School of War - Ep 221: Joel Wuthnow and Phillip Saunders on China’s PLA

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

Joel Wuthnow and Phillip Saunders, both of the  U.S. National Defense University and authors of China's Quest for Military Supremacy, join the show to discuss the origins, organization, and strategic outlook of China’s military.  ▪️ Times     •      01:22 Introduction     •      01:57 Origins     •      06:58 Crisis control        •      08:48 PLA structure      •      13:05 1960            •      20:17 Horizontal escalation         •      24:34 By land or sea     •      28:23 American resolve     •      30:54 Xi         •      36:41 A lack of experience      •      44:10 Military diplomacy     •      48:17 Reading list     •      50:43 Be unpredictable Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

We've talked a lot about Chinese strategy and intentions regarding Taiwan and other potential theaters of conflict on the show, but we've never done an episode about the PLA itself. Today, we're going to do an introduction to the Chinese military, its origins, its structure, and what it seems to be preparing for. Let's get into it. It is for war. December 7, 1921, a date which will live in India. experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in France.

We'll fight on the beaches. We should fight on the landing grounds. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Dr. Joel What Now and Dr. Philip C. Saunders. They're both at the U.S. National Defense University, both experts on defense policy, on China, the Chinese military in particular. And today we are here to talk about their book, China's quest for military supremacy. Joel, Philip, thank you so much for joining the show. Happy to be here. Thanks, Aaron. So why don't we step way back and talk about how the Chinese military got going in its current form?

I'd say how the PLA got going, and the relationship between the PLA, the Chinese Communist Party, the revolution in China, in its origins in the 20th century, and explain perhaps sort of what's distinctive about the PLA in that regard, as opposed to, say, for example, the American military is something you might compare it to. So, Jens, I'll let whoever, whether it's Phil or Joel, whoever wants to take a swing at that, we can get going with that. Sure, I'll take a first stab at this. I think, you know, the origin story is really actually important to understand.

and who the PLA is today, they weren't a national army like what we are. They never existed for the purpose of defending a nation. They grew up in the 1920s as basically the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party during the Civil War. And that's what they remained as. And so even today, when they talk about themselves, it's never, we are the nation's army to protect the nation's interests.

It's always we are the party's army to protect the party's interests. And when you go into the PLA just to underscore this point, you know, they do take an oath like we would take an oath to say, but the difference is that when they take this oath, they take an oath to obey the party's orders and we take an oath to the Constitution. So it's a very different idea. But it actually creates some problems for them because in the PLA, they have to ensure that the party remains in control and how do they do that? Well, they do that by having a huge amount of propaganda that meant that is designed to underscore. the party's vision, its interests, its ideology. And so people in the PLA all have to understand that and study it. But they also have all these different control mechanisms, too. So if you think about political commissars, if you think about party committees, you know, I was just watching the hunt for red October last night, and this big thing about the political commissar who was murdered at the beginning,

they have something like that. They have something like that. They have commissars who exist all the way down to the level of a submarine. And so these two people have to get along with. with each other, they can't just, you know, everyone follows the captain's orders. It doesn't, doesn't work like that. And so it's very different from our system where we have, you know, centralized command and we have, you know, a commander who's in charge of everything. But in the PLA, they have dual command and party committees. And so the role of the party is really influential.

It's an aspiration. They've never achieved absolute controlled by the party. The PLA has always been a bureaucracy. Sometimes it has its own agenda. Sometimes it gets. gets involved in corruption and things like this. That's a big thing going on right now in the PLA. But it is something that makes them very distinctive from the way that we organize, from the way that really all Western militaries organize in terms of our civil military relations. It's striking that there's this sort of tension between, on the one hand, this is a deeply ideological organization that in its origins is founded to defend a party,

a revolution, you know, a particular movement, which now, of course, controls China, while at the same time that movement looks at this entity that it is created to defend itself as a major potential threat to its existence. And so you have to have all these systems of control in place as a consequence. Well, yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.

And, you know, it's not as though they don't understand the dilemma that they're in. I mean, they certainly understand it. They look to us. They try to figure out, why is it so that the U.S. can act so quickly and have all this initiative and develop plans and then actually be able to operate once the plan gets thrown out,

how is the U.S. able to do all this stuff? And so they understand that our organizational culture, which has mission command and has a single commander and all this, they value it. They think that's great. The problem is they can never fully embrace it because if you fully embrace it,

then that means you have to kind of let the tenter hooks of the party go off a bit. And they're never willing. That's always the first priority, you know, even above effectiveness as a war fighting organization. It's always keeping the party in control so that, you know, as Mao said, you know, the, you know, they have control of the barrel of the gun, right? Essentially so that the barrel of the gun doesn't turn against the party. I would just add to that that there's a, there's sort of a problem that as China's relied increasingly on nationalism to justify party rule, you know, what you have as an army that wants to defend China. and especially defend China against foreigners.

