This article is
important. China’s boots on the ground
is comparable to the French and German armies of 1914 in terms of doctrine and
training. That means it is more a
civilian army that will be mauled in a stand up fight. They have not actually gotten away from Mao’s
mass attack approach which cost them so dearly in the Korean War.
Thus we have
bluster been sometimes taken seriously.
That is likely why they are in no rush whatsoever to actually move into
North Korea. It could too easily spin
out of control.
China has lived
of the advantages of its almost perfect strategic position on land for over two
thousand years. Even real barbaric
invasions were merely absorbed by a huge population differential. Only in the past century and one half has the
vulnerability of its sea coast been laid bare.
This has resulted in the strong emergence of adjacent coastal states who
have adopted modern military doctrine while acting as a protective buffer for
China. The reason they represent no
threat to China is again the population advantage.
Thus China now
gets to fight no wars whatsoever and struggles to make its military relevant at
all. Recall that popular support in
China is naturally low anyway.
China’s
Deceptively Weak (and Dangerous) Military
In many ways, the PLA is weaker than it looks – and
more dangerous.
By Ian Easton
January 31, 2014
In April 2003, the Chinese Navy decided to put a
large group of its best submarine talent on the same boat as part of an
experiment to synergize its naval elite. The result? Within hours of leaving
port, the Type 035 Ming III class submarine sank with
all hands lost. Never having fully recovered from this maritime disaster, the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still the only permanent member of the
United Nations Security Council never to
have conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine.
China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five”
never to have built and operated an aircraft carrier. While it launched a
refurbished Ukrainian built carrier amidst much fanfare in September 2012 –
then-President Hu Jintao and all the top brass showed up – soon afterward the big ship had to return to
the docks for extensive overhauls because of suspected engine failure; not the
most auspicious of starts for China’s fledgling “blue water” navy, and not the
least example of a modernizing military that has yet to master last century’s
technology.
Indeed, today the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
still conducts long-distance maneuver training at speeds measured by how fast the next
available cargo train can transport its tanks and guns forward. And if mobilizing and moving armies around on
railway tracks sounds a bit antiquated in an era of global airlift, it should –
that was how it was done in the First World War.
Not to be outdone by the conventional army, China’s
powerful strategic rocket troops, the Second Artillery Force, still uses cavalry units to
patrol its sprawling missile bases deep within China’s vast interior. Why?
Because it doesn’t have any helicopters. Equally scarce in China are modern
fixed-wing military aircraft. So the Air Force continues to use a 1950s Soviet
designed airframe, the Tupolev
Tu-16, as a bomber (its original intended mission), a battlefield
reconnaissance aircraft, an electronic warfare aircraft, a target spotting
aircraft, and an aerial refueling tanker. Likewise, the PLA uses the Soviet
designed Antonov An-12 military
cargo aircraft for ELINT (electronic intelligence) missions, ASW
(anti-submarine warfare) missions, geological survey missions, and airborne
early warning missions. It also has an An-12 variant specially modified for
transporting livestock, allowing sheep and goats access to remote seasonal
pastures.
But if China’s lack of decent hardware is somewhat
surprising given all the hype surrounding Beijing’s massive military
modernization program, the state of “software” (military training and
readiness) is truly astounding. At one military exercise in the summer of 2012,
a strategic PLA unit, stressed out by the hard work of handling warheads in an
underground bunker complex, actually had to take time out of a 15-day wartime simulation for movie nights and karaoke parties. In fact, by day nine of the exercise, a “cultural
performance troupe” (common PLA euphemism for song-and-dance girls) had to be
brought into the otherwise sealed facility to entertain the homesick soldiers.
Apparently becoming suspicious that men might not
have the emotional fortitude to hack it in high-pressure situations, an
experimental all-female unit was then brought in for the 2013 iteration of the
war games, held in May,
for an abbreviated 72-hour trial run. Unfortunately for the PLA, the results
were even worse. By the end of the second day of the exercise, the hardened
tunnel facility’s psychological counseling office was overrun with patients, many
reportedly too upset to eat and one even suffering with severe nausea because
of the unpleasant conditions.
While recent years have witnessed a tremendous Chinese propaganda effort aimed at convincing the world that the PRC is
a serious military player that is owed respect, outsiders often forget that China does not even have a professional
military. The PLA,
unlike the armed forces of the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and
other regional heavyweights, is by definition not a professional fighting
force. Rather, it is a “party army,” the armed wing of the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP). Indeed, all career officers in the PLA are members of the CCP and
all units at the company level and above have political officers assigned to
enforce party control. Likewise, all important decisions in the PLA are made by
Communist Party committees that are dominated by political officers, not by
operators. This system ensures that the interests of the party’s civilian and
military leaders are merged, and for this reason new Chinese soldiers entering
into the PLA swear their allegiance to the CCP, not to the PRC constitution or
the people of China.
