The Pentagon has redoubled its plans to contain China within the First Island Chain in accordance with the 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) update. In a Sept. 22 report to the Senate Armed Services Committee on the 2026 NDS, delivered two days before the Trump-Xi Jinping summit, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby highlighted the Department’s efforts to establish a “deterrence by denial” posture in the Indo-Pacific against China. The move is the culmination of attempts within the past decade to prepare American forces for a potential conflict against China, one that would require expansive logistics and missile volleys over the vast distances of the Pacific.
“The Department of War is laser-focused on ensuring a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific,” Colby said. “Our goal in doing so is not to dominate the region or anyone in it. Rather, it is to ensure that no country can dominate us or our allies—in essence, to set the military conditions required to achieve the goal set by the 2025 National Security Strategy of a balance of power in the Indo-Pacific that allows all of us to enjoy a decent peace.”
Colby noted that U.S. and Chinese military officials have been engaged in a military dialogue over the past year. However, “we are ever mindful of President Trump’s direction to always negotiate from a position of strength,” he said. “Therefore, even as we work to avoid confrontation, we continue our efforts to strengthen deterrence by denial along the First Island Chain (FIC), with the goal, as Secretary Hegseth has said, of ensuring that ‘aggression is infeasible, escalation unattractive, and war deemed irrational.’”
To underscore Colby’s strategy, the U.S. Marine Corps will deploy its ground-based anti-ship and air-defense missile systems to Japan’s island of Yonaguni for exercise Keen Sword, placing new U.S.-Japan capabilities on an island sitting just 110 kilometers from Taiwan, Defense News reported on Monday. Keen Sword, the largest U.S.-Japan biennial joint drill, will feature two key systems of the Marine Corps’s littoral force: the anti-ship NMESIS (Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System) and air-defense MADIS (Marine Air Defense Integrated System). The systems will be deployed to Yonaguni for the first time, as this year’s iteration shifts to ground-based, multi-island, sea-denial operations aimed at distributing American and Japanese forces across the southwestern islands.
