ABSTRACT
Vast distances, limited forces, precious alliances: the Pacific reaching from America’s West Coast and into the Indian Ocean presents the globe’s number one challenge for the flexibility and agility of US airpower. “The Indo-Pacific is the Department of Defense’s priority theater,” declared the United States’ Indo-Pacific Strategy Review of 2019. Both China and Russia in the 2020s will reach a maximum rate of modernization of nuclear forces and conventional forces. Russia under Putin increased its military tempo from the cyber war against Estonia in 2007 to the exotic missile tests that closed out the 2010s. The region is also the top priority for China, a rival with military and economic depth unlike anything the United States and allies have faced in the Pacific. China and Russia promised to reach peak modernization of forces in the decade from 2020 to 2030.
