The London-based think tank released its take on the region’s balance of power, noting the growth in arms could boost deterrence against potential Chinese military offensives.

China has in recent years stepped up military activity around neighboring Taiwan, which Beijing considers a rogue province and has threatened to take back by force. While the United States officially maintains its one-China policy, it also provides arms to the island nation.

“That’s been our policy for as long as I can remember, and it remains our policy,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday. “And again, it’s a policy that ensures to the best of our ability that we have peace, that we have stability, that we don’t have a status quo that’s disrupted in ways that are going to have repercussions for everyone around the world.”

As a means of ensuring regional stability, the report specifically pointed to the U.S. Air Force’s B-21 Raider, a bomber currently in development by Northrop Grumman.

The first Raider, unveiled a little over a year ago, flew to Edwards Air Force Base, California, in November 2023 to undergo flight testing. Initial delivery to the service is expected in the mid-2020s.

The IISS report offered four possible basing locations for the B-21 in the Asia-Pacific — one in Guam and three in Australia — based on its own analysis, information from the U.S. and Australian militaries, and Lockheed Martin.

In addition, a variant of the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile, dubbed AGM-158D JASSM-XR, with a range of up to about 1,118 miles, is scheduled to begin delivery in February 2027, the report noted.

“Designed to defeat modern air-defence systems and attack fixed targets, the JASSM and its variants can be launched from most USAF-crewed combat aircraft but are particularly potent when launched from long-range bombers,” it stated. “The prospect that the future B-21 Raider very low-observable bomber might also be equipped with variants of the JASSM will also potentially significantly extend the USAF’s ability to project power at long ranges while remaining undetected.”

Here’s the reach these scenarios provide the U.S. Air Force:

This isn’t Russia’s first military intervention in the European country, the International Institute for Strategic Studies wrote in its 2022 “Military Balance” report. Notably, since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, “European states have turned a corner in terms of their defence spending,” the think tank wrote.

The following information on select weapons systems — with footnotes at the bottom of this article — is also available on IISS’s Military Balance+ database.

• Data as of November 2021.
• Armored Fighting Vehicles are armored combat vehicles with a combat weight of at least 6 metric tons.
• Artillery are weapons (including guns, howitzers, multiple-rocket launchers and mortars) with a caliber greater than 100mm for artillery pieces and 80mm and above for mortars, capable of engaging ground targets with indirect fire.
• Surface-to-Surface Missile Launchers are vehicles for transporting and firing surface-to-surface ballistic and cruise missiles.
• Air Defense includes guns, directed-energy weapons and surface-to-air missile launchers designed to engage fixed-wing, rotary-wing and unmanned aircraft. Systems primarily intended to intercept missiles rather than aircraft are excluded.

The Washington Post story, which alleged that the report was buried, was based upon a document that Defense News reported about in January 2015, noted Press Secretary Josh Earnest, “an indication that this is a document that was available to other members of the public, including other journalists who carefully cover the Pentagon.”

“I’ll also point out that, at least as of this morning, the report was available to anybody in the world that had a live internet connection and a relatively modern web browser because it was available at the Pentagon website,” he added.

In January 2015, Defense News reported that the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board recommended the department slash $125 billionin spending over the next five years by reducing services from contractors, implementing early retirements, reworking contracts and reducing administrative costs.

The report had been ordered by Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work in an October 2014 memo, asking a civilian panel to form a task group “to review and recommend changes to the Department’s current plans for enterprise modernization.”

“My goal is to modernize our business processes and supporting systems and create an agile enterprise shared services organization in order to reduce costs, maximize return on investment, and improve performance,” Work wrote.

According to the Post, the internal report uncovered more wasteful spending than was predicted, and senior defense officials reacted by concealing the information.

A defense official, who spoke to Defense News on condition of anonymity prior to the release of an official response from the Pentagon, praised the internal report as having “some good points.”

“We don’t hate the report,” the official said. “The problem is the lack of — well, it’s the very vague recommendations in the report. … It doesn’t get into the specifics we need.”

Washington-based consultancy firm Avascent, in a May 2016 analysis of the DoD’s Operations & Maintenance (O&M) budget, split O&M funds into six capability categories, which may apply to more than one branch of the military:

“You’d expect areas like aviation, maritime and land forces to consume the bulk of the budget. But the largest category by far is what we have termed ‘Enterprise-wide,’ ” said Douglas Berenson, a managing director at Avascent.

Approximately 40 percent of the O&M budget is associated with enterprise-wide costs, he said, as opposed to operational forces.

Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, which investigates charges of misconduct in the federal government, said the allegation by The Post is a “perfect illustration of the three biggest problems affecting the Defense Department: a contractor workforce that costs too much; a culture of secrecy; and a fear that exposing waste will lead to cuts in defense spending.”

“In 2014, POGO

then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel about a ‘concerted effort’ by DoD officials to ‘willfully breach laws and congressional mandates’ that require better tracking of service contracts,” she said. “This effort blinds the agency to potentially billions of dollars in wasteful spending.”