The 1974 Paracels Sea Battle: A Campaign Appraisal

The Paracels battle of 1974 illustrates a continuity in China’s creative use of naval and nonmilitary instruments of sea power. The apparent efficacy of mixing unorthodox methods with traditional tools of war suggests that China may turn to this playbook again in future confrontations in the South China Sea

China, Fragile Superpower

According to Susan Shirk, China suffers terribly from the “wag the dog” syn- drome. Shirk argues rather persuasively that China is saddled with a host of in- ternal problems, ranging from wide- spread social unrest to rampant political corruption, that have sharply intensi- fied insecurities among Chinese leaders with respect to their hold on power. Such perceptions of vulnerability have in turn heightened Chinese sensitivities to slights by Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, slights that accordingly threaten to arouse potentially uncon- trollable national passions and, in the process, stimulate regime-toppling im- pulses at home

Chinese Missile Strategy and the U.S. Naval Presence in Japan

In recent years, defense analysts in the United States have substantially revised their estimates of China’s missile prowess. A decade ago, most observers rated Beijing’s ballistic missiles as inaccurate, blunt weapons limited to terrorizing ci- vilian populations. Today, the emerging consensus within the U.S. strategic community is that China’s arsenal can infl ict lethal harm with precision on a wide ange of military targets, including ports and airfi elds. As a consequence, many observers have jettisoned previously sanguine net assessments that conferred de- cisive, qualitative advantages to Taiwan in the cross-strait military balance. Indeed, the debates on China’s coercive power and Taiwan’s apparent inability to resist such pressure have taken on a palpably fatalistic tone

Fighting the Naval Hegemon: Evolution in French, Soviet, and Chinese Naval Thought

Geography gives strategy its context. Secure from land invasion, Great Brit- ain and later the United States employed a distinctive form of sea power to defeat their adversaries. Both used their navies to control sea-lanes and vital choke points and to apply direct pressure along enemy coastlines. Through their dominance of the oceans they were able to shape the political and economic order of the world. It is fair to say that what amounts to the Anglo-American school of naval power has demonstrated its efficacy time after time: over the past 250 years these two powers have, singly or together, and always with other allies, defeated every opponent that has attempted to change that order

China and the United States in the Indian Ocean

The Asian seas today are witnessing an intriguing historical anomaly—the simultaneous rises of two homegrown maritime powers against the backdrop of U.S. dominion over the global commons. The drivers behind this apparent irregularity in the Asian regional order are, of course, China and India. Their aspi- rations for great-power status and, above all, their quests for energy security have compelled both Beijing and New Delhi to redirect their gazes from land to the seas

Taiwan

The past four years have witnessed an unexpected warming of relations between the United States and China. The rancor generated by the EP-3 spy-plane controversy and the debate over American arms sales to Taiwan dissi- pated in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Beijing supported the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan. It has co-operated with the United States in the war on terror, sharing intelligence and coordinating law-enforcement efforts.1 Perhaps most strikingly, Chinese officials have worked quietly but assiduously to break the nu- clear impasse on the Korean Peninsula

Thinking about the Unthinkable

Will Japan go nuclear? Doubtful—but what if it does? It is possible to envi- sion circumstances that would impel Tokyo and the Japanese populace to cast aside their long-standing dread of nuclear weapons and to construct an arsenal of their own for the sake of national survival. Menacing strategic surroundings or a collapse of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty are two such circumstances. If some nightmare scenario did come to pass, the common wisdom has it, Japan could build a working bomb in short order. In 1991, Richard Halloran averred that “Japan is N minus six months,” although he saw no evidence that Japan entertained any ambition to tap its latent weapons capability

Japanese Maritime Thought: If Not Mahan, Who?

The late Colonel John Boyd, who knew a thing or two about strategic thought, was fond of declaring that excellence in warfare and other human endeavors depended on people, ideas, and hardware—in that order.1 We postulate that Japan has lost sight of this commonsense axiom, allowing strategic thought to atrophy

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements