This report describes a set of scenarios through which the authors explore the hypothesis that U.S.-China competition plausibly could lead to wars that endure longer than envisioned by traditional force planning scenarios. These scenarios feature a variety of circumstances in which the United States and China could be required to sustain military operations on a potentially open-ended time frame.

Thinking Through Protracted War with China

Nine Scenarios

Joel B. Predd, Paul DeLuca, Scott Savitz, Edward Geist, Caitlin Lee

ResearchPublished Feb 26, 2025

As ample wargaming and analysis have shown, any war with China would be economically and strategically costly, as well as fraught with the risk of escalation to nuclear war. In addition, any U.S.-China military conflict could very likely last longer than envisioned by traditional force planning scenarios, which often are designed around relatively limited objectives and call for U.S. forces and capabilities that could bring a war to a quick, decisive conclusion.

This report describes a set of scenarios of such protracted conflicts and provides what could be a foundation for more-detailed planning or analysis. To allow free creative scope for the scenario development process, the authors did not place a priori constraints on the meaning of “protracted,” and therefore, the resulting scenarios feature a variety of circumstances in which the United States and China could be required to sustain military operations on much longer time frames.

Key Findings

There are reasons to believe that the assumption that U.S. military planners could discount the possibility of protracted war in the second half of the 20th century may no longer apply in the emerging strategic environment

  • It is not obvious why some confrontations of interest, such as a contest over Taiwan, would be expected to escalate to nuclear use.
  • Neither China nor the United States possesses overwhelming conventional military power or significant economic overmatch that would ensure rapid victory.
  • The opening phase on a U.S.-China contingency could set the stage for protraction.
  • New technologies could enable novel kinds of protracted war qualitatively dissimilar to historical conflicts, such as World War II.

There are four broad classes of scenarios that can lead to open-ended warfighting in which stakes for both sides must be large enough to justify continued fighting but small enough to avoid escalation to all-out nuclear war

  • The United States and China fight indirectly through proxies, expending materiel, capital, and other (e.g., political) resources to support their surrogates.
  • The United States and China fight each other directly but on third-party territories, thereby minimizing the existential risks to their respective homelands.
  • The United States and China engage in direct conflict, but limited objectives or external factors constrain the rate of progress toward goals.
  • The United States and China engage in direct warfighting, but both sides implicitly or explicitly negotiate constraints on escalation.

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  • Copyright: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Available
  • Year: 2025
  • Print Format: Paperback
  • Paperback Pages: 65
  • Paperback Price: $32.00
  • Paperback ISBN/EAN: 1-9774-1492-3
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.7249/RRA1475-1
  • Document Number: RR-A1475-1

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RAND Style Manual

Predd, Joel B., Paul DeLuca, Scott Savitz, Edward Geist, and Caitlin Lee, Thinking Through Protracted War with China: Nine Scenarios, RAND Corporation, RR-A1475-1, 2025. As of April 8, 2025: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1475-1.html

Chicago Manual of Style

Predd, Joel B., Paul DeLuca, Scott Savitz, Edward Geist, and Caitlin Lee, Thinking Through Protracted War with China: Nine Scenarios. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1475-1.html. Also available in print form.
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This research was sponsored by the Office of Net Assessment and conducted within the Acquisition and Technology Policy Program of the RAND National Security Research Division.

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