ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the conventional military balance between China and India. We argue the balance is asymmetric but uneven—that is, China enjoys overall advantages in having a larger, better-resourced, more modernized, and better-organized force, but this may not translate into superiority in every scenario. We show that China’s military priorities are its high-technology, multi-domain competition with the United States, whereas India remains focused on ground-force threats on its northern borders. China has more effectively modernized its military, compared with India—it has more resources, more indigenous production, more effective joint organization, and critical combat enablers. However, conventional military advantages may vary in different geographic areas—military geography favors China on their land border, but favors India in the Indian Ocean. In a crisis or war, the military outcome will be highly contingent on the particular context of the conflict and the use of non-conventional tools of power.
