China’s Military: Not a Giant, but Not a Midget
Dean Cheng /
In support of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Commission, the RAND Corporation provided a report on the limitations of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Immediately, a chorus of voices was citing the report to show that the Chinese threat was overblown. Time magazine’s Mark Thompson wished that more people would read the report, since it “stands in contrast to much of the U.S. debate over China’s military.” This jibes with Thompson’s past dismissal of PLA analyses, such as when he derided reports on the PLA’s “new historic missions,” snarkily referring to them as “new hysteric missions.” (One wonders whether that raises doubts in his mind about this RAND report, since many of the people who have analyzed those “new historic missions” are also authors of this report.) Less hyperbolically, both CNN and The Diplomat highlighted problems that the report identified in the PLA, including corruption, logistics, and strategic lift.
What to make of all this? Has the Pentagon simply been engaged in threat inflation for all of these years?
The Significantly Modernized PLA
Regrettably, while it would be wonderful if there were no real Chinese threat, the PLA has significantly modernized as the RAND team notes (and some of the reports did notice). It has gained substantial capabilities in a range of areas “aimed at deterring or, if necessary, countering U.S. military intervention in the Asia-Pacific region.” Indeed, the very first paragraph of the report states:
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has undergone a remarkable transformation since the mid-1990s. With most of the attention currently devoted to the PLA’s growing capabilities, it is easy to forget that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the PLA was not only saddled with outdated equipment but also hamstrung by problems with personnel quality, poor training, and the distractions and massive corruption associated with involvement in an array of commercial activities.
The report recognizes, unlike much of the coverage of the report, that “the PLA’s progress has been impressive overall, and the PLA is clearly becoming an increasingly professional and capable fighting force.”
Continuing Modernization
From that starting point, the RAND team then proceeds to enumerate continuing weaknesses in the PLA. These include problems in the PLA’s organizational structure and shortcomings in various PLA capabilities. Even these, however, are part of what the RAND team terms an incomplete transformation because they recognize that the PLA’s modernization program is hardly complete. The report is therefore more akin to a halftime assessment than a postgame roundup.
In this regard, while the PLA exhibits various weaknesses in capabilities such as logistics, training, and strategic lift, this does not mean that the PLA has ceased its modernization program. Indeed, given the steady evolution of the PLA Navy and increasing sophistication of its electronic warfare and space capabilities, the PLA will likely devote more resources in the future to precisely these areas. Indeed, the Chinese modernization effort has been marked by a systematic approach of taking careful steps along a sustained program, leading to the improvements that RAND has noted.
Lack of Combat Experience
PLA priorities have likely been influenced in part by the lack of combat experience. As the RAND team notes, the PLA has not fought a war since 1979. This is a fundamental disadvantage because it deprives the PLA of experience upon which to base decisions. It is also a situation that the U.S. presumably prefers, but that may change in the future. Moreover, none of China’s neighbors (except Russia) have any more recent combat experience, and many (e.g., Japan, South Korea, and most Southeast Asian states) have even less. So, if the Chinese are at a disadvantage, many of its potential adversaries (who are often American allies) are even more so.
Civil–Military Relations
Furthermore, some of the problems highlighted by the RAND report are analytical judgments with which reasonable people might well disagree. For example, the report suggests that some of the problems confronting the PLA are rooted in its being a Party army (a part of the Chinese Communist Party) rather than a national military and that there may be weaknesses in Chinese civil–military relations. These might pose challenges to China’s larger national security decision-making apparatus, but it is unclear whether, or to what extent, these are actual problems for the PLA.
Corruption
Similarly, the report strikingly suggests that a problem may be that the PLA may function, at times, as “an interest group” (p. 46). One cannot help but wonder whether any military in the world is so pristine as to not function as an interest group? As for corruption, this is undoubtedly a massive problem, not only in the PLA, but in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a whole. Yet the “Fat Leonard” prosecutions that are roiling the U.S. Navy demonstrate that the PRC is not alone in confronting corruption issues. Chinese corruption investigations have resulted in the arrest of some very senior officers, whereas the U.S. has simply censured three rear admirals who are retiring. One cannot help but wonder how a Chinese equivalent of RAND might view corruption problems in the U.S. military?
Similar Challenges in NATO
Finally, several problems that confront the PLA are little different from those that challenge the European members of NATO. NATO has long been aware of its lack of strategic airlift. France could not sustain even a limited operation in Mali without heavy reliance on NATO, especially American strategic airlift assets. It has even outsourced some of its strategic lift requirements to Russia.
Similarly, NATO has allowed its anti-submarine warfare capabilities to atrophy. Meanwhile, operations against Libya, certainly not a first-rate military power, so taxed the European members of NATO that they were forced to rely on the United States for munitions as their own stocks ran low within days. Moreover, from the beginning, they relied heavily on the United States for “aerial refueling, precision targeting, surveillance and reconnaissance.”
Challenging the U.S.
It is a sobering realization that the problems that confront the PLA, which only a decade or two ago was merely a marginal military that fielded the world’s best obsolete equipment, are today the same sorts of problems that tax first-world militaries in NATO. Coupled with its still substantial numbers, the PLA likely poses as many challenges for the U.S. as it confronts internally.