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How the world's largest military stacks up to the US armed forces
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A recent report from the US Congressional Research Service outlines China's 2.3
million-member armed forces and sheds light on misconceptions
from Western military analysts.
Simply put, the report challenges the idea that Westerners can
understand China's military and foreign-policy decisions without
first understanding Chinese philosophy and culture of warfare.
Unlike the US, China has a media apparatus controlled by the
state, so its military reports lack the transparency established
by a free press.
China also has a fundamentally different understanding of
aggression. For the Chinese, there is little difference between
peacetime and wartime cyber espionage, and they have engaged in
stealing military secrets from the US and others because they
can.
The report, written by Ian E. Rinehart, a CRS analyst in Asian
affairs, urges Congress and military leadership to examine a
"Chinese way of war."
Specifics of the report, detailed below, show how China has
stepped up to rival the US's military might in the Pacific:
Overview of China's military forces
With a population of 1.3 billion to draw from, more than four
times as much as the population of the US, China has over 2.3
million in active service, with an additional 1.1 million as
reserves and military police. The People's Liberation Army (PLA)
has actually shrunk from its estimated 1992 level of more than 3
million in active service.
The US military has about 1.4 million active service members,
which represents a much lower total number of personnel, but a
much higher percentage of the population engaged in the military.
Also important to consider is that China's last war was a short
fight against Vietnam in 1979. The Chinese have not been in a
sustained conflict since the Korean war that ended in 1953.
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US theaters of command for comparison
The US has only a fraction of its forces dedicated to a large
region in the Pacific that includes China.
The US would have to abandon interests worldwide in order to
focus on China, whereas China's entire military would focus on
defending its borders and few interests in the Pacific.
A combination of foreign acquisition and domestic innovation,
possibly bolstered by cyber espionage, have led to a huge
push in modernization for the Chinese PLA.
A recent
anticorruption push by Chinese President Xi Jinping has
consolidated more power behind the leader and further streamlined
the country's acquisition and modernization efforts.
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Quality over quantity
Though China is known for mass-produced goods, its focus of late
has clearly been on quality over quantity.
By most metrics, the PLAAF has decreased, but as this graphic
depicts, its potency has increased many times over.
China's Cold War-era legacy fighters that used to make up the
majority of its forces have sharply declined, while
fourth-generation aircraft now make up almost half of the force.
This chart shows China consistently spending around 2% of it's
GDP on defense, but there are reasons to doubt this:
1. There is no international
standard of what constitutes "defense spending."
2. China may want to downplay
its military expenses, and the numbers reported are not
independently verified.
3. It can be difficult to
differentiate defense spending from other types of spending, and
poor accounting practices ensure that not even China really knows
the true figures.
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China's navy
China's navy regularly makes headlines by expanding its defensive
perimeter outward throughout artificial islands in the South
China Sea. China is effectively boxed out of the deeper pacific by a string
of islands and nations around its borders.
It has also made a point of modernizing its naval vessels, especially in
the area of submarines and antiship cruise missiles.
China plans to increase its submarine fleet from 62 to as
many as 78 by 2020, according to the US Department of Defense. It
is also undergoing efforts to build additional aircraft carriers, and
currently using its current vessel, the Liaoning, to train on and
design carrier-ready aircraft.
This testimony from an expert on China's navy before Congress in
July 2015 illustrates just how far the PLA has come:
China is on course to deploy greater quantities of missiles with
greater ranges than those systems that could be employed by the
US Navy against them. China is on track to have quantitative
parity or better in surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and anti-ship
cruise missiles (ASCMs), parity in missile launch cells, and
quantitative inferiority only in multi-mission land-attack cruise
missiles (LACMs).
The DoD has reported that the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) is "rapidly
closing the gap with western air forces across a broad spectrum
of capabilities," and that China "will endeavor to shift its
focus from territorial air defense to both defense and offense."
While there have been reports that the Chinese will overtake the
US in air superiority by 2030, Air Force Gen. Lori
J. Robinson said that training and support for US pilots gives
them an "unbelievably huge" advantage over the Chinese pilots.
But China has been stepping up its training programs with
increasingly realistic drills that are less scripted and more
improvisational.
Additionally, the Chinese are developing fifth-generation
aircraft, the J-20 and J-31, which are said to rival the US's
coming F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
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China's ground forces
While China commands the largest ground force in the world, it is
plagued by mobility problems.
China lacks sufficient transport helicopters, and still largely
relies on trains for transportation across the mainland.
