Cadet Faith Austin on “Fighting, Leading, and Graduating in 2027: Thoughts on China’s Strategy”

How is the next generation of military leaders being prepared and, more importantly, how are they preparing themselves for the challenges to come?

The oldest and largest commissioning source for Air Force and Space Force officers is the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC).  One of the program’s requirements is to attend Field Training at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Today’s post will provide you with some insight into what the cadets are learning there. 

Our author is Cadet Faith Austin (who is, among her many pursuits, the Undergraduate Liaison for LENS!).  Faith describes how what she learned about China at Field Training especially impressed her, particularly since her follow-on project was a summer research and study trip to Cameroon, where she saw China’s activities first-hand.  

I think you’ll be very impressed with this super-talented officer-to-be (who is planning, BTW, on pursuing a law degree and becoming a judge advocate (JAG)).  She sagely analyzes the challenges she and her contemporaries will face as military officers when they are commissioned at graduation in 2027.  She says:

Rising to the occasion will not be about rhetoric or deadlines, but about whether we choose to learn the cultural fluency, strategic awareness, and resilience that tomorrow’s fight will demand.

The intentional steps we take now, such as studying critical languages and building bridges between tomorrow’s civilian and military national security spaces, are the foundation for shaping U.S.–China competition and safeguarding the future.

Here’s Cadet Austin:

Fighting, Leading, and Graduating in 2027: Thoughts on China’s Strategy

by Cadet Faith Austin

A Wake-Up Call at Maxwell

At 0600 on Father’s Day, I didn’t expect a PowerPoint to challenge my own quiet skepticism about the urgency of the China question. Before the hot Alabama sun baked Maxwell Air Force Base, a couple of hundred sweaty cadets hurried to their seats in silence, unaware that they would receive one of the most important messages of their Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program.

Master Sergeant Stephen Loeh, Superintendent of China Education at the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) think tank, would deliver the same lecture five different times to roughly a thousand future Air Force and Space Force Officers who will graduate and commission in FY 28.

For those of us in that room, 2027 was no longer just a graduation year; the weighty reality that Beijing had set its aspirational benchmark for military readiness made working towards a diploma the least of our worries.

The strategic clock has been quietly ticking for years. For many of my peer cadets who aren’t students of history or don’t keep up with current affairs as much as Lawfire readers, MSgt Loeh’s lesson was a wake-up call for what the future fight may hold.

He described the complex and nuanced history of the People’s Republic of China’s cultural, political, economic, and military strategy in the context of air and space domains. Additionally, he provided informed insights on the status quo through the DIME framework (the four instruments of national power: Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic).

When MSgt Loeh alluded to Beijing’s 2027 goals, he was underscoring a point first raised years earlier by Admiral Phil Davidson, the former United States Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) commander who warned Congress that the PLA aimed for Taiwan readiness by that date.

His testimony crystallized the “Davidson Window” in the U.S. security debate, reminding me that this timeline is watched not only at Maxwell but across the national security establishment—and by the PLA itself.

To the People’s Republic of China and the 20th Party Congress, our graduation year marks the centennial of the founding of the Chinese military, the People’s Liberation Army, and the planned fulfillment of China’s military transformation.

Substantiated with statistics, maps, and headlines, this particular lecture’s slides captured the reality of how such posturing enables Beijing to project power across domains well beyond its own backyard, in opposition to American influence.

Whether or not the Davidson Window “opens” exactly on time, the message to my cohort was clear: the finish line of ROTC might be the starting line of something far more consequential. With a discreet nudge, my friend pointed to a note in his Rite in the Rain notebook: “We should’ve started learning Mandarin, like, yesterday.”

China’s Strategy Isn’t Just Terrestrial

About a week before I arrived at Maxwell, CASI released a 56-page report on deterring China’s use of force in the space domain. A quick read while at Field Training revealed to me jarring updates on how China’s ambitions aren’t just maritime or terrestrial—they’re orbital.

Multiple Chinese sites, including the Bohu facility, are developing ground-based lasers designed to “blind and deafen” satellite systems. Meanwhile, the PLA is exploring mobile ground-based microwave systems, space-based high-power lasers, and the operations of ground-launched anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles capable of destroying satellites in low, medium, and geostationary orbits.

This report led me to other Department of Defense publications, presenting concerning studies on Chinese activities from the North to the South Pole and everywhere in between.

