Russia Is Helping China Close the Military Gap With the United States
A Foundation for Defense of Democracies analysis finds Russia is accelerating China's military modernization as Beijing increases maritime pressure on Taiwan with live naval war games.
Russia is actively helping China narrow the military gap with American forces at precisely the moment Beijing is escalating pressure on Taiwan, according to a new analysis from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The finding arrives as Taiwan conducted anti-blockade naval drills Wednesday and the United States urged China to stand down.
The convergence of these developments marks one of the more consequential weeks in Indo-Pacific security in recent memory: a peer competitor absorbing battlefield lessons from a land war in Europe, a flashpoint strait under active military pressure, and an alliance architecture — AUKUS — that a senior Pentagon official described Thursday as moving at “full steam ahead.”
What Russia Is Transferring
The FDD analysis focuses on the qualitative dimension of Russian-Chinese military cooperation rather than just weapons sales. Russia’s armed forces have spent more than two years conducting high-intensity combat operations against a well-supplied adversary, accumulating operational data on drone warfare, electronic countermeasures, missile strike patterns, and logistics under sustained attrition. That experience has value China’s People’s Liberation Army cannot replicate in peacetime exercises.
The report’s core argument is that Beijing is the principal beneficiary of Russia’s war in Ukraine — not through direct combat participation, but through the systematic harvesting of lessons that U.S. and Taiwanese planners must now account for. A PLA that has absorbed Russian findings on suppressing air defenses, degrading communications, and sustaining operational tempo is a materially different adversary than one operating on pre-war doctrine.
This matters most in the Taiwan Strait, where any conflict would unfold at sea and in the air domain rather than across contested land lines.
Taiwan Responds With Anti-Blockade Drills
Taiwan’s navy conducted live-fire drills Wednesday as part of ongoing annual war games, with exercises specifically designed to simulate breaking a naval blockade — a scenario that has become the PLA’s most-discussed option for coercing Taipei short of a full amphibious assault, according to Reuters.
The drills unfolded as China stepped up maritime pressure in waters surrounding the island, a pattern that has intensified over the past eighteen months. Beijing has used a combination of coast guard vessels, PLA Navy ships, and air sorties to assert what it calls sovereignty over areas Taiwan and international maritime law regard as international waters or Taiwan’s own jurisdiction.
Taipei Times reported that the naval exercises included surface combatants, submarines, and maritime patrol aircraft working in coordination — a force structure tailored to the specific threat of a blockade rather than a direct beach assault.
The United States responded diplomatically. Washington urged China to halt its military pressure campaign following the drills, according to Focus Taiwan, reiterating the longstanding American position that cross-strait differences must be resolved peacefully and without coercion. Whether the urging carries weight is another question — U.S. statements of this type have become routine enough that their deterrent effect is debated among analysts.
The AUKUS Variable
On Thursday, Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s third-highest-ranking official, described the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as progressing on schedule, telling reporters the deal is moving at “full steam ahead,” according to The Guardian. Colby, who was previously skeptical of the program’s feasibility and cost structure, called himself “very pleased” with its current trajectory.
AUKUS — the tripartite agreement among the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia — is designed to provide Canberra with nuclear-powered (though not nuclear-armed) submarines. The program’s strategic logic is to extend the undersea reach of allied forces in the Indo-Pacific, complicating PLA naval planning in exactly the waters where a Taiwan contingency would play out.
Colby’s shift from skeptic to advocate carries significance. He has been one of Washington’s more clearheaded voices about the need to prioritize deterrence in Asia over commitments elsewhere — a posture that puts him at the center of debates over how the U.S. distributes its military attention across Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific simultaneously.
The timing of his AUKUS remarks, one day after Taiwan’s anti-blockade drills and alongside the FDD’s Russia-China analysis, was not accidental. The Pentagon is constructing a visible deterrence narrative at a moment when the military balance in the strait is under active question.
What the Balance Sheet Shows
The FDD finding is an uncomfortable accounting. On one side of the ledger: Russia accelerating China’s operational learning curve through two-plus years of high-intensity warfare. On the other: the U.S. and its allies building out submarine capacity, reaffirming defense commitments, and continuing arms transfers to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act.
The gap-closing the FDD describes is not a cliff — it is a slope. The question analysts are debating is whether allied investment is sufficient to maintain a deterrence advantage as that slope steepens.
North Korea’s latest ballistic missile launch, reported Wednesday by Hankyoreh, adds another layer of complexity. Pyongyang’s continued testing strains American military attention and provides another data point for Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang to share — all three governments watching each other’s tests with professional interest.
The week’s combined picture is of a threat environment where the traditional assumption of overwhelming U.S. technological superiority is being methodically tested. The FDD analysis does not argue that China has achieved parity; it argues that Russia is helping Beijing get there faster than Washington’s planning timelines anticipated.
Related coverage: Taiwan Drills Simulate Chinese Missile Strike and Drone Defense | Taiwan, China, and Indonesia Naval Drill Tensions | Russia-Ukraine: North Korean Missiles and Escalation | Russian Strike Burns Ukraine Port
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