Emerging Military Technologies and Strategic Stability in the Indo-Pacific: A Policy Analysis of U.S.–China Strategic Rivalry

Abstract

The accelerating competition between the United States and China in emerging military technologies including artificial intelligence-enabled decision-making, autonomous and unmanned systems, hypersonic delivery vehicles, offensive cyber capabilities, and counter-space systems, is altering the operational and perceptual conditions that underpin strategic stability in the Indo-Pacific. This article undertakes a qualitative, problem-oriented policy analysis, informed by Strategic Stability Theory (SST), of the pathways through which these technologies affect crisis stability, arms-race stability, and deterrence stability in the U.S.–China relationship. Drawing on a verified, tiered evidence base of  U.S. and Chinese official documents including annual DoD reports on Chinese military and security developments, DoD strategy summaries, China’s white papers on national defense and arms control, and official Chinese and multilateral submissions on military applications of artificial intelligence, together with independent research institutions and the peer-reviewed strategic-stability literature, the analysis finds that emerging technologies compress decision timelines, deepen conventional-nuclear entanglement, increase the vulnerability of nuclear command-and-control (NC2) infrastructure, and generate technological uncertainty that existing bilateral and multilateral governance mechanisms have not kept pace with. These effects are shown to derive substantially from reciprocal, security-seeking behavior on both sides rather than from the unilateral conduct of either power. The article identifies the resulting governance gap as the central policy problem, develops and systematically evaluates three categories of policy response, a bilateral technology incidents protocol, domain-specific confidence-building measures, and multilateral/Track-1.5 governance engagement, against explicit criteria of effectiveness, feasibility, urgency, implementation difficulty, and escalation sensitivity, and proposes an implementation framework specifying responsible actors, mechanisms, and time horizons. The article concludes that reducing the probability of inadvertent or uncontrolled escalation requires deliberate, reciprocal investment in technology-specific crisis-management and confidence-building architecture, rather than the elimination of underlying strategic competition, which lies beyond the scope of feasible near-term policy.