And it's not so interested in defending the party against workers and students, as happened in 1989. And so there's a mismatch in motives that the military thinks of itself as playing this kind of national role and isn't interested in playing this coercive, repressive role against the Chinese people. Yet that's what the party ultimately wants to be sure they will do. And so there's an inherent kind of tension there, which is partly why all this emphasis on political education and control. Is that a question mostly of potential use of the military in a crisis? Or to what extent, so is the PLA or elements of the military complex in China directly involved in domestic control or even sort of edge cases like Xinjiang and operations out there? primarily a military thing? Are there other elements of state security involved? Like, how does that actually work out? Joel, do you want to, I mean, you've written a lot on the people's arm,

please. So this is kind of a function of history. I mean, it used to be the case that the PLA did a lot of that kind of stuff. And so in TNMN, the PLA was called in because that was really the only tool that the party had at its disposal to deal with that huge crisis. But 1989 was a kind of pivotal moment because they said, I mean, the PLA really said to themselves, we don't want to be in this business of cracking heads in China. That's not who we are. That's not what we want to do. We're professionals, after all. And so the party kind of agreed with that. And they said, look, you don't have to do that so much. Yes, you're the last line of defense. We can call you in. But what they wanted to do is to make this whole surveillance state real. So what that meant was

building up the people's armed police, which is their internal security force, building up the police building up, you know, currently the techno authoritarian state that they have. And so you don't really need the PLA to be kind of out in the streets patrolling. Maybe with the exception, as you said, in Xinjiang and Tibet, where they still kind of are on the streets and they need to have that active presence because you have more descent out west. But in most parts of China in the cities in the countryside, they're in their barracks. They're preparing for war abroad, but they're not really doing domestic policing. You know what I think would be helpful? We have a lot of listeners who think about this issue, some who think about it a lot and specialize in it to some extent, but most don't.

And could we do just kind of a broad overview of the structure of the PLA in 2025? Like what are its major services? How is it actually? What is the actual mechanism of control via this committee? Just give us kind of an overview. What is the PLA? Basically speaking, the high command is Xi Jinping's in charge. So his title, he's the chairman of the Central Military Commission. And so that's the high command. Currently, it's Xi Jinping and three officers because he purged the other three who were on there after 2022. So it's a very small group of people. And below that level, you have all these different departments and offices. It's, you know, the joint staff department and so on and so forth. There's 15 of them that manages the bureaucracy. If you're talking about the operations,

chain of command, it goes down to the theater commands. So there's five of them. So, for example, if you're talking about a war with Taiwan, that would be the Eastern Theater Command, primarily responsible for that. And there's others. They all have their own contingencies. The Western Theater Command is, you know, doing the Xinjiang stuff, Southern Theater, South China, and it goes on like that. They don't really have much of a structure for overseas operations, and this is what makes them different from the U.S. because we have global combatant commands and transcom and things, they don't really have that. They have one overseas base in Djibouti, and they have peacekeepers and things like that,

but they really don't have a large overseas structure. And so the reason for that is because their strategy is more focused on sort of the domestic, the near-abroad, sort of the Indo-Pacific theater. And then kind of the last little bits, you know, the services, well, they have an Army, Navy, Air Force, but also a rocket force. right so we don't have that the rocket force does conventional missiles and also the nuclear deterrent piece and then they also have these other forces the information support the logistics and the space force and the cyber force so they have those as well which are support forces but all of that stuff

is designed to support you know theater operations basically not really designed to support overseas operations so but but for that fact but for the the the global reach question it actually sounds very much like our system. That is to say there's an operational chain of command, which the implications those operations will be joint and the services provide forces. But then you have services, raising the forces, training them, equipping them. Is that basically right? I mean, that's basically right. You know, we, you know, some of our writings, we've kind of likened this to Goldwater Nichols, because what Goldwater Nichols did was to take the services pretty much out of the chain of commands and leave the joint people to do operations. And so the PLA has embraced that idea. So the theater

commands are joint. The services don't really do operations much anymore. But the difference is not the org chart. The difference is all this political stuff inside it. So the commissars, the party committees. So they basically taking Goldwater Nichols like with Chinese characteristics. So they put all this Leninism like right into it. And so it functions differently. The chain of command is different. The organizational culture is distinct. And so it's a similarity with the U.S. but it's not a carbon copy. But what is that most recent Chinese fighter that was like uncannily like our, is it the J20, whichever one kind of looks like ours, but not quite?

That's sounds like that. There's a lot of similarity when you look at the pictures. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, a story that's been told on the podcast many times is, and I'm curious if you agree with the basic premise, but then I have a question for you, if you do, which is that, you know, China was off doing its thing and the United States fought the Gulf War. China and the rest of the world for that matter looked at what we did in the goal for and thought,

oh boy, this is something new and very dangerous to our interests. And then basically spent a generation plus altering its ways so as to prevent us from ever doing that ever again, certainly, well, maybe to prevent us from doing it to them. One, do you sort of accept that premise? And two, can you kind of weave in the story of recent modernization efforts, maybe even starting before she, like what are the major evolutions in the story? structure of the PLA as part of this broader effort to deal with America's, you know, revolution in military affairs, to deal with what we were able to demonstrate in the 90s and come

up to the present day as a much more potent for it. Sure. Well, I'll start back a little bit before that. I'll run the clock back to the, you know, for the PLA, the big thing is their breakup with the Soviet Union in 1960. Before that, they were getting a lot of aid, technology, military assistance. That all got cut off in 1960, and they had to do it on their own. So they're basically taking late 50s Soviet technology and trying to figure out how to replicate it, improve it, make it more modern.

