CLSC Dialogues – Ep 23 – Joshua Arostegui, Brennan Deveraux, and Rick Gunnell – More Than a Numbers Game: Comparing US and Chinese Landpower in the Pacific Requires Context

[Rick Gunnell] You're listening to CLSC Dialogues, landpower in the Indo-Pacific, a China Landpower Studies Center production. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of Army, US Army, War College, or any other agency of the US government. I'm Rick Gunnel, research professor of China military studies and today we're talking with Josh Arostegui, chair of the China Landpower Studies Center, and Brennan Devereaux, national security researcher at the Strategic Studies Institute.

Today, we'll be chatting about the recently published monograph More Than a Numbers Game: Comparing US and Chinese Landpower in the Pacific Requires Context. I'll start with an opening question. How did you become interested in this topic, and how did it evolve over time?

[Joshua Arostegui] Well, I'll jump on this one first. So, this was essentially a direct result of a visit from senior leaders from the US Army Pacific. When our center first stood up. It was more of an ask for us to get after, you know, assessing or analyzing, you know, how US Army campaigning in the Indo-Pacific was working? Maybe describe a little bit more in detail and potentially look at measures of effectiveness, you know, against adversaries.

I'm a China guy, you know, I like to research China stuff. While I worked for the Army for many years, it was one of those topics that I said, well, I'll give it a shot. And, as I did it, I realized I knew a lot more about China than I knew about the US Army. And so, after I wrote my first couple drafts, I was a little disappointed with how they turned out. And I went to the office next door and talked to Brennan and say, “Hey, Brennan, what do you think?” And he gave me some great ideas about potentially creating a more of a comparative analysis with how the PLA and its army, in the Indo-Pacific, was posturing and modernizing and use that as essentially a foundation to compare both sides.

And as I started to write this, I said, wow, this is a really great idea. I also realized I still don't know as much about the US Army as I should. “Hey, Brennan, do you want to help out with this one?” And, honestly, him coming on board the project, you know, me co-opting his assistance made this really, a far better project. Brennan?

[Brennan Deveraux] Yeah. So, I took from where Josh chose, and we kind of looked at this big restructure with the comparison between the forces. And one thing that drove that is there's this old Navy PowerPoint slide that both of us had seen - a lot of people who have looked at future war have seen - where it's, it pretty much that the bottom line in it is look how many ships China has. Isn't that terrifying? Which “yes…but” was always kind of the conversation. And as we transition that to landpower, it's really important because these systems, while still very important, are less the foundation of what that power is. So, it's important to know how many tanks someone has. But there's more to how tanks are employed than just how many ships someone has.

And so we use that kind of as their foundation to say, don't do that. Don't just compare like items and say, “oh my gosh, we're doomed because they have more people.” Because they do. They have more people. They'll continue to have more people. And if they want, they'll continue to have a bigger army. And what we did is we started with kind of this shorter commentary piece, that really argued more of that, which was, you know, we got to make sure as we're doing these assessments that we don't fall into that trap because it's such an easy trap for analysis.

But that really also, similar to the first draft Josh did, it really didn't pan out. Because that foundational knowledge wasn't really there. So, we switched from commentary to actual hard analysis to kind of provide some of that framework that says, you know, there is context between and here are some of the things we need to measure. And as