This report examines how China’s military build-up to 2035 might challenge assumptions about Australian security by scrutinising China’s long-range military capabilities today and in a decade’s time. It identifies shifts that affect Australian security regardless of China’s capacity to strike Australian territory.

China may already be building a ‘post-American navy’, one designed not to confront US naval predominance in the Pacific, but to inherit it as the US baulks at the increasing cost of continued regional leadership.