They didn't do very well with that. But by the mid-80s, the U.S. is starting to provide some stuff, allow France and Britain to provide stuff. that all stops after Tiananmen in 1989, but the Russian defense industry becomes willing to sell to China. So their focus there is how do you build a modern military, just one that's basically flying fourth generation fighters, and they have modern tanks, and they have ships that don't sink. And that's their kind of first direction. How do you become a modern military? And the Gulf War showed them first how far behind they really were, what the state. of the art was, what were the gains from good intelligence, from networking, from precision-guided

munitions? And they saw the U.S. and the coalition take down the Iraqi army, which was at that point the fourth largest army in the world, operating better equipment, mostly Soviet than the PLA was operating. And they're like, oh, boy, this is bad. It shows how vulnerable we are on the one hand and need to find ways to blunt that U.S. capability, but it also shows what can be done. And so there are other reaction is, how do we get some of this? How do we build a military that can do these things? And I would say they kind of went at it both sides of that over the next 20 years or so. So the one piece is how do you organize to do this? How do you informationize your military, build intelligence satellites, have the communications,

organized to operate jointly, do all these things that let you get all the synergies that the U.S. showed off. And then the other side is China's vulnerable to this. How can you defeat that? How can you throw spokes in the U.S. wheels? And so they invested a lot of time and effort in what they, what's called anti-access area denial, but sort of how do you push the U.S. military DAC? They like to operate from forward air bases.

Okay. Build missiles and take out those forward air bases. They like to operate off carriers. Okay. Design a new kind of weapon and anti-ship ballistic missile that can target a U.S. carrier. And when you start to do those things, you force the U.S. military further back, further away from China, and reduce that threat. You know, other things they invested in air defenses, conventional submarines. that could target U.S. carriers, you know, a bunch of advanced systems.

But that was the other side is to try to push the U.S. back. And that has strategic components, too, counter space, because the U.S. depends on space to make, you know, find the enemy, make all the precision weapons get where they need to go. Well, that's all dependent on satellites. So China invests in ways to degrade or attack U.S. satellites. And that's kind of the irony is the first part of that, that counter the U.S. stuff matured much more quickly. But at the same time, the PLA was making their own investments in communications,

networking, satellites, and replicating a lot of those capabilities. So now they are more dependent on these things and also more vulnerable than they used to be. Yeah, let me just kind of chime in because, you know, I do think that the Gulf War is still kind of a template for the PLA. If you're talking about, you know, a high end of war against Taiwan in the U.S., the ideal is for a decisive quick victory using joint operations and powered by technology. But, you know, the problem, though, is that they're seeing in the war with Ukraine right now that these plans sometimes don't go as expected.

And, you know, this was Putin's gambit as well, was to quickly decapitate the regime and conquer territory. But now he's in year three of a quagmire. And so the PLA is looking at this and saying, well, might we not have to prepare? pair for protracted conflict as well. And so they're having to, I think, go back to a deeper vein in kind of PLA heritage all the way back really to the 1930s when they were in this kind of open-ended war with the KMT and then with Japan. Mao wrote his famous treatise on protracted war in 1936. So I think they're having to kind of dust off the books and look at, well, what happens if that

quick victory falls apart? What preparations do we need to actually get into a much? longer slog with Taiwan or the U.S. or anyone else. So I think what that means is that they're having to look at their strategic stockpiles of ammunition, of strategic material like oil, thinking about national mobilization of the people, thinking about all this, you know, if, you know, in the plan B, the plans don't go according to plan and you get into a longer. So I think, you know, again, it probably serves a kind of deterrent purpose if they are, if they have doubts that you can win in three days or four days, that's probably good for deterrence. But on the other hand, if they feel like they have to go to war, it might not work.

And so they have to be prepared for that longer campaign. Yeah, I'm curious how you rate the seriousness of those efforts to prepare for what's beyond, because this does seem to me to be the critical issue for all of us to wrap our minds around. You know, if the challenge for us, the United States is simply to, as you say, to communicate, to have them believe that a sure. short, sharp war is unlikely to succeed or it's unlikely to be short. And if we just met that burden, that would probably deter them. Well, that's, that's, you know, nothing's easy in life, but that's, that's an achievable goal. It's pretty clear which you would need, what forces you would need to

develop and what you would need to do to achieve it. The much greater threat, of course, is if we have to, we have to, to wage a protracted war against China. And looking at the, the structure of the forces of what they've bought, just the sheer scale of the thing as it grows, which you gentlemen have done so much work to document, one gets the impression, yes, that there's some thought of protraction on their end. And also, despite, as you point out, the lack of a global command structure and the lack of the kind of alliances and extensive basing arrangements that we have, it also seems, I mean, I could infer from what you're outlining in terms of the facts of their capabilities, that simply dominance in the Western Pacific is not the only thing the PLA is designed.

for it may not be optimized for things beyond that precisely at this moment but it's a lot of it's a lot of ships in the pla navy to just fight a fight a war in the taiwan straight right well i think they are preparing for the future and the future could have some degree of let's say you know horizontal escalation if their overseas interests are threatened by us which they probably anticipate to some degree in a larger war in asia you know but it wouldn't remain a local war in their view could become more of a general global campaign, not necessarily nuclear, but it could involve their interests in other regions where they're getting their oil from or where they're getting critical minerals from or where they have merchant traffic that goes

through. And so I think they realize that we are still a dominant global military and can threaten their access to a lot of that stuff. For that reason, not only the Navy in particular, but the Air Force, the other services, They have to have more of a power projection capability. This is not meant to dominate territory or to set up colonies or anything of that nature, but it is meant to protect their interests precisely because they worry that we're going to cut that stuff off. And that is kind of a critical weakness to them.

