Beijing’s choosing.
This represents a form of pre-positioned deterrence that operates below the threshold of armed conflict. Allied publics may support defense spending in the abstract while remaining unaware that the infrastructure sustaining their daily lives has already been compromised. The revelation of such compromises during a crisis could shatter confidence in ways that pure military pressure might not achieve.
South Korea faces a variant of this challenge complicated by its proximity to North Korea. Seoul’s defense establishment must plan for two contingencies simultaneously—a northern threat that remains immediate and a Chinese threat that grows more serious annually. The cognitive load of dual deterrence strains both military planning and public attention.
Korean public opinion on China has soured dramatically in recent years, but the memory of Chinese economic retaliation following the THAAD deployment in 2017 remains fresh. Beijing demonstrated that it could inflict billions of dollars in economic damage through tourism restrictions and informal trade barriers alone. The lesson was not lost on Korean businesses or the politicians they support.
The Credibility Question
Extended deterrence depends on a proposition that grows harder to sustain as Chinese capabilities expand: that the United States would risk nuclear escalation to defend allies against a nuclear-armed adversary. The logic was always somewhat theological—a matter of faith rather than calculation. That faith is eroding.
Japan’s defense establishment has begun discussing options that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Not nuclear weapons acquisition, which remains politically toxic, but enhanced conventional strike capabilities that could hold Chinese assets at risk. The acquisition of Tomahawk cruise missiles represents a first step toward a more autonomous deterrent posture.
Australia’s AUKUS submarines point in the same direction. Nuclear propulsion—though not nuclear armament—provides the range and endurance to operate far from home waters, reducing dependence on American logistics support. The submarines represent a hedge against American reliability as much as a contribution to allied capability.
The Philippines has taken a different path, doubling down on the American alliance precisely because it lacks the resources for strategic autonomy. President Marcos has authorized expanded American access to bases across the archipelago, accepting the risks of hosting American forces in exchange for the security guarantees they theoretically provide.
This divergence in allied responses—Japan and Australia hedging toward autonomy while the Philippines embraces deeper dependence—reveals the incoherence at the heart of the alliance structure. There is no unified theory of Pacific deterrence, only a collection of bilateral arrangements that may or may not function as an integrated whole under stress.
The Industrial Base That Wasn’t
America’s defense industrial base was optimized for a world that no longer exists—one where small numbers of exquisitely capable platforms could achieve decisive effects against technologically inferior adversaries. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reinforced this model. Precision strikes from standoff range. Limited ground forces. Minimal attrition.
A Pacific conflict would invert every assumption. Attrition rates for aircraft, ships, and missiles would exceed anything American planners have experienced since World War II. Replacement timelines measured in years would confront consumption rates measured in days.
The rare earth supply chain compounds the problem. China controls not merely the mining of rare earth elements but the processing capacity that transforms raw materials into the magnets, alloys, and components that modern weapons require. An American missile designed to deter China depends on Chinese permission to manufacture at scale.
This dependency represents a structural vulnerability that no amount of political will can overcome in the relevant timeframe. Developing alternative supply chains requires years of investment in mining, processing, and manufacturing capacity. The investments are beginning, but they will not mature before the 2027 window that Chinese military planners appear to be targeting.
Japan faces similar constraints despite its manufacturing prowess. The country’s defense industry was deliberately stunted after World War II, and decades of export restrictions prevented the development of production capacity at scale. Recent policy changes have loosened these restrictions, but building industrial capacity takes time that the strategic calendar may not provide.
What Actually Holds
The picture is not uniformly bleak. Several factors continue to complicate Chinese calculations in ways that may preserve deterrence even as its foundations erode.
Taiwan’s geography remains formidable. The Taiwan Strait is 100 miles wide at its narrowest point, and the island’s western coast offers few suitable landing beaches. An amphibious invasion would require the largest naval operation in human history, conducted against a defender who has had decades to prepare fortifications and whose population demonstrates genuine resolve to resist.
The economic interdependence that constrains allied options also constrains Beijing. China’s economy depends on exports that flow through sea lanes that American and allied navies could interdict. A war that closed those lanes would devastate Chinese growth regardless of military outcomes. Xi Jinping faces his own version of the political will problem—convincing a population accustomed to rising prosperity to accept the sacrifices that war would demand.
Allied intelligence sharing has improved markedly. The Five Eyes arrangement now operates alongside newer frameworks that include Japan and South Korea. Chinese military movements face surveillance from multiple angles, reducing the possibility of surprise that successful aggression would require.
And American military capabilities, while constrained by industrial limitations, remain formidable in absolute terms. The submarine fleet can operate in waters where Chinese anti-access systems are less effective. Long-range strike platforms can reach targets from beyond the range of most Chinese defenses. The question is not whether American forces can inflict damage but whether they can sustain operations long enough to achieve strategic objectives.
The Default Trajectory
Absent significant intervention, the trend lines point toward a gradual erosion of deterrence that may not manifest as a single dramatic failure but as a slow-motion collapse of credibility.
