The Evolution of Landpower

This commentary is part of a report from the CSIS Defense and Security Department entitled War and the Modern Battlefield: Insights from Ukraine and the Middle East.

In late February 2022, Russian forces launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Within hours, columns of tanks rolled across borders, missiles launched from the air and sea struck airfields, and cyberattacks targeted communication systems. Yet amid these varied assault vectors, the defining struggle in the war’s early phase—Russia’s attempt to encircle Kyiv and seize critical lodgments like the Hostomel airport—was for land.¹

Despite Russia’s initial multidomain salvo, comprising long-range fires, cyberattacks, and electronic warfare, the Ukrainian defense hinged on organized ground resistance. Soldiers and territorial volunteers held the capital’s outskirts and prevented Russian paratroopers from establishing a key air bridge at Hostomel. A mix of former tech executives turned drone operators and special forces teams launched ambushes along Russian armored columns reminiscent of Finnish motti tactics from the Winter War.² These activities at the tactical level denied Moscow’s operational objective of rapidly seizing Kyiv in a lightning 10-day campaign. In other words, strategy hinged on the value of territory in the land domain. Great battles remain fought by people over land, and the domain plays a central role at every level of war.

But land is not just the object of campaigns, it is the medium through which adversaries access other domains. In a world of satellites, precision munitions, and networked warfare, the initial campaign of the war in Ukraine underscored an enduring reality: Landpower remains indispensable as the hub that sustains and integrates operations across air, sea, space, and cyber domains. There is no airpower without airports. There is no seapower with major ports. There is no cyber or space power without digital infrastructure, ground stations, and launch platforms.

Landpower in the twenty-first century is neither eclipsed by technology nor rendered obsolete by distant-strike capabilities and the increasing importance of other domains. It evolves with new doctrines, and technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) and cyber integration. Yet it endures in its fundamental role. Cyberspace relies on servers and fiber-optic cables housed on the ground. Ultimately, political and strategic outcomes still hinge on who holds which territory, for how long, and at what cost.

The chapter proceeds by adapting naval theory to reconceptualize twenty-first-century landpower. Using Sir Julian Corbett’s ideas as a guide, it proposes seeing land as a hub connecting other domains. This perspective is then illustrated through a series of vignettes analyzing how Ukraine, China, and the United States are using land-based forces to generate effects in other domains. The chapter concludes by drawing three implications about the future of war. First, future campaigns will need to focus on securing strategic ground-based infrastructure that includes not just air and naval ports but space-based hubs and data infrastructure. Second, combined arms now means combined domains where land serves as a gateway to effects in air, sea, cyberspace, and space. Last, there is a larger competition over critical infrastructure likely to define both competition and warfighting in the coming decades.

What Has Changed: Depth and Domains

A persistent theme in the evolution of modern land warfare is disrupting adversaries across the depth of battlespace to enable maneuver. If a force can move, it can threaten adversary centers of gravity, thus compelling surrender or inviting destruction. Early twentieth-century Soviet theorist Georgii Isserson charted the changing character of war in relation to how politics and technology create new epochs.³ His notion of successive “epochs of warfare” predicted that once continuous fronts became the norm (as in World War I), future battles would require deep operations to bypass linear defenses. This thinking inspired Soviet deep battle doctrine, which remains relevant in the twenty-first century.⁴ It also provides a larger conceptual foundation for modern combined arms maneuver and writings from Liddell Hart and Mikhail Tukhachevsky about how to break static fronts.⁵ And since the late Cold War, concerns about combined arms maneuver have had to grapple with the challenge of how precision weapons and modern battle networks complicate massing forces.⁶ This condition has become increasingly acute with the rise of the transparent battlefield, where even small or medium-sized countries can network drones to deny maneuver.⁷ 

Modern multidomain operations seek to use long-range fires to change battlefield conditions and enable maneuver. Multidomain operations revolve around penetrating layered defenses, such as anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) networks, to disrupt an adversary’s depth and create exploitable corridors.⁸ The concept is consistent with the “pulse attacks” envisioned by the Joint Warfighting Concept, which will increasingly rely on coordinated effects across space, cyberspace, and more traditional land, air, and maritime domains.⁹ At the same time, modern landpower has to increasingly contend with how information changes politics and puts a premium on understanding human terrain.¹⁰ Long-range strikes happen alongside computational propaganda campaigns, creating a new form of political warfare.¹¹ Seen in this light, Isserson’s key insight—that changes in technology (e.g., mechanization, long-range fires) drive doctrinal evolution but never negate the human requirement to seize ground—continues to inform contemporary landpower debates.