They still kind of talk about, think about this so-called, you know, Malacca dilemma. You know, it's not just specifically about the Strait of Malacca and all the oil that comes through. It's about all the maritime choke points everywhere, where there's still. stuff has to transit through and we dominate, you know. And, you know, we've been in the Middle East of late and fought wars out there recently and they haven't. And so I think that is a vulnerability. And they're trying to get after that.

But the question is, can they do it without allies, without an overseas presence, you know, with just ships that go out for a few, you know, months at a time, how well can they do that? So I think that is still somewhat, we're talking about deterrence. That is still somewhat of an Achilles heel for a protracted war. Now, the benefit that they have in their system is that they can produce a lot of stuff, right? They have this industrial capacity that we lack. So in that respect, this is totally unlike, you know, if you think to like World War II against Japan, for example,

Japan needed a knockout punch because they assessed that our industrial capacity was like seven times theirs. They couldn't get into it. Admiral Yamamoto warned, you know, protracted war sucks for us because we can't build ships. for China, that's not the case. They can build things. The problem is the access to the global resources, the strategic minerals, the oil and all that. They don't have that internally. And so they worry that we could potentially cut that stuff off. So I think that's kind of part of the, part of the equation. And that's also, so I think part of the greater vulnerability is the Chinese economy. That's also a reason they want a short war to win without fighting is because

the longer conflict goes, the more China will be shut off from the global economy. They won't be importing, they won't be exporting, they'll have to move to a wartime economy. And that's really challenging to kind of keep it going for years at a time. And they don't necessarily have confidence that their public will fully support that for years at a time. That's part of the party's legitimacy is raising living standards. And if you maneuver China into a years-long war where everybody's suffering, that's not so good from a domestic political stability point. So I think there's also that part of it why a longer war deters them. Part of it is the military pieces, but part of it is also the resilience of the economy.

You know, if maritime traffic shuts down, China's not going to be the world's largest manufacturer or the world's largest exporter at that point. So that's part of deterrence as well. Well, this is also presumably part of the thinking behind, you know, the structure of Belt and Road. And we've had Michael Soblock on the show to talk about the strategic thinking behind Belt and Road, strategic in the strict sense. That is to say, if maritime traffic is suddenly, you know, restricted or even shut down, the ability to move stuff in and out of Western China over land, really the relationship with Russia that you've seen getting closer and closer in the last couple of years, all of this is presumably meant as a hedge against. collapse and, you know, sea access, right? And I'm curious to know your view about whether or not it's a sufficient hedge. Like I have no idea of what can be moved across. It's not sufficient.

I mean, it helps. Every bit helps. And you can do things like put oil on trains and move it by rail, but not in the quantity that they really need because most of what they export is going by sea. You know, if they're importing coal, they're importing oil, they're importing high volume things, and you can't run that over the mountains through Central Asia in the quantity that they would need. It's just way too expensive. And if you're talking to war, there's no guarantee those roads and rail lines are going to still be operating either in that kind of a setting. So I think, you know, that helps a little bit. But the notion that you can build more rail lines and roads, and I've been on some of those roads, you know, into Uzbekistan, you can't put that much traffic going through the mountains, you know, 15,000 feet high to, you know, it's a lot harder to do that than it is to ship an oil tanker or container ship.

So, yes, they hope that that will mitigate it, but I don't think it will necessarily have that much impact if you're talking a full-scale war. So I think if they're trying to kind of rationalize getting into this and how they're going to do, I mean, they're aware of the risk to the economy. They're aware of the risk to critical imports. And I think what they would try to tell themselves is that their resolve would be stronger. Their people would, you know, so-called like eat bitterness for a long period of time. Because for them, this war is a core interest. It's something that the people have been thoroughly indoctrinated to support.

It's something that the PLA is being constantly told as righteous and everything. And I think what they would try to convince themselves is that the U.S. will also suffer because the global economy will be completely shot and that the American people will never support a war that go drags on and on against a great power, nuclear-powered rival, you know, endlessly over an interest that's not a core interest. It is something that most people don't care about and that is something that people will not sacrifice their day-to-day life to invest in. and they will not only believe that, but they will also project that to try to deter us. They'll tell us the message, we will fight longer to the last man,

to the last, you know, inch will fight forever for this, and it doesn't, will sacrifice endlessly, and you won't, and you know that. And so don't get into it. So both sides are trying to deter each other, right?

Like we're trying to deter them by saying, you know, your economy, you will not achieve national rejuvenation because your economy will be said back decades, but they're telling the same thing back to us. That, you know, your plans to put America first, right? Like, that will also, you know, be sacrificed on the, you know, on the intervention that you're planning to do for us.