The ground forces mainly exist to deter and manage conflicts with
China's borders, and their goal is to increase mechanization by
2020.
The DoD states that the PLA is "developing and testing several
new classes and variants of offensive missiles, including
hypersonic glide vehicles, forming additional missile units,
upgrading older missile systems, and developing methods to
counter ballistic missile defenses."
Of all the technologies indigenously produced in China, the
ballistic missiles are a relative bright
spot. China has effective intercontinental ballistic missiles,
which can carry nuclear payloads, as well as conventional
shorter-range ballistic missiles.
The CRS report cites an expert as saying that the PLA's Rocket
Force "is central to the PLA's emerging capacity to not only
complicate US power projection and freedom of operations in the
Asia-Pacific region but also challenge regional powers' attempts
to deny the PLA air superiority and command of the seas."
Additionally, China may seek to buy Russia's advanced S-400
missile-defense system, which would bolster its
already-substantial missile defenses.
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Counter-space capabilities
China has tremendous space assets, including 70 military
satellites used for communications, navigation, positioning and
timing, meteorology, and electronic and signals intelligence.
Additionally, China sees the US's reliance on GPS technology and
space assets as a weakness, and has developed antisatellite
capabilities, such as directed-energy weapons, satellite jammers,
and antisatellite missiles.
There is some disagreement among experts on China's cyber-warfare
capabilities, but the following is known:
China has three types of cyber forces: (1) specialized military
network warfare forces in the PLA, (2) PLA-authorized teams of
network warfare specialists in government organizations, and (3)
non-governmental forces that may be mobilized for network warfare
operations.
Potentially, China could access foreign networks and even deny
foreign nations access to their own networks.
There have been numerous and credible reports that China has used
cyber espionage to steal military secrets from the US.
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China's weaknesses
By its own admission, China has deficiencies in training,
cooperation between services, administration, human capital,
force development, and logistics.
Under the rule of the Communist Party, the Chinese military has
long had to avoid honest self-assessment and focus instead on
presenting only positives to the country at large, while the
force grows less experienced in real combat.
According to the report: "Chinese military analysts assess that
it is not yet capable of carrying out complex operations overseas
or fighting and winning a 'local war under informationized
conditions,' their term for the type of conflict that they
perceive China is most likely to face."
The CRS report warns against "mirror imaging" or "tacitly and
perhaps unconsciously assuming that one's values and belief sets
are shared by the other party-can lead to less accurate
assessments of the other party's intentions" when analyzing
Chinese military aspects.
Simply put, just because China is pushing a massive, modern
military doesn't mean it'd wield it in the same way the US would.
The most striking difference between US and Chinese military
doctrine would be the Chinese concept of "active defense."
According to the report:
PLA strategists place a high priority on seizing the initiative
in a conflict. Some observers believe that the PLA would pair
this predilection with its assessment that the cyber and space
domains are the "high ground" of contemporary warfare and thus
choose to strike its adversary's information networks.
According to one American scholar, China believes that a
"preemptive first strike is preferable, as it sets the stage for
the remainder of the conflict and puts the aggressor in a
distinct position of advantage."
China's use of cyber warfare against the US is a prime example of
this philosophy. They have already engaged the US with
non-kinetic warfare through the theft of military secrets and
hacking into the Office of Personnel Management.
The report concludes that the Chinese, in addition to traditional
warfare, would confront an enemy with media and propaganda, legal
actions, and psychological warfare.
Already we have seen China employ its media apparatus against the
US in denouncing freedom to navigation exercises in the South
China Sea, as well as legal actions against other nations in the
Pacific that claim the islands China is currently developing.
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Conclusion
China has done a magnificent job of leveraging every possible
source of national power, from domestic propaganda and currency
manipulation to cyber espionage and military reform.
The threats posed by China to the US are real and credible, but
only in its specific region. Whether China is reaching for
regional hegemony or simply trying to rise as a power in its own
right is a subject of academic debate, but as a technological
nemesis the US has much it can learn from China.
For now, the US maintains a slight edge in kinetic-warfare
capabilities, while China has had unprecedented success with
cyber warfare and innovating anti-space capabilities.
US citizens enjoy more personal freedoms and transparency in
governance, but as threats from more authoritarian states like
Russia and China arise, the need for a focused, reformed US
foreign policy that can contest the wills of other nations
through media, technology, and, yes, kinetic means is clearer
than ever.
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