All of my learning corroborated MSgt Loeh’s briefing. It was plain to see that China’s ambitions aren’t confined to aircraft carriers or hypersonic missiles; they’re also built in concrete, asphalt, and debt.

Yet even with the data, the doctrine, and the satellite schematics, it still felt like a future-tense problem. I could understand China’s trajectory and point to the research I had collected, but without seeing where those lines connected in the real world, comprehending this reality remained a theoretical exercise.

I graduated from Field Training and left Maxwell Air Force Base with an intellectual framework for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but it wasn’t until I set foot in Cameroon that those concepts became tangible in the real world.

Seeing the Belt and Road in Cameroon

In July, I set foot in Africa for the first time thanks to a research grant from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The purpose of my trip was to conduct an observational study on rural transportation needs and methods in Cameroon’s West, Centre, and East agricultural regions.

My team drove over 1,500km during the course of our stay in Cameroon, interviewing and surveying smallholder farmers and stakeholders in business and government about post-harvest loss and crop transport where roads don’t exist.

In every stretch of asphalt and in every construction sign, I could see pieces of the current Great Power Competition puzzle that had been laid out at Maxwell.

While China has invested in Cameroon’s infrastructure for decades, the Central African country formally joined the BRI in 2018 and has received more than 18,000 billion FCFA from China to boost its National Development Strategy 2020–2030.

According to Cameroon’s public debt agency, the Caisse autonome d’amortissement, China accounts for 65% of Cameroon’s bilateral debt (2,648.30 billion Central African Francs). This percentage represents 20.2% of China’s total external debt, positioning its debt share at 2.5 times that of its colonizing country, France.

Through public infrastructure projects in the 2010s, massive Chinese companies such as CCCC, CWE, CHEC, Sinohydro, Huawei, and ZTE have served as Xi Jinping’s proxies with great success.

Even in rural markets, goods from Chinese e-commerce giants, like Temu and Shein, were ubiquitous. In a conversation about entrepreneurial growth among young Cameroonians and economic production forecasts, local partners from across the NGO space, provincial governments, and the Ministry of Agriculture alike lamented that “Cameroon isn’t free. We were colonized by the Germans, then the French and English. Now we are controlled by China”.

Witnessing the BRI unfold in real time and hearing the stories of those seeking a freer future for Cameroon convinced me that strategic competition begins long before conflict, through quiet business deals and fresh asphalt.

Silent power grabs by Beijing for infrastructure, debt, and influence, often disguised as “development aid,” in Cameroon. Rather, these types of power grabs are present in the majority of the Global South. 

Preparing for 2027 and Beyond

The lecture that began in a sweltering Alabama auditorium and the lessons I carried home from Cameroon leave me with a question that is as personal as it is operational: What will 2027 mean for us?

My generation of future leaders in the national security field cannot view it as a date to fear, but rather as a challenge to equip ourselves with the cultural fluency and strategic awareness necessary to address it.

Rising to the occasion will not be about rhetoric or deadlines, but about whether we choose to learn the cultural fluency, strategic awareness, and resilience that tomorrow’s fight will demand.

The intentional steps we take now, such as studying critical languages and building bridges between tomorrow’s civilian and military national security spaces, are the foundation for shaping U.S.–China competition and safeguarding the future.

Engaging with accessible opportunities, such as the Boren Scholarship or Project Global Officer, are just a few of the many excellent resources available to young Americans interested in national security.

As a hopeful Space JAG, I want to spend the next two years not assuming war is inevitable, but rather asking how law, dialogue, and education might still shape what happens when my class puts on our bars.

About the author

Faith Austin a third-year undergraduate student studying History, International Comparative Studies, and Russian Language between both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, made possible by the Robertson Scholars Leadership.

Growing up in Indiana, Faith was first exposed to conversations surrounding national security while living in Munich, Germany, on the U.S. State Department’s Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange scholarship. Additionally, she further embraces “two blues, one community” through her cross-campus involvements in organizations ranging from Duke’s American Grand Strategy Program to Carolina’s Marathon Team.

She is currently a cadet in UNC and Duke’s Air Force ROTC Detachments with plans to commission into the US Space Force in May 2027 before attending law school.

Disclaimers: 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views or position of the Department of the Air Force, United States Department of Defense/War (DoD/DoW), or the U.S. Government. 

The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect my views, those of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, or Duke University. See also here. 

Remember what we like to say on Lawfire^®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!