And so the question is, like, who believes who in this equation? Like, who thinks who is actually going to fight harder, irrespective of what the actual, like, material costs are going to be here. Yeah, it sounds like we all have a lot of lessons to learn from the early 1940s. You know, when it comes to shipbuilding, I mean, in reference to your earlier comment, Joel, of course, the harrowing thing to realize is we're more the Japanese. We're more the imperial Japanese in this analogy today, and that's a harrowing thing to reflect on. But then when it comes to American resolve to fight, the Japanese badly miscalculated there. I mean, there's a way in which you could imagine Chinese campaigns assuming risk,

like the PLA assuming a lot of risk on front, try to keep us out of initial stages of hostilities in the sort of grand strategic hope that we won't come. in or that will come in in such a way that it will be hard to generate popular support. But if this thing opens with killing a lot of Americans, I mean, they need to go back and review what happened in 1941 when that happened, because American resolve tends to accumulate rapidly. That's true. And when we've had PLA delegations that come to the United States and they go out to Hawaii, you know, we always take them to see the Arizona Memorial.

And, you know, it's not such a subtle point. You know, the Japanese won an initial victory. And they really, they really mobilize the United States. And look what happened. The U.S. can hold a grudge. And so it's not an accident when we get a PLA delegation. That's one of the places we take them to kind of impress upon them that fight. If you, you know, you don't win quickly or even if you do, do score an initial victory,

that's not necessarily the end of the conflict. You know, you'll sometimes see when, you know, like when war games play out, you know, if you're on the red team, you have. all this stuff you can throw at the U.S., and you're really tempted to go first, right? Like, you want to throw that big knockout punch, which probably means killing a bunch of Americans with this bolt out of the blue.

But precisely because of the thing that you just mentioned, which is dragging the U.S. into a war, I'm not quite certain that that's actually how the PLA would act. They have an idea of deterrence that doesn't necessarily rely on a massive, like, Russian-style escalate to de-escalate. move. I think what they're talking about is more, let's make some signals that's not kill anybody, but let's signal our intention to really fight hard. And so that could be some signaling in cyber,

in space, in like nuclear signaling. I think they're kind of interested in that with their big nuclear deterrent they've built. And so I think they're trying to think more about brinkmanship and what that would look like in a conflict. So going right up to the edge, but not actually crossing over it precisely because they don't want to achieve this like Japan-1949 result. Right. So it's no original observation to say that Xi is the most significant Chinese leader since Mao, certainly the most powerful leader since Mao and most powerful military leader since Mao. You guys make the same point in the book.

And so much of what we're discussing in the end comes down to Xi's attitudes, decisions, world view, instincts. You know, talk a bit about Xi's career as the chair of this commission, the ultimate commander of the military. I'm not sure commander is the right technical term, but the person in charge of the military and what his major

focuses have been and what this all tells us about his strategic worldview. Well, you know, she is different from Mao, right? Because Mao actually had real military experience. I mean, he was in war for like 20 years. And so he kind of got it. He

inner civil war was, and he wrote treatises that were based in his own. So Xi Jinping doesn't have really any of that. He grew up during the cultural revolution. He didn't really serve in the PLA, aside from a couple years as like an aid to a defense minister, right? Because he was, you know, basically the son of a senior Chinese party official Xi Jong-Shun, and there's a new biography from Joe Turigian about that. That's very good. So he grew up in the elite circles, but he was wasn't himself a military guy or a combat veteran, what he did was he had a provincial career. So he had some connections with the PLA. He knew what the plans were to mobilize the PLA and how those things worked.

But it wasn't until he came to Beijing as a vice president basically in 2010 that he was appointed to the Central Military Commission under Hu Jintao. And so at that point, he really kind of has a front row seat to all the stuff the PLA is doing for good and bad, right? Like all the stuff they're trying to do to modernize, but also all the rot and the corruption and the not listening to the senior leaders of the party and all this, Lender Who. And so his first priority, you know, is really to clean up some of the rot more than anything else. I mean, he's saying you guys are doing illicit schemes and you're, you know, you're not being serious about professionalization. And so the first thing he does really is

the anti-corruption campaign is getting out a lot of the rodden eggs. and kind of deter, trying to deter, you know, these schemes from continuing. All right. So once he does that, then he really starts this huge military reform in 2015. And that's the whole Goldwater Nichols thing that we talked about earlier, which is setting up this new command structure. And then later on he does other things like building out the nuclear deterrence. Presently, what he's really focused on is preparing for war.

He's given them this 2027 deadline of being ready for a war with Taiwan and the U.S. And he's also trying at the same time to make progress on all these other territorial disputes that China has by using like the Coast Guard and the maritime militia and all these other people. So he has a lot on a lot on his plate, right? It's managing the world's largest and most difficult to manage bureaucracy, but it's also preparing for a huge war and doing a lot of other things at the same time territorially. So he's been able to make some progress because he is in charge and he is respected and there's a lot of money to do this and he has a vision but at the same time you know really controlling the PLA has been difficult for him and so he's had to come back to

this question of anti-corruption I mentioned the purges of late that he's done because it's it's hard you know you're like I said you're dealing with the world's largest most difficult bureaucracy even if you're Xi Jinping you know it's just really hard for him to handle and so that has I think distracted him from the external things that he's wanted to do with the Taiwan, et cetera. I would add two things to that. You know, the first is that he's had a very consistent theme that the PLA needs to be able to fight and win wars.