The political utility of landpower remains its role in adding credibility to strategic deterrence through forward-deployed forces ranging from trip wires to large coalition formations designed to prevent a conventional fait accompli attack and provide options to seize key terrain.¹² Traditionally, the seat of power has been on land, defined by both political and economic points. These hubs—such as capital cities, mountain passes, and ports located on critical sea lines of communication—provided the aimpoints for campaigns for centuries.

Yet, increasingly, there is a new logic to landpower. Hubs on land anchor how militaries connect their forces to project combat power across multiple domains. In other words, landpower anchors the entire warfighting architecture.¹³ As highlighted above, ports supply navies, runways host and maintain airpower, ground stations control satellites, and fiber-optic cables house the internet’s spine. Absent secure territorial footholds, domain capabilities wither. Joint all-domain warfare and the “symphony of capabilities” called for in the Joint Warfighting Concept require fusing effects across multiple domains. This logic suggests a need to revisit how soldiers, policymakers, and analysts conceptualize the utility of landpower.

The Land-Sea Interaction as a Model for Multidomain Warfare

Sir Julian Corbett (1854–1922) is remembered as a leading naval theorist, but his ideas help understand the centrality of land as a gateway to joint all-domain operations. His seminal work, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911), challenged conventional naval thought by emphasizing that maritime power is inherently tied to operations on land.¹⁴ Unlike American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), who championed decisive naval engagements and total sea control, Corbett argued that true strategic success required the integration of sea and landpower.¹⁵

Over the last generation, scholars and practitioners have applied this insight to new domains, including space and cyberspace.¹⁶ This chapter expands Corbett’s original insight even further.¹⁷ The land is no longer just a strategic objective, with naval forces serving as a supporting element. It becomes a hub for connecting domains and waging joint all-domain operations.¹⁸

Just as Corbett emphasized that naval forces must influence events on land to be strategically decisive, modern joint forces must integrate land, sea, air, space, and cyber capabilities to achieve operational success. At the operational level, landpower serves as a means of both generating and denying effects in other domains in support of a larger campaign. Corbett’s logic dictates that airpower, like naval power, is fundamentally dependent on ground-based logistical support, radar stations, and air defense systems.¹⁹

Modern naval forces cannot operate effectively without land-based resupply.²⁰ Furthermore, modern naval campaigns operate as part of a network of coastal sensors and missile batteries central to modern concepts of sea denial.²¹ They also rely on satellites launched from ground sites to provide everything from intelligence updates to positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) support to targeting. Even space and cyberspace depend on land-based infrastructure ranging from downlink stations and fiber-optic cables to data centers and launch platforms. Corbett’s land-sea integration model should be expanded into a land-centric model for multidomain operations, where control of ports, airports, cyber hubs, and space infrastructure determines the ability to conduct effective military operations across all domains.

How Land Hubs Shape Modern Military Competition and Campaigns

Corbett’s concept of “disputed command”—the idea that no force can achieve total dominance at sea and must instead focus on controlling key areas—applies directly to modern multidomain operations. In this framework, seizing and holding at risk key land-based infrastructure such as ports, space launch sites, and data centers determines the flow of effects across domains. Three cases, laid out in the sections below, demonstrate this logic.

China’s Infrastructure Strategy

Contrary to much of the scholarship, China’s militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea is not just a maritime gray zone tactic.²² Rather, it reflects an enduring truth about war: Land remains the hub through which great powers generate and sustain cross-domain advantage. Drawing from Corbett’s theory of limited maritime command, Beijing’s strategy is not singularly about coercion beneath the threshold of war. Instead, these activities shape the theater and set conditions by extending Beijing’s A2/AD bubble and creating opportunities for power projection. Seen in this light, beyond coercion, militarized islands help Beijing generate the air and maritime power required to support future sea control operations that complicate U.S. and allied planning.²³

These artificial island hubs serve as forward operating bases, sensor nodes, and logistics platforms—critical nodes in China’s evolving battle network. They enable the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to extend surveillance and strike reach far beyond the mainland, fusing land-based radar, ship-borne sensors, and airborne early warning into an integrated architecture for command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C5ISR).²⁴ From these positions, China can deploy drones, patrol aircraft, naval militia vessels, and coast guard cutters in coordinated maritime domain operations. This forward basing enables the PLA to sustain presence, monitor traffic, and hold at risk key chokepoints like the Bashi Channel and the Strait of Malacca—contested sea lines of communication vital to both global commerce and regional military mobility.