This may be one reason why China’s marines (or
“naval infantry” in PLA parlance) and other amphibious warfare units
train by landing on big
white sandy beaches that look
nothing like the west coast of Taiwan (or for that matter anyplace else they
could conceivably be sent in the East China Sea or South China Sea). It could also be why PLA Air Force pilots still
typically get less than ten hours of flight
time a month (well below regional standards), and only in 2012 began to
have the ability to submit their own flight plans (previously, overbearing
staff officers assigned pilots their flight plans and would not even allow them
to taxi and take-off on the runways by themselves).
Intense and realistic training is dangerous
business, and the American maxim that the more you bleed during training the
less you bleed during combat doesn’t translate well in a Leninist military
system. Just the opposite. China’s military is
intentionally organized to bureaucratically enforce risk-averse behavior,
because an army that spends too much time training is an army that is not
engaging in enough political indoctrination. Beijing’s worst nightmare is that the PLA could one day forget that its
number one mission is protecting the Communist Party’s civilian leaders against
all its enemies – especially when the CCP’s “enemies” are domestic student or
religious groups campaigning for democratic rights, as happened in 1989 and 1999,
respectively.
For that reason, the PLA has to engage in
constant “political work”
at the expense of training for combat. This means that 30 to 40 percent of an
officer’s career (or roughly 15 hours per 40-hour work week) is wasted studying
CCP propaganda, singing patriotic songs, and conducting small group discussions
on Marxist-Leninist theory. And when
PLA officers do train, it is almost always a cautious affair that rarely
involves risky (i.e., realistic) training scenarios.
Abraham Lincoln once observed that if he had six
hours to chop down a tree he would spend the first four hours sharpening his
axe. Clearly the PLA is not sharpening its proverbial axe. Nor can it.
Rather, it has opted to invest in a bigger axe, albeit one that is still dull.
Ironically, this undermines Beijing’s own aspirations for
building a truly powerful 21st century military.
Yet none of this should be comforting to China’s
potential military adversaries. It is precisely China’s military weakness that
makes it so dangerous. Take the PLA’s lack of combat experience, for example. A
few minor border scraps aside, the PLA hasn’t seen real combat since the
Korean War. This appears to be a major factor leading it to act so brazenly
in the East and South China Seas. Indeed, China’s navy now appears to be
itching for a fight anywhere it can find one. Experienced combat veterans
almost never act this way. Indeed, history shows that military commanders that
have gone to war are significantly less hawkish than their inexperienced
counterparts. Lacking the somber wisdom that comes from combat experience,
today’s PLA is all hawk and no dove.
The Chinese military is dangerous in another way as
well. Recognizing that it will never be able to compete with the U.S. and its
allies using traditional methods of war fighting, the PLA has turned to
unconventional “asymmetric” first-strike weapons and capabilities to make up
for its lack of conventional firepower, professionalism and experience. These
weapons include more than 1,600 offensive ballistic and cruise missiles, whose very nature is so strategically destabilizing
that the U.S. and Russia decided to outlaw them with the INF Treaty some 25 years ago.
In concert with its strategic missile forces,
China has also developed a broad array of space weapons designed
to destroy satellites used to verify arms control treaties, provide military
communications, and warn of enemy attacks.
China has also built the world’s largest army of cyber warriors, and the planet’s second largest fleet of drones,
to exploit areas where the U.S. and its allies are under-defended. All of these
capabilities make it more likely that China could one day be tempted to start a
war, and none come with any built in escalation control.
Yet while there is ample and growing evidence to
suggest China could, through malice or mistake, start a devastating war in the
Pacific, it is highly improbable that the PLA’s strategy could actually win a
war. Take a Taiwan invasion scenario, which is the PLA’s top operational
planning priority. While much hand-wringing has
been done in recent years about the shifting military balance in the Taiwan
Strait, so far no one has been able to explain how any invading PLA force would
be able to cross over 100 nautical miles of exceedingly rough water and
successfully land on the world’s most inhospitable beaches, let alone capture
the capital and pacify the rest of the rugged island.
The PLA simply does not have enough transport ships
to make the crossing, and those it does have are remarkably vulnerable to
Taiwanese anti-ship cruise missiles, guided rockets, smart cluster munitions, mobile artillery and advanced sea mines – not to
mention its elite corps of American-trained fighter
and helicopter pilots. Even if some lucky PLA units could survive the trip (not
at all a safe assumption), they would be rapidly overwhelmed by a small but
professional Taiwan military that has been thinking about and preparing for
this fight for decades.
Going forward it will be important for the U.S. and
its allies to recognize that China’s military is in many ways much weaker than it looks. However, it is also growing more capable of
inflicting destruction on its enemies through the use of first-strike weapons.
To mitigate the destabilizing effects of the PLA’s strategy, the U.S. and its
allies should try harder to maintain their current (if eroding)
leads in military hardware. But more importantly, they must continue investing
in the training that makes them true professionals. While manpower numbers are
likely to come down in the years ahead due to defense budget cuts, regional
democracies will have less to fear from China’s weak but dangerous military if
their axes stay sharp.
Ian Easton is a research fellow at the Project 2049
Institute in Arlington, VA. He was also a recent visiting fellow at the Japan
Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo. Previously, he was a China analyst
at the Center for Naval Analyses.
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