China: Warfare in the Information Age

[ 101 ] roundtable • sizing the chinese military China: Warfare in the Information Age Larry Wortzel At the intellectual level, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) understands the way that technology has driven a “revolution in military affairs,” affecting how commanders organize and command forces and the way those forces coordinate on the battlefield. The white paper on national defense released by China’s State Council in December 2006 acknowledges, “a revolution in military affairs is developing in depth worldwide,” noting “military competition based on ‘informationalization’ is intensifying.” For the most part, PLA military theorists are learning to apply technology to war by watching how the U.S. armed forces have experimented with technology and performed in combat. Senior PLA leaders consider the United States to be the most advanced military force on which to base their own military development. They also see the United States as the most likely potential enemy against which China may need to employ or counter the latest means of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR). Many in the PLA fear that the latent power of the United States gives Washington the capability to coerce or dominate China, forcing Beijing to abandon its own interests. The goal of the PLA is to create a more modern force that can challenge or deter the best military forces in the world. China’s military today is, however, not a uniformly high-technology force. A number of systems are able to work at sophisticated levels, but the PLA cannot field a fully digitized force across the spectrum of its military systems. The PLA is working to apply “network-centric warfare” concepts but lacks a comprehensive set of the data  “China Publishes White Paper on National Defense,” Open Source Center, December 29, 2006 u http://www.opensource.gov/.  Zhang Wannian, ed., Dangdai shijie junshi yu Zhongguo guofang [China’s National Defense and Contemporary World Military Affairs] (Beijing: Military Science Press, 1999), 25. Zhang points out that even though the Soviet Union has broken up, “hegemonism still looms on the international stage” and that the United States is “primary among Western hegemonist nations.” Larry Wortzel is a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and previously served as the director of the Asian Studies Center and vice president for foreign policy at the Heritage Foundation. Wortzel joined Heritage in November 1999 upon completing a 32-year career in the U.S. Armed Forces. He can be reached at . note u This essay is a shortened version of a paper originally presented at the conference “Exploring the ‘Right Size’ for China’s Military: PLA Missions, Functions, and Organization,” Carlisle Barracks, PA, October 6–8, 2006 and to be included in Roy Kamphausen and Andrew Scobell, eds., Right Sizing the People’s Liberation Army: Exploring the Contours of China’s Military (Carlisle, PA: Army War College Press, forthcoming). [ 102 ] asia policy transfer systems necessary to field a force that employs these technologies in a uniform way. It may be two to five years until the PLA achieves anything in the Asia-Pacific region close to the level of networking that U.S. forces can apply globally today. This essay overviews China’s understanding and goals for C4ISR, the current state of China’s capabilities in this area, and implications for the United States. China’s Conceptualization of C4ISR A number of recent publications and speeches by the PLA provide clues as to China’s current thinking on the usefulness of C4ISR. For instance, to help achieve China’s information warfare goals, two PLA Air Force authors, Sun Yiming and Yang Liping, have built a virtual roadmap to attacking joint U.S. data systems and communications. By consulting dozens of corporate web sites and tactical data link operator guides, as well as NATO and U.S. military manuals, the authors produced a virtual guidebook for electronic warfare to disrupt critical U.S. cooperative target engagement and C4ISR data links. As another example, one PLA Academy of Military Science researcher expressed the view that to engage in modern war the PLA must be able to “attack the enemy’s knowledge systems and such high value targets as communications, carrier...