Allied publics will continue supporting defense spending in principle while resisting the specific sacrifices—higher taxes, conscription, economic disruption—that genuine warfighting capacity would require. Governments will announce impressive procurement programs while industrial constraints ensure that hardware arrives too slowly to matter. American reliability will remain officially unquestioned while allied hedging accelerates.
China will continue expanding its missile arsenal, improving its cyber capabilities, and conducting influence operations designed to fracture allied cohesion. The 2027 timeline may slip—military preparations often take longer than planners anticipate—but the underlying trajectory favors Beijing.
The most likely outcome is not a dramatic invasion but a gradual shift in the correlation of forces that eventually allows China to achieve its objectives through coercion rather than combat. Taiwan might find itself increasingly isolated, its economy strangled by gray-zone pressure, its international space constricted, until accommodation becomes the only viable option. The war that never happens may prove more decisive than the war that does.
The Interventions That Might Matter
Three leverage points offer the possibility of altering this trajectory, though each carries significant costs.
First, accelerated munitions production. The United States and allies could treat the industrial base as a genuine strategic priority, accepting the inefficiencies and costs of surge capacity that sits idle during peacetime. This would require sustained political commitment across multiple election cycles—precisely the kind of long-term investment that democratic systems find difficult to maintain.
Second, distributed force posture. Moving away from concentrated bases toward dispersed operations across multiple locations would complicate Chinese targeting while requiring extensive diplomatic negotiations with host nations, many of whom would face Chinese pressure to refuse cooperation. The Philippines’ willingness to host additional American facilities suggests this path remains viable, but it demands resources and attention that compete with other priorities.
Third, enhanced allied autonomy. Encouraging Japan, Australia, and eventually Taiwan to develop indigenous capabilities that reduce dependence on American logistics and command systems would create a more resilient deterrent architecture. It would also reduce American control over allied actions and potentially accelerate regional arms races. The trade-off is real.
None of these interventions guarantees success. All require political will that may not materialize and industrial capacity that takes years to develop. The honest assessment is that deterrence in the Western Pacific is degrading faster than the measures designed to restore it.
FAQ: Key Questions Answered
Q: Could Taiwan defend itself without American intervention? A: Not indefinitely. Taiwan’s military has improved significantly, and its geography favors defense, but its logistics capacity—particularly fuel and munitions stockpiles—would be exhausted within weeks of a serious blockade or invasion. American support is not optional for extended resistance.
Q: Why doesn’t Japan just build nuclear weapons? A: Constitutional constraints, public opinion shaped by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and alliance dynamics all militate against Japanese nuclear acquisition. The political costs would be enormous, and the strategic benefits uncertain given that Japan already operates under the American nuclear umbrella. Enhanced conventional capabilities offer a less controversial path to greater autonomy.
Q: What would trigger American military intervention? A: The Taiwan Relations Act commits the United States to provide Taiwan with defensive arms and to maintain the capacity to resist coercion, but it does not guarantee military intervention. The decision would depend on the circumstances of any conflict, the administration in power, and congressional support. This ambiguity is deliberate—and increasingly problematic.
Q: Is war between the US and China inevitable? A: No. Deterrence can hold even as it degrades, and both sides have powerful incentives to avoid direct conflict. The danger is not inevitability but accident—a crisis that escalates beyond either side’s intentions, or a miscalculation about the other’s red lines. Managing that risk requires sustained attention that competing priorities often crowd out.
The Silence Before the Storm
The most striking feature of the current moment is not the deterioration of deterrence but the quietude surrounding it. Allied capitals conduct business as usual. Defense budgets increase incrementally. Diplomatic statements express concern without urgency. The gap between the threat assessments that officials read in classified briefings and the priorities they pursue in public grows wider each year.
This is not ignorance. It is the rational response of political systems optimized for short-term survival to long-term threats that may or may not materialize. The costs of preparation are immediate and visible. The costs of unpreparedness are distant and uncertain. Democratic politics systematically discounts the future.
What breaks first is not political will or military capacity in isolation. What breaks is the connection between them—the ability to translate public concern into sustained investment, to convert defense spending into actual capability, to maintain alliance cohesion under pressure that has not yet arrived but casts its shadow across every calculation. The architecture of Pacific deterrence is not collapsing. It is hollowing out from within, maintaining its external form while the load-bearing structures quietly fail.
The question is whether anyone will notice before the weight shifts.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- RAND Corporation analysis of Chinese missile threats to US air bases - foundational assessment of runway vulnerability
- War on the Rocks on the Kadena Conundrum - strategic analysis of Pacific force posture challenges
- Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council polling - public opinion data on cross-strait relations
- Foreign Affairs on America’s munitions crisis - defense industrial base limitations
- Military Review on Chinese disinformation in Taiwan - information warfare analysis
- Defense News on Chinese missile threats to US airpower - operational vulnerability assessment
- Nippon.com on Japan’s defense budget trajectory - Japanese military spending data
- Lowy Institute Poll 2024 - Australian public opinion on China threat
