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SUMMARY:

– People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) understanding of the military balance is fundamentally based on systems warfare concepts – modern warfare as a confrontation between opposing operational systems

– Systems concepts drive China’s…identification of enduring or emerging weaknesses

– …in key areas essential to conducting systems confrontation and systems destruction warfare, there remain significant gaps

– During Xi’s tenure, the PLA has been forced to confront a range of problems that go well beyond technological modernization, force structure, and organizational relationships

– Current PLA self-assessments focus on four broad themes, two of which hardly, if ever, have been addressed in U.S. net assessments: political reliability and mobilization. Two others are somewhat more familiar: fighting and winning wars and leadership and command

– …through different evaluation processes, (both the United States and the PRC) have concluded that war with the other has the potential to be extremely risky from an escalation standpoint, protracted and costly, and fatally harmful to long-term credibility and/or strategic goals

– Necessary improvements have not materialized quickly and will likely take time because of the PLA’s organizational culture and the improvements’ systemic complexity

– These self-assessments drive the PRC to very different views of risk in regard to potential great power conflict, namely over the status of Taiwan.

– The PLA sees itself as the weaker side in the overall military balance, largely because it has made only limited progress in those key areas that will define future warfare, most importantly informatization and system-of-systems–based operations

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By Mark Cozad, Jeffrey Engstrom, Scott W. Harold, Timothy R. Heath, Sale Lilly, Edmund J. Burke, Julia Brackup, Derek Grossman