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General (Ret.) Joe Dunford served as the 19th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from 2015-2019. In that capacity, he was the senior ranking U.S. officer and the principal military advisor to the President, Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council. Prior assignments included service as the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the Commander of U.S. Forces and NATO Forces in Afghanistan. He is a graduate of St Michael’s College and has graduate degrees from Georgetown University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. General Dunford currently serves as the Chairman of the Board of the Injured Marine Semper Fi and America’s Fund and as a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. What follows is a lightly edited interview.

Q: I’d like to start with the big picture of the U.S.-China relationship. Most people characterize this relationship between the world’s two great powers today as “strategic competition,” and this competition is clearly multidimensional — from economics, to technology, to even the pandemic. Give us an overview of the military dimension: Where are we today? How did we get here? And where is that trajectory going?

A: You correctly highlighted that the military dimension is only one dimension, and by far a supporting dimension to the broader objectives that are both political and economic. I think the military dimension starts with the U.S. military needing to lend credibility to our alliances in the Indo-Pacific area. The capabilities we deploy to the Pacific need to assure our allies that we can meet our alliance commitments and need to serve as a deterrent for aggressive action in the region. Of course, a subset of that is to provide the President of the United States with options — credible options — in the event that deterrence fails. 

The U.S. military, from a broader view, serves as a manifestation of U.S. commitment to the region as well. And it’s not a coincidence, both from a capabilities perspective as well as from a manifestation of commitment, that all of the U.S. military’s most modern equipment have been deployed to the Indo-Pacific first. The military dimension also provides the credibility for diplomats to do what they do. And that’s not unique to the Indo-Pacific, but it is an element of the Indo-Pacific.

With regard to not just competition with China, but more broadly, we fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows in the Indo-Pacific, and that’s to assert freedom of navigation in accordance with international law. And by the way, we conduct about 1,000 freedom of navigation operations every year in 22 countries around the world. So I deliberately separate that from just specifically competition with China because it’s a broader task of the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific that is consistent with things the U.S. military does elsewhere.

Another element of the military dimension of the competition is to establish effective relationships with the Chinese military to mitigate the risk of miscalculation and to be in a position to assist in managing a crisis should one occur. That’s a really important element of our mil-to-mil relationship. 

You mentioned deterring our adversaries from aggressive actions that run counter to our interests. There’s a vigorous debate within the strategic community about how best to secure our national interests in the Indo-Pacific — and often those approaches are framed in terms of either “restoring primacy” or “sustaining deterrence.” Given the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” which the last administration articulated, I’m curious as to what your view is on the optimal strategic framework to achieve those objectives.

It’s a great question, and I find it strange that people frame it the way they do, between deterrence and primacy. In my view, the benchmark should be our national interests in the region. And the military dimension of that is of course what we’re talking about. And our military capabilities need to be such — relative to the Chinese — that we can advance our interests in the region. So I don’t really view it as either primacy or deterrence. I view it as having a military dimension of our overall strategy in the Pacific that allows us to secure our national interests. 

But at the end of the day, what is deterrence? It boils down to having any potential adversary view the cost of their action as far exceeding whatever they can hope to gain. When we talk about the “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” at the end of the day, we want all nations to be on a level playing field with regard to rules, laws, norms, and standards. And from a military perspective, we don’t want military coercion combined with economic coercion to put nations at a positional disadvantage in the Indo-Pacific. 

So words like “primacy” and “deterrence,” I think, aren’t nuanced enough to really address what we should be doing in the Indo-Pacific. 

What I would expect is the new administration will clearly articulate our national interests in the region — that will probably largely be a re-articulation — but then the specific objectives a Biden administration will have in the Indo-Pacific. And then I think it’s incumbent on the U.S. military to make whatever adaptation is necessary to support, in the context of a broader strategy, those specific objectives outlined by the Biden administration.

I want to shift to your experience working with China’s leadership. You’ve met with Xi Jinping and their military leaders on numerous occasions. What were those interactions like? Were they productive? And did you get a sense of how they viewed U.S.-China military relations from those meetings?

My dealings with the Chinese military in my last assignment really began after the diplomatic and security dialogue in May of 2017. And Fang Fenghui came and was one of the representatives for the Chinese. I attended with Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Mattis at the time. And this was about six weeks after Mar-a-Lago. There was a great deal of optimism in the wake of Mar-a-Lago for the trajectory of U.S.-China relations. And there was an agreement on a series of dialogues, one of which was the diplomatic and security dialogue, to advance the relationship. 

Xi Jinping believed — and he told me this personally — that one of the outcomes of Mar-a-Lago was an agreement that the military-to-military relationship between the U.S. and China would be a stabilizing element of the overall relationship, and he was very committed to this. During the meeting in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2017, it was agreed that I would go to Beijing later that summer and work out the details of the mil-to-mil relationship and a more formal structure within which the Chinese Joint Staff and the U.S. Joint Staff could communicate — to include a more effective, real-time communications mechanism. 

