People's Liberation Army Operational Concepts
Abstract
Lacking recent examples of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) in combat, the operational concepts developed in accordance with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strategic guidelines provide the best indication of how the PLA would fight. Strategic guidelines direct the PLA to win Informatized Local Wars, recognizing the centrality of information both as a domain in which war occurs and as the central means to wage military conflict when the dominant mode of warfare is confrontation between information-based systems-of-systems." One of the most notable efforts toward informatization is the PLAs establishment of the Strategic Support Force, which is responsible for integrating cyber data and capabilities with electromagnetic and space warfare information and operations. Three interlinked operational concepts likely underpin doctrine and establish principles by which the PLA will seek to accomplish its given missions through 2035, the date that President Xi Jinping assigned for the PLA to achieve fully modernized status: (1) War control (and, therefore, campaign success) depends on information dominance; (2) combat space is shrinking, but war space has expanded; and (3) target-centric warfare provides the means to defeat an adversarys operational system. Xi and his strategists are looking beyond his 2035 fully modernized milestone to develop military theory and concepts for a world-class military by 2050. At the center of this innovative effort is the PLAs leveraging of national defense big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to support an evolved system-of-systems or algorithm-based approach to great-power competition and armed conflict. The extent to which Chinese aspirations for an innovative military strategy and doctrine become reality will largely rest on the application of emerging big data and AI technologies to military purpose and the marriage of any ensuing new capabilities to existing concepts of joint force operations in system-of-systems warfare
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2020
- Accession Number
- AD1110216
Entities
People
- Cortez A. Iii Cooper
- Edmund J. Burke
- Kristen Gunness
- Mark Cozad
Organizations
- RAND Corporation