At the strategic level, these land hubs function as platforms for power projection and political warfare. They support not only A2/AD operations but also economic and legal gray zone tactics—enabling Beijing to expand illegal fishing operations, intimidate rival claimants, and lay de facto claim to undersea resources, including hydrocarbons, gas fields, and mineral deposits beneath the South China Sea.²⁵ These actions mirror a broader trend: the use of land-based infrastructure to enable multidomain operations that blur the line between conventional force projection and peacetime coercion. China’s artificial islands are not just concrete symbols of sovereignty—they are multidomain launchpads from which Beijing contests both physical access and legal norms in the Indo-Pacific. In this context, landpower becomes not just the foundation of military operations, but the platform for strategic influence.

Second, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is not just about trade routes or economic corridors. It is a global strategy to reshape the physical and digital terrain through which power is projected. BRI reflects a modern understanding of landpower as the connective tissue for multidomain influence. By building, financing, or leasing key infrastructure around the globe—from ports and railways to data centers and satellite ground stations—Beijing is establishing positional advantage to shape maritime access, cyberspace architecture, and space operations.²⁶ The strategic logic mirrors Corbett’s foundational claim that the sea alone does not win wars; control over land is required to influence outcomes at sea and beyond.

In the maritime domain, the BRI has enabled China to construct a web of dual-use logistics nodes that support the evolution of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) into a blue-water force. China’s first overseas base in Djibouti and key BRI-linked ports like Gwadar (Pakistan), Hambantota (Sri Lanka), and Doraleh (Djibouti) offer refueling, surveillance, and maintenance infrastructure for PLAN deployments in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. These ports are not simply commercial. They are “strategic strongpoints” designed to extend the reach of Chinese seapower while providing platforms for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) collection and coercive diplomacy in times of crisis. During a Taiwan contingency, these positions could support PLAN surface action groups or submarines imposing a distant blockade, placing pressure on U.S. and allied resupply routes.

Equally important is China’s Digital Silk Road (DSR), a pillar of the BRI aimed at exporting Chinese telecommunications technology, including 5G infrastructure, fiber-optic networks, smart-city surveillance systems, and undersea cables.²⁷ Companies like Huawei and ZTE dominate many of these projects, often bundled with surveillance and facial recognition systems that mirror China’s domestic “digital authoritarianism” model.²⁸ Elements of this technology are already installed in more than 80 countries, providing China with not only soft power but also potential access to foreign data and signals intelligence. In strategic terms, China is creating digital terrain dependencies that allow Beijing to shape or even disrupt the information environment through technical infrastructure and software backdoors.

The export of Chinese telecommunications systems dovetails with the rise of the Space Silk Road.²⁹ Under the larger “Space Information Corridor” initiative, China is building and operating satellite ground stations and launch facilities in key partner countries, such as Argentina, Namibia, and Pakistan. These facilities support China’s growing satellite constellations, including the Beidou navigation system and remote-sensing platforms capable of supporting PLA C4ISR and precision strike operations. Beidou now offers global PNT services and is marketed as a GPS alternative. By extending space infrastructure abroad, China ensures redundancy and global coverage for its space assets, giving the PLA an advantage in a future blockade or counter-intervention scenario.

The larger family of BRI initiatives thus provides China with a global network of land-based infrastructure nodes that connect sensors, shooters, and decisionmakers—the essence of a modern battle network. In a Taiwan contingency, China may never need to encircle Taiwan directly. Instead, it can leverage this infrastructure to isolate the island digitally and economically. PLA doctrine, including exercises like Joint Sword-2024, points to the use of cyberattacks, electronic warfare, and space-based ISR to sever Taiwan’s communications and raise the costs of U.S. intervention. Ground stations in the Middle East or Africa can relay data in support of operations in East Asia, while telecommunications dependencies can be used to shape the decisionmaking of foreign governments hesitant to side with Washington in a crisis.