I went in August 2017 and had a very productive meeting. The way things work in China is you never know what your senior level meetings are going to be until you finish your initial meetings. And then they make judgments as to whether or not it’s worth people’s time at the senior level to meet. On the last day that I was in China, Fang Fenghui told me with great enthusiasm that I had a surprise, and my surprise was a meeting with President Xi Jinping. 

He was very complimentary about the efforts that we had had — at that point over the last couple of days. We did come up with a framework for Joint Staff Dialogue. We came up with a framework for enhancing crisis communication between the Chinese and U.S. military, and we had the full support of Xi Jinping. 

The Chinese actually use military-to-military dialogue as an indicator of the overall health of the relationship, so when the overall relationship is not going well, their view is that the military-to-military relationship and the overall security and diplomatic dialogue need to step back. 

We came back to the United States, and we had a couple of follow-up meetings at the two- and three-star level. A Chinese delegation came to the U.S. first. And we also did some work by secure video-teleconference between the Joint Staff and the Chinese military. 

In any event, as the relationship began to deteriorate in 2018, the momentum went away. Fang Fenghui was arrested in the fall of 2017. His replacement committed to a U.S. visit in spring of 2018, and he never came.

We really lost not only the momentum at the strategic level, but I think it’s fair to say there’s a lot of room for improvement even in the management of incidents at sea and in the air and the basic structures that inform safe and professional conduct of forces in the air and in the sea. 

And here’s the interesting thing: I participated in a Track 2 last summer, and I asked the retired Chinese General a question. I said: At the very time that effective military-to-military relationships and communications are necessary to mitigate the risk of miscalculation and manage a crisis, we actually are sliding backwards in our ability to communicate — I don’t understand that, can you explain that? 

And the answer was one that we need to think about as we move forward. The Chinese General said, ‘Well, I suppose that’s because we don’t want to legitimize the U.S. presence in the region with these structures.”

So, we have a very strong cultural difference between the U.S. and China that we need to think about as we look at military-to-military relations moving forward. The U.S. view is that we should be talking to people regardless of our overall relationship, and the crisis communication we had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War is an illustration of that. But the Chinese actually use military-to-military dialogue as an indicator of the overall health of the relationship, so when the overall relationship is not going well, their view is that the military-to-military relationship and the overall security and diplomatic dialogue need to step back. 

I don’t have an answer for why that is, but it needs to inform where we go in the Biden administration. We need to, as a matter of priority, find an acceptable framework within which we can today have military-to-military exchange, dialogue, communication that can mitigate the risk of miscalculation, that can effectively oversee the professional and safe conduct of our forces operating in close proximity, and that can serve as an effective mechanism in the event of a crisis. 

So those would be the three minimal objectives we ought to have in the mil-to-mil relationship moving forward. We’re going to have to find a way that’s acceptable to both parties to move forward. And I think that needs to be a part of the initial engagement of the new administration with China, because that’s the shock absorber, and that’s a minimal level of engagement that then we can build upon.

One potential scenario that many folks worry about is a conflict over Taiwan. Taiwan is, of course, a U.S. partner in the region and fellow democracy, but in the past couple of years, we’ve seen an increasingly tense security situation generated across the Taiwan Strait. How do you think about the military challenges in Taiwan’s case and what the U.S. approach to our policy toward Taiwan should be, including for example, the question of arms sales?

So let’s start with the latter part of the question. U.S. policy over years has been that any solution with Taiwan needs to be peaceful. That’s been a core element of all of the communiqués that have come out — the peaceful element — and that we would recognize One China, but that the combination with Taiwan that would eventually occur would be again one that was peaceful and took into account the interests of the people in Taiwan. 

The Trump administration increased — but not changed — the security cooperation that we have with Taiwan. In other words, we have, for a long time, provided military equipment and exchanges that have helped Taiwan more effectively defend itself — and more importantly deterred China from thinking that military action could allow them to achieve their political objectives. So it was designed to convince the Chinese that Taiwan could impose a cost on China that would exceed what they could hope to gain by using force to achieve their political objectives with regard to Taiwan. And so that’s our current policy, to strengthen Taiwan’s military so they can defend themselves. 

Now a lot of people will talk about China’s ability to be successful in a Taiwan scenario. I think that the wargames and so forth that we refer to have highlighted very real military challenges because of something that’s kind of a military fact — that is, that China has interior lines in a conflict with Taiwan, and geographical advantage. And so that needs to be dealt with. And over the last several years, and particularly in the wake of Desert Shield and Desert Storm, China has developed a suite of what we call in the Pentagon the anti-access area-denial (A2/AD) weapons capabilities — in plain English, the ability of the United States to project power into the region and then to operate freely across all those five domains that I spoke about. 

