Sensing and Analysis for Adversary-Informed Acquisition

Abstract

The US and China are engaged in a long-term, great power competition. This competition demands an adversarial-informed US approach to defense procurement and investment – one that accounts, for example, for Chinese sensitivities and exceptions of strength and weakness. The proposed paper will advance a new methodology for assessing adversarial threat and threat perceptions in the context of major defense acquisition programs, as well as proprietary data on Chinese military discourse, to frame China’s response to US procurement decisions and implications for competitive investment. In a series of papers presented at the Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Program, the authors have documented the scope and history of China's military-civil fusion strategy, its operational elements, and implications that China's contemporary military technology development strategy poses for the US acquisition community. The proposed paper will build on that foundation of analysis. The paper's methodology will leverage a proprietary dataset of Chinese-language articles collected from the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army. That content will be reviewed alongside strategic texts from China's military planning apparatus (e.g., S&T plans as well as Ministry of Defense White Papers and texts like the Science of Military Strategy published by the Academy of Military Sciences) to frame China's high level military objectives and supporting tasks. That strategic framing will be used to identify a subset of US military defense acquisition programs that are of most relevance to competition with China. Content and sentiment analysis will then be conducted against the historical archive of PLA-linked articles to identify trends around references to specific US acquisition programs and related platforms and capabilities. The resulting analysis will advance an argument about how particular MDAPs register with a Chinese audience, how trends change over time, and what that may indicate about the development of threat-informed acquisition processes.