They've got to be good at their military business. They've got to be properly, properly equipped, properly trained, and able to fight. And that's been a consistent theme throughout his time in office. That's what the PLA is for. That's the criterion for measuring their effectiveness. Yet at the same time, it has also been political control. So I would add a little bit to what Joel said is when he got into office, you know, the first thing he did, yes, anti-corruption, but what he's really doing is cleaning out senior officers who were loyal to Zhang Zemin, who were loyal to part of networks within the PLA, getting rid of those peoples whose loyalty to the party and to him were in doubt and trying to replace them with his own people. and reinvigorating the party structures, the party, party organs within the PLA to try to solve this problem of loyalty.

So those have been the two themes, absolute loyalty to the party and to Xi Jinping himself, but also a PLA that is focused on fighting and winning wars. So I think those are the hallmarks. And it's a much more ambitious goal. His goal is a world-class military. One part of that is having the capability to win a fight over Taiwan, but a world-class military is one that, you know, if not exactly on parity with the U.S., it's in the same group as the U.S. military or the Russian military. Well, yeah, so I want to ask you to sort of rate the PLA's progress on the goal of, I don't know exactly the word I want here, whether it's readiness or lethality or just actual warfighting. capacity beyond the kit. You know, the actual ability of the war fighters to do their jobs,

whether it's an infantry unit or a ship's crew or what have you. And I'm also curious, maybe you could sort of frame it this way, how you begin to think about assessing that? Like, how do you go about thinking that through if you're, you know, if you're in your shoes and you're trying to come up with a professional assessment? Because, you know, you hear this, it's sort of casually thrown around as, oh, the Chinese, they haven't fought a war since, you know, in 1979, my usual response to that is to point out that I don't think our surface Navy has really fought a war since 1945. So, you know, lest we grow complacent.

But you guys are the pros here. How do you think about this and how do you actually think they're doing? Well, let me tackle this kind of in three ways, that there's a part that is organization, there's a part that's training, and there's a part that's leadership. The organization part was a big problem in the pre-reform PLA. because they wanted to fight a joint campaign. They had joint doctrine. They wanted to fight that way.

But if you look at how they were organized, let's say then it was the non-jing military region. In peacetime, that's an army regional command. And that's what they do, spend their days in peacetime doing army training. But in wartime, that's supposed to turn into a war zone and be a joint campaign and control the Navy and control the rocket force and control the air force. But they didn't practice that. They didn't train that way and they didn't have the ability to do this transition.

So their organization wasn't consistent with how they wanted to fight. I would say the 2015 reform largely fixed that problem. Now they are organized in peacetime, how they would fight in wartime, and their training in peacetime, how they would train in wartime. So I think that's an area where they made tremendous progress. The second piece is training to make it more realistic, to train how you're going to fight. This is an area where it's harder to gauge, but I think they've made considerable progress. And some of the illustrations, they've set up their equivalent of the National Training Center.

You know, an Army battalion will rotate through there. They will fight against the permanent training cadre. They will get their butts kicked by that permanent training cadre. they will learn from that experience and they'll go back and get better. A lot of their exercises are now what they call back-to-back or oppositional force exercises, whether that's Army or Air Force or Navy. They're operating against a reacting opponent. It's not scripted.

That's obviously much more realistic training. So I think they've made some progress there, but maybe not as much. What's left then is the leadership rule. and having leaders that can effectively plan and train and conduct joint operations. And I think our sense is that's where there are deficiencies. They say there are deficiencies. Their problem with commanders who cannot command who are in senior positions. This is where the lack of combat experience is potentially a problem,

where the lack of joint experience across the force is potentially a problem. And it's, I think what we see is they try to get around out by plane, by having a detailed plan. Here's what everybody's going to do. Practice what you're going to do. Okay, we're all set. But the problem is once combat starts, the plans change. The adversary reacts. You're in a different situation. You have to coordinate differently across the forces, and your commanders have to show initiative. They have to recognize the situation, respond to it, and adapt accordingly. And that's where I think, where I guess we think, that the PLA has problems in the ability to do that, kind of react on the battlefield to new conditions.

So I guess I would rate, and just to kind of build on what Phil said, but I would rate readiness. If we're talking about the PLA's primary contingency, which is kind of across-straight operations, I mean, this is our pacing scenario too. But for them, you know, if you're talking about the different kinds of things they can do across the Taiwan straight,

they're ready for different kinds of eventualities. So if you talk about like seizing one of the offshore islands or blockading one of the offshore islands, they can do that easily. I mean, not without bloodshed, but they could do that. They could succeed. This is like outside our defense perimeter. I don't know if we would intervene or not. But if you're just talking about the PLA versus the Taiwan defenders on Jin met, I mean, it's not really an even match at all. If you're talking about a blockade of Taiwan, the main island, I think they could do that too.

and they've been training for it because they have a lot of ships. And now they have increasing experience in doing it. So I think they could do a blockade. I think they could selectively quarantine critical things going into Taiwan if they wanted to do that. But there would be a huge, you know, price to pay for their own reputation. I mean, that would look very aggressive. We may or may not intervene with that. I think the biggest challenge for them would be the so-called Joint Island Landing campaign.

