Perilous Straits: The Changing Military Balance Around Taiwan

With Speakers Dr. Andrew S. Erickson* is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He is also Professor of Strategy in the U.S. Naval War College (NWC)’s China Maritime Studies Institute, which he helped establish and has served as Research Director. Erickson has received the Navy Superior Civilian Service Medal, NWC’s inaugural Civilian Faculty Research Excellence Award, and the National Bureau of Asian Research’s inaugural Ellis Joffe Prize for PLA Studies. Erickson’s latest coedited volume, Chinese Amphibious Warfare: Prospects for a Cross-Strait Invasion, has been named the Samuel B. Griffith Foundation’s 2025 Publication of the Year and selected for the Commandant of the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program’s 2025 Reading List. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry published a Chinese-language translation of his coedited volume on China’s Maritime Gray Zone Operations in 2023. and Prof. Eric Heginbotham is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Security Studies Program (SSP) and Co-Director of the SSP Wargaming Lab. Prior to joining MIT, Heginbotham was a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He has published extensively on Asian security issues and was the lead author of the U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power. Most recently, he co-authored three studies on military aspects of the Taiwan problem: The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan; Confronting Armageddon: Wargaming Nuclear Deterrence and Its Failures in a U.S.-China Conflict Over Taiwan; and Lights Out? Wargaming a Chinese Blockade of Taiwan. Heginbotham speaks and reads Chinese and Japanese and was a Captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. _______ *Disclaimer: The views expressed by Dr. Erickson are his alone, based solely on open sources and offered from an independent academic perspective. They do not represent the policies or estimates of the U.S. Navy or any other organization of the U.S. government, or of any other organization with which he is affiliated. Dr. Erickson is presenting in his personal capacity, not as an employee of the U.S. government.