Ultimately, the BRI is not a traditional military alliance or a treaty network. It is a system of territorial dependencies through infrastructure. China is building a multidomain campaign plan through roads, cables, ports, and satellites, all anchored on land. In this new logic of combined arms, land is not just the objective. It is the access point, the enabler, and the global amplifier of Chinese influence. Understanding how larger strategic initiatives like BRI generate “land power in being” in the age of battle networks is essential for U.S. strategists thinking about denial, disruption, and resilience in long-term competition.

Killing Planes, Ships, and Satellites with Ground-Launched Effects

One of the defining features of Ukraine’s evolving campaign is its ability to use land-based strikes to fracture Russian multidomain operations. From the outset of the war, Ukraine has demonstrated that long-range fires—whether delivered by ballistic missiles, drones, or cruise missile systems—can create strategic effects when precisely targeted at key airfields, naval ports, and satellite communications centers. These operations reveal how land serves not merely as a battlespace, but as a hub, essentially an anchor point, from which forces can shape air, sea, space, and cyber operations. Whether striking strategic bomber bases deep inside Russia, sinking the Moskva, or disabling satellite communications links in Crimea, Ukraine has exposed how control of terrain and infrastructure enables the projection of power across all domains. This is a war fought not only over territory, but over the systems that connect, sense, and strike across that territory.

On February 25, 2022, Ukraine launched a Tochka-U ballistic missile strike on Russia’s Millerovo air base in Rostov Oblast, about 20 km from the border.³⁰ The attack set hangars ablaze and destroyed at least one Russian Su-30SM fighter on the ground. This early cross-border strike signaled Kyiv’s willingness and capability to target Russian military infrastructure from the outset. The surprise attack forced Russia to recognize its vulnerability at home, complicating Russian air operations near the front and foreshadowing a broader Ukrainian strategy of hitting deep targets to disrupt Russian multidomain operations.

On August 9, 2022, explosions rocked the Saky (Novofedorivka) airbase in Russian-occupied Crimea.³¹ The blasts, which Ukraine later implied were its doing, obliterated ammo depots and wrecked multiple Russian warplanes. Western intelligence assessed that over half of the Black Sea Fleet’s naval aviation combat jets were put out of use by the Saky strike. In its aftermath, Russia had to disperse or relocate remaining aircraft, degrading its ability to project airpower over the Black Sea and southern Ukraine.

In another unprecedented long-range attack, Ukraine targeted the Dyagilevo airfield (over 450 km from Ukraine) on December 5, 2022, using modified Soviet-era drones.³² The strike, aimed at disabling Russia’s strategic bombers, caused a fuel truck explosion that killed three personnel and injured others, and it reportedly damaged a Tu-22M3 nuclear-capable bomber. The ability of Ukraine to hit an airbase so deep in Russian territory underscored gaps in Russia’s air defenses and threatened its multidomain operations by potentially limiting the sortie rate of strategic bombers used for cruise missile attacks on Ukraine.

On August 19, 2023, a Ukrainian drone strike hit Soltsy-2 air base in northwestern Russia (about 650 km from Ukraine), which hosts Tu-22M3 “Backfire” bombers.³³ This strike again highlighted Russia’s struggles to protect strategic assets deep inside its territory—a vulnerability that undermines its air domain supremacy. Following the strike, Russia hurriedly relocated the remaining Tu-22M3 fleet to more remote airfields, revealing how Ukrainian deep strikes were steadily eroding Russia’s freedom of action in the air. The attack also served as a harbinger for even bolder attacks that would occur in 2025 like Operation Spider Web and using special forces and drones to attack long-range bombers deep inside Russia.³⁴

In addition to using ground-launched, long-range drones, Ukraine has used U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles to strike Russian airfields. On October 17, 2023, Ukrainian missiles struck the helicopters staged in Berdyansk and Luhansk.³⁵ The twin strikes forced Russia to temporarily relocate surviving helicopters farther from the front, blunting its ability to support ground troops. Collectively, the ATACMS strikes demonstrated a significant evolution in Ukraine’s multidomain operations, combining precision missiles and special forces targeting to neutralize key Russian aviation assets in one coordinated blow.

