Right-Sizing the People's Liberation Army: Exploring the Contours of the Chinese Military (review)

In June 2005, at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld posed three questions to Beijing:

Since no nation threatens China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment? Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?

(Donald Rumsfeld, speech to the Shangri-La Dialogue 2005, Singapore, 6/4/2005)

These sentiments were echoed by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, when she told CBS News in September 2005 that China's "military buildup looks outsized for its regional concerns."

Those two statements basically constituted the rationale for this book and the conference (one in a series of annual meetings on the Chinese military held at the U.S. Army War College) upon which it is based. What is the "right size" for the People's Liberation Army (PLA)? How big should it be, and, specifically, how big does it deserve to be? What capabilities—in terms of table of equipment, manpower, force structure, and so forth—should the PLA possess relative to its threat environment and in order to achieve its stated strategic goals?

If all this does not seem rather presumptuous and even rather preachy on the part of non-Chinese outsiders, well, it is. Part of the basis for this conference and book, I later learned, was, in fact, to challenge the so-called Blue Teamers who continually prattle on about the "China Threat": go ahead, be normative—tell us what is "too much," what is "outsized," what should the PLA look like? The fact that no such critics or their writings actually appear in this volume says something about the difficulty—and perhaps impossibility—of undertaking such a chore.

For the most part, then, this book deals with its subject more according to its subtitle—that is, exploring the "contours of the PLA"—rather than expounding on whether recent modernization efforts are "too much." In this regard, it takes a straightforward approach. The first section, consisting of two long chapters by Michael Chambers and David Finkelstein, discusses China's "threat environment" and its subsequent military strategic response. Finkelstein's chapter is particularly insightful, as it draws heavily upon Chinese primary sources in order to argue that the PLA does indeed have a coherent plan of action based on firm strategic guidelines and tasking. In other words, PLA modernization efforts over the past ten to fifteen years have not been ad hoc and based on "what we can get," but rather are the result of "fundamental decisions" made in accordance with a clear set of goals and objectives.

The rest of the book is divided into sections dealing with PLA nuclear and strategic missile forces, the PLA's growing potential for network-centric warfare (NCW), ground forces, the PLA Air Force (PLAAF), and the PLA Navy (PLAN). A few chapters stand out. Larry Wortzel's assessment of PLA progress in developing a modern C4ISR (command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) architecture and in engaging in NCW especially goes a long ways toward opening a particular "black-box" in the PLA's "revolution in military affairs" (or RMA). Since C4ISR and NCW are deemed by "transformationauts" (both in the West and in China) as central to the modern, information technology–led RMA, naturally we need as much light shed on this opaque subject as is possible. Wortzel leads us through an oft-times confusing maze of acronyms and esoteric technologies to the conclusion that the Chinese have indeed grasped the nettle of NCW and are advancing in this area at an astonishing rate—a disquieting thought at the very least.

The two chapters on Chinese airpower—by Phillip Saunders and Erik Quam, and by Kevin Lanzit and Kenneth Allen—both detail ongoing developments in building a smaller but more technologically capable—a "leaner and meaner"—PLAAF. For their part, Saunders...