Sea Control - Sea Control 595: China's Command Revolution with Elsa Kania

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

Links1. Elsa Kania's LinkedIn profile.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Ahoy, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. I'm your host, Brian Kerg, and our guest today is Dr. Elsa Kanya. We'll be discussing her area of expertise and doctoral dissertation, China's Command Revolution, Reforms, Adaptation, and Emerging Innovations in Chinese Military Command Capabilities. As a reminder, all views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any other organization with which we are affiliated. Elsa, welcome aboard Sea Control. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background? Thanks