While the use of naval drones and air-launched cruise missiles have captured the headlines, Ukraine has also illustrated how to integrate ground-launched ballistic and antiship cruise missile strikes into sea denial operations. In the early weeks of the war, Ukraine targeted Russian naval forces using occupied ports as forward bases. On March 24, 2022, a Ukrainian Tochka-U ballistic missile struck a port on Ukraine’s Sea of Azov coast, where Russian Black Sea Fleet landing ships were unloading supplies.³⁶ The strike caused a massive explosion and fire, sinking the Alligator-class landing ship Saratov and heavily damaging two other Russian amphibious vessels docked nearby. This attack eliminated a key asset for Russia’s planned amphibious operations and forced an abrupt withdrawal of the remaining landing ships from Berdiansk. In effect, Ukraine’s missile strikes foiled Russia’s seaborne resupply efforts on that front and demonstrated that port facilities under Russian control were not safe from attack, disrupting Russia’s joint land-sea logistical operations in southern Ukraine.

On April 13, 2022, Ukraine achieved a landmark naval victory by striking Russia’s Black Sea Fleet flagship, the cruiser Moskva.³⁷ Ukrainian Neptune antiship cruise missiles hit the Moskva off the Ukrainian coast, igniting a fire and eventually sinking the 12,000-ton warship. The loss of the Moskva—the largest Russian warship sunk in combat since World War II—was a major symbolic and operational blow to Russia’s navy. As the fleet’s primary air defense ship, its sinking left Russian naval forces at greater risk from Ukrainian aircraft and missiles. After this incident, Russian warships pulled farther away from Ukraine’s coast.

Last, Ukraine attacked Russian targets on land to try and degrade Moscow’s access to space. In December 2023, Ukrainian forces targeted a Russian satellite communication hub in Yevpatoriya, Crimea. Of note, this site was associated with coordinating GLONASS (i.e., Russian GPS) and a wide range of orbital activities.³⁸ The attack involved a mix of drones and cruise missiles. In June 2024, Ukrainian forces hit the facility again. Ukrainian sources identified the attack as the “second Ukrainian strike on [Russia’s] space warfare infrastructure” in Crimea.³⁹ The attack likely compounded the damage to satellite dishes and communication equipment from the first strike. Each of these blows further degrades Russia’s ability to use Crimea as a secure node for command and control via satellite. By targeting ground-based satellite links and over-the-horizon radars, Ukraine is directly contesting Russia’s space and electronic dominance. These operations have implications beyond immediate battlefield effects. They challenge Russia’s strategic situational awareness and precision warfare capabilities (which rely on satellite guidance), thereby influencing the multidomain balance (land, air, sea, and space) in favor of Ukraine.

Occupying Key Maritime Terrain

Emerging littoral rotational forces like the U.S. Army’s Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) and the U.S. Marine Corps’ Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR) represent a significant shift in operational art. These formations emphasize the integration of capabilities across multiple domains—land, sea, air, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum projected from littoral battlespace.⁴⁰ The units are designed to operate as agile, forward-deployed hubs, capable of coordinating and executing complex operations that challenge adversaries across all domains of warfare. Neither the MDTF nor MLR is decisive in any one domain. Rather, the theory of victory is that they can generate effects in multiple domains to place the adversary on the horns of a dilemma, thus disrupting freedom of action.

The MDTF is a brigade-sized formation tailored to penetrate and disintegrate adversary A2/AD systems. It integrates long-range precision fires—including a mix of land and sea cruise missiles—with non-kinetic capabilities, including cyber and electronic warfare, to create multiple dilemmas for adversaries.⁴¹ The formation also has organic air and counter–unmanned aircraft system (UAS) defense.⁴² Central to the MDTF’s effectiveness is the Multi-Domain Effects Battalion (MDEB), which synchronizes targeting across domains, leveraging space-based sensors for real-time intelligence and coordinating cyber and electromagnetic spectrum operations to disrupt enemy networks.⁴³ These are coordinated with novel low-cost sensors, including long-endurance UASs and high-altitude balloons.⁴⁴

The MDTF’s structure includes components such as the Intelligence, Information, Cyber, Electronic Warfare, and Space (I2CEWS) battalion, which ensures seamless integration of operations across domains. This integration enables the MDTF to conduct operations that combine kinetic strikes with cyber and electronic attacks, effectively targeting adversary command and control systems and creating opportunities for joint force exploitation.