So this is the so-called, you know, invasion of Taiwan. Are they really ready for that? And I would say it would be very difficult because they have a weakness and the weaknesses that they have to mass all of these forces in a particular area where they lack air and maritime supremacy. They don't have that and they can't guarantee that to their leadership. And so if they start down that road, it's not going to be a surprise to anyone that they're doing it. It's not going to be a theta-complete. It'll be a huge effort involving hundreds of ships and hundreds of thousands of people.

and that's something that would be very vulnerable to them, even if they had more experience and even if they had the kind of training, et cetera. But at the end of the day, that's an inherent problem with that option for them. It has been since 1950 when Mao tried to do the same thing and we block. So I think it remains a problem today

because they don't own that airspace or that water space. We have submarines and we have long-range bombers that can come in and do enough damage that they can guarantee victory. And at the end of the day, if you're going to go, if you're going to push that button, you want to guarantee a victory. You don't want some doubt about how it's going to turn out.

So that's how I would rate it. Yeah. It'd be like doing Operation Overlord or Operation Neptune, but before the Luftwaffe and the Kriegs Marine are just right. So I want to step back from Taiwan in the time we have remaining. I'm sort of fascinated by what the structure and capabilities of the PLA and just how the PLA and it's offering. officer corps operate, what that can tell us about Chinese strategic world views beyond the

question of the ultimate status of Taiwan. I mean, if you look at the U.S. military, I think you can infer pretty clearly what our view of the world is, you know, whether or not we're supremely pleased with it in Washington or every, you know, element of every political party is supremely pleased with it. We have a military that is about guaranteeing a certain conception of war by working with allies. And, you know, you can look at what we build and how it operates around the world. old and flesh that picture out, I think, without a great deal of difficulty. You've pointed, you know, the account you give, there's this sort of disjunct where you have this rapidly

expand, this military that's rapidly expanding capability in the Chinese front and has real elements of power projection coming online without really the global structure yet to kind of command and coordinate. And I say yet. I don't know if you would accept that, but that seems clear to me. And I'm just curious, you know, I don't know exactly. Like when they do military diplomacy, for example, which you write about in the book, you know, again, I could tell you what our defense attaches are thinking when they're out doing military diplomacy in the Philippines or Germany or whatever, and they're doing joint exercises and, you know, how they see their role.

How did PLA officers see their role? How do they understand what they're doing when they are using the military in peacetime to establish these political connections. I would say, so two things. You know, first, when they're doing it inside Asia, they're shaping the region. And that's been a big shift over the last 10 or 15 years, when the PLA is either doing military diplomacy or they're just doing their own exercises,

where they're doing patrols in the Spratly Islands or off the East China Sea. Increasingly, they're exercising presence. They're showing that the PLA can get out there and control things. contesting these territorial disputes, and they're trying to expand their effective control. So that's one big function, is to sort of shape the region, so everybody in the region knows there's a powerful military here. They know what it's focused on, and they'll think twice about that. Then I think beyond that, the military diplomacy pieces are there to support foreign policy, generally. They're subordinate to it. So they are there to try to make friends. And if you can't

make friends at least make sure that your enemies know your capabilities and are hesitant to challenge it. But a lot of what they do is not that significant militarily. It is high-level visits, its port calls, its occasional exercises, most of which are not that significant. I would say sort of three exceptions to this. One is with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with Russia, China, Central Asia. Those are focused on counterterrorism, counter separatism. There's a certain degree of military conflict, military cooperation with those. And if something comes up, if there's an incident in those places, there's an implicit Chinese and Russian ability to intervene and help out one of those countries. So that matters militarily. The second is with Pakistan. That's probably

China's number two military partner. It is quantitatively. And they do serious military exercises with them. So you see things like Chinese fighters acting as targets for Pakistani air defense in an air defense exercise, you know, sort of oppositional combat training. That is starting to be pretty significant military activity. But the one that matters most is what they do with the Russians. This is both the PLA trying to learn from the Russian military, which they regard as very advanced, very well organized, a lot of combat experience. a lot of lessons to learn that the PLA can learn. A little bit of interoperability where the Chinese and Russian militaries are learning to work together.

Some of that on the ground side, some of it on the Navy side. And kind of the most recent element of that has been joint patrols. So these are from 2018. These are joint air patrols about twice a year. These are joint Navy patrols about twice a year. And not a lot of military content to this. You know, they're not practicing war-type moves. But what they're trying to demonstrate to the rest of the world is, hey, China and Russia can get along.

Our militaries can operate together. You have to take that seriously. And some of our research has focused on distinguishing the military piece from the political signaling piece. Those are low on military content, but they're high on political signaling. And so when the Chinese and Russians are doing an air patrol off Alaska, you know, that's, sending a political signal to the United States. It's not that they're going to invade or attack Alaska, but China and Russia can cooperate and we can do it in your backyard. You need to take us more seriously. And that's one of the goals of that kind of military diplomacy is sending that kind of strategic message.