But I think we need to be careful concluding that challenges in the military dimension mean overall that we don’t have deterrence, because any cost to China for using violence and force to achieve their political objectives in Taiwan would be met by diplomatic action, economic action, and military action. And I think it’s important when we think about the military dimension, to look at it in isolation to see where are the challenges and how can we fill what may be identified as capability gaps and so forth — but it’s a big mistake to look at deterrence as a purely military problem. 

As for any specific piece of equipment, that’s a decision for Taiwan to make. Taiwan is responsible for the defense of Taiwan — the United States is not. We can certainly, in conversations at the military-to-military level, share professional ideas and thoughts. But we don’t have, as you know, a formal alliance with Taiwan. We have a commitment to the peaceful resolution or peaceful framework within which the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan is addressed, but I think that any question about specific capabilities and investments needs to be informed by Taiwan’s theory of the case, their plan to defend themselves, and what capabilities are most relevant in a cost-imposing strategy in the event that China chooses military aggression to achieve their political ends. More important than one specific program or piece of equipment is to actually ask Taiwan what their theory of the case is. And then we should facilitate military sales that support their concept. 

You said earlier that the military needs to adapt to how the administration articulates its objectives and its strategies. Obviously one of the drivers of that adaptation is the PLA’s modernization campaign. Xi has stated the PLA will “basically modernize” by 2035, and become a “world-class military” — and thus a peer competitor, if they’re not already, of the U.S. military — by mid-century. Do you believe they are on track to accomplish that? Along that trajectory, what are the key challenges they might face? And if they succeed, what threat would that pose to the U.S.? 

I think the idea of China being a peer competitor is one that has been generally accepted as being some years from now — three, five, or seven years from now — based on the trajectory that we’re on. And we certainly, from a U.S. perspective, can affect that equation to some degree, and that’s what part of our modernization plan is designed to do. But I think “peer competitor” is a fair term. 

In terms of challenges that China faces, in 2017 when the CCP Congress met, one of the things that Xi Jinping laid out was a plan for the integration of the Chinese military — what we call unified command. Fielding equipment is one thing, but being able to integrate that equipment, the people, and the doctrine into warfighting capability is something else. And while I won’t underestimate the Chinese — it does you no good to underestimate a threat — I think the most significant challenge for the Chinese is to take that investment that they’re making in technology and equipment and actually translate that into capability. 

Integration of all that into real warfighting capability is a difficult challenge. China has some history and some cultural barriers to what we would describe as “joint warfighting” that I know is a priority for their leadership, but I also know it’s a work in progress and not something that they have achieved yet. And to be honest, I think with regard to warfighting integration, we have a couple of decades’ head start on doing that, which again is not a reason for us to be complacent, but it is an area that I would highlight as probably not China’s strength at this point.

That leads us to China’s use of technology to bolster their military capabilities. The PLA is not only adopting AI but also other emerging technologies like biotech and quantum computing through what’s been termed “military-civil fusion.” So how do advantages in AI shape the future of military power? And more importantly, while the U.S. has traditionally been the innovation powerhouse of the world, how does the relationship between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley need to adapt specifically vis-à-vis the China challenge?

So let me take the second part of your question first, and then we’ll come back to how China is doing with AI and the implications of AI — because the second part of the question is really an important point. 

I always use the World War II example: Why was the United States, in the end, successful in World War II? And the answer is that we were able to mobilize the industrial capacity of the United States and the intellectual capacity of the American people to achieve our objectives. 

Today, I really do believe that competition with China can’t be U.S. government only. It has to be a combination of the private and public sector. And to the extent that we can deepen the public-private partnership in the U.S. to enhance our overall competitiveness globally, we’ll be successful. 

I really do believe that competition with China can’t be U.S. government only. It has to be a combination of the private and public sector.

One of the things I think can be done is capital investment. When you look at where the money is going, encouraging U.S. capital and capital from allied nations to go to companies and to sectors that are of interest to the United States, and to provide those companies that are of most interest to the United States an alternative to Chinese capital — with all the baggage that comes with that — is an important element. 

Let’s go to your other question on the significance of AI. In the near term, what AI can do is greatly assist decision-making. Speed of decision-making with a high confidence in the information and intelligence upon which that decision is based is a critical competitive advantage, and AI can obviously help quickly integrate information and intelligence, provide a clear pattern of what is the environment within which a decision is being made, and then allow a decision-maker to make an informed decision. 

Obviously, as you look forward and start thinking about man-machine teaming, autonomous vehicles, integrating autonomous vehicles with manned vehicles, cross-domain solutions in command-and-control, intelligence, and so forth, all of that is in the future, but even today, AI just for support of decision-making is a huge factor in assessing an overall competitive advantage.

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