The MLR is designed as a stand-in force capable of conducting sea denial operations, particularly in contested maritime environments. It leverages Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) to establish temporary, low-signature positions that can launch antiship missiles, conduct air defense, and support maritime domain awareness.⁴⁵ The integration of systems like the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) enhances the MLR’s ability to target enemy vessels effectively. The formation also includes more organic infantry than the MDTF and high-end mobile radar that allows it to coordinate surface and air search missions that support naval strike and sector air defense.⁴⁶

Additionally, the MLR’s coordination with the Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group (MIG) allows for synchronized operations across the electromagnetic spectrum, cyber, and space domains.⁴⁷ The group provides capabilities such as electronic warfare, signals intelligence, and information operations, ensuring that the MLR can operate effectively in the information environment and support joint force objectives.

Both the MDTF and MLR exemplify the U.S. military’s shift toward integrated, multi-domain operations. By serving as agile hubs that coordinate effects across land, sea, air, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum, these units enhance the joint force’s ability to respond to complex threats and maintain strategic advantages in contested environments.

Conclusions

Landpower is not vanishing in the age of long-range fires and precision-guided munitions. Rather, it is transforming. As this chapter has shown, land remains the essential hub that links, sustains, and amplifies effects across domains. From the defense of Kyiv to drone strikes on strategic airfields, ports, and satellite arrays, Ukraine has illustrated that territorial control and infrastructure access remain central to projecting power in modern warfare. Likewise, China’s militarized islands and BRI infrastructure demonstrate how states use physical footholds to enable distributed operations in cyberspace and space and across the electromagnetic spectrum. Modern landpower does not just seize ground. It shapes the strategic environment across domains. In short, land is no longer just where wars are fought. It is the platform from which they are connected, contested, and won.

Implication 1: Secure terrain is strategic infrastructure.

The first implication is that future campaigns will hinge on the ability to secure and deny access to key land-based infrastructure—airfields, ports, ground stations, fiber-optic hubs, and satellite uplinks. As seen in Ukraine’s ATACMS strikes on the Berdiansk and Luhansk airfields and its attack on the Yevpatoriya space communications hub, controlling or disrupting critical ground nodes can dismantle an adversary’s multidomain battle network. For operational planners, this means the geography of future conflict will expand beyond front lines to include “strategic terrain” tied to logistics, sensing, and information flows. The side that can hold or disrupt these land-based hubs will set the tempo across all domains. As Ukraine’s campaign demonstrates, even a nation under invasion can impose strategic effects if it understands and targets the warfighting infrastructure that enables adversary operations.

Implication 2: Combined arms now means combined domains.

Second, the evolution of the U.S. Army’s MDTF and the Marine Corps’ MLR underscores that modern combined arms no longer simply means integrating tanks, artillery, and infantry—it means synchronizing effects across land, sea, air, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum. This concept is at the core of the new Joint Warfighting Concept and Joint All-Domain Operations, as well as part of Army doctrine.⁴⁸ Hence, the future is likely to resemble the present but with greater ability for land-based units to generate effects in multiple domains. These units act as forward-deployed hubs capable of generating converging dilemmas for adversaries. The MDTF’s Multi-Domain Effects Battalion and the MLR’s coordination with the MIG show that command nodes must now integrate not just fires and maneuver, but sensing, spoofing, jamming, and even narrative control. In effect, multidomain formations are emerging as the new combined arms teams—agile, integrated, and capable of commanding terrain in both the physical and information space.

Implication 3: Strategic competition is a battle of infrastructure.

Finally, the broader logic of China’s BRI—including its extension into digital and space infrastructure—alongside its militarized island strategy highlights that the future of great power competition will hinge less on massed formations and more on positional advantage. China is building the physical scaffolding for a global battle network—ports, data centers, and ground stations—that can project power and support coercion at a distance. In this context, strategic competition becomes a race to build, access, and protect key infrastructure nodes across the globe. Like the United Kingdom building coaling stations and laying undersea cables in the past, Beijing is laying the foundations for global reach in the age of sensors, satellites, and digital terrain. For U.S. strategists, this means deterrence and campaigning must account not just for military postures, but for the infrastructure ecosystems that allow domain integration. In the age of multidomain operations, holding the high ground often begins with holding the right hub.

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Benjamin Jensen is the director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.