Can I close this on a bit of a practical question? For those of us who are fascinated by these subjects, but perhaps don't have the amount of time to devote to it as you guys do or the, you know, certainly the technical expertise in the language, What can we read in English, you know, when it comes to Chinese texts, is there a good place to go to get these what are in China, presumably openly available Chinese texts? Like, what do you read? How do you stay abreast of these issues for your own work? So there are some very good translations of Chinese military writings for people who kind of, you know, they want to hear what the Chinese are saying and now what we are saying about them. So just, for example, our colleagues over at the China Aerospace Studies Institute have translated. a lot of PLA doctrinal texts or textbooks, like the science of military strategy and things like that, and have posted it for people. And so, you know, when we teach students, sometimes

they want to go and say, well, what are the Chinese actually writing about, like, escalation control or military relationships or whatever? And these textbooks, like, have all the answers. Like, this is how they teach their own people. Authoritatively, we don't have a lot right now. The last defense white paper they did was in 2019. And so typically those would have facts and figures and messages they want to impart. And so you can still read like, you know, Xi Jinping's statements and Ministry of National Defense press conferences. I mean, they still do all that. But the last white paper, which is kind of like the authoritative view from the PLA, we haven't had one for six years.

We may get one. We may not. But that's the other place I used to tell people to look. it's just so dated at this point that it's not as valuable. And we also look at the work reports, especially Xi Jinping's 22 work report to the party Congress. He talks there pretty explicitly, not in a lot of length, but it's as authoritative as you can get. What is the Chinese military for? What are the major kind of elements of reform?

What are they trying to do? So that's as authoritative a source as you can get straight out of straight from Xi Jinping. things, pen and read by him personally. Last question, you've been very clear throughout our conversation. You're clear in the book that if there's a flaw in all this for the PLA, it's this question of leadership and political trust and an over-centralization, or perhaps that's the wrong word, because actually one of the issues that there isn't central command where there ought to be is actually split command.

But nevertheless, over-control of things that in our system would be delegated to lower echelons. Okay, that seems plausible. Let's assume for argument's sake that that's all accurate. How should the U.S. military plan to exploit that as a practical matter for our own planning? What does that mean for us besides we're just going to cross our fingers and hope that they're kind of slow to react to stuff? I mean, to me, I think what that means is that we really have to be unpredictable. We have to come at them from directions and in formats that they cannot anticipate because, I mean, they're very much into planning. I mean, this was like, you know, again,

like I was watching The Hunt for Red October and they made this whole thing about the plans and how they always do what's in the plan. Well, I mean, that's kind of true of the Chinese as well. Is it like they have these, you know, war games that they do and they have these doctrinal trucks, but it lays out all the answers for them. And so the commanders, they don't really have, you know,

the ability to go off script. But so if we can do things that they think are really puzzling, you know, using formats of, forces in like locations and directions and packages that they're not sure what what it all adds up to. I think that slows them down. They put a lot of effort into seizing and maintaining the initiative in their writings. And once you get them off their initiative, I think things really get bad for them.

And so if you can convince them in peacetime that your planning is kind of messed up, like we have a lot of things that we're going to show you like the tip of the iceberg and make you wonder what else is beneath the surface. I mean, I think that's all really good for deterrence because they, understand that this, you know, structure they have is a bit of a street jacket for their effectiveness and for their initiative, you know, and so if we can show them that we're going to be unpredictable, create surprises and dilemmas for them, that I think that's very good. I would just add to that part of their thinking about crisis management and escalation

control is to localize, to keep it focused on the main point of action. And so that implies that one of the ways we can present them with dilemmas is by threatening to broaden the conflict horizontally. Maybe something's going to happen through Central Asia. Maybe something's going to happen through India. Now all of a sudden your Western Theater Command is worried about that. They're responsible for dealing with threats from those areas. And now all of a sudden they say, well, I need my troops. You know, no, they can't go off to the Eastern Theater Command to fight in Taiwan. You know, we have credible threats coming through India. We have credible threats from Central Asia. I need those forces to deal with those possibilities.

So that's an example of how you can present challenges from different directions and maybe complicate PLA decisions about how to allocate forces, what to be focused on. That's all super interesting. Joel, for our own ideological purposes and domestic morale, we need Tom Clancy in the 2020s to be writing us Hunts for Red October, but about China. I think we need that politically as a country, that quality of Cold War style fiction. But I'm not familiar with anyone doing that kind of work yet. There's a desperate need if you guys know anyone.

Maybe that's my post-retirement career. There we go. There we go. Well, I think Clancy was like an insurance guy, right? He didn't, he had amazingly had no connections to the IC or anything. And then I don't know how he got the Naval Institute press to publish on what I do. Do you know the lesson from that, though? that we were doing this.

No, from the Naval Institute Press publishing the Hunter Red October. Oh, what's the last? They didn't get the movie rights. And so every now, every time they publish a book, they make sure the contract includes the movie rights.

And so our former colleague Bud Cole, who's published several books on the Chinese Navy, some through them, he said, you know, now I have to sign away my movie rights when they published the book. But I think we kept ours, right, Joel?

I think so. Yep. I'll look forward to the cinematic version of China's quest for military supremacy. Joel with now, Philip Saunders. Thank you so much for joining the show. My pleasure. Thanks very much. This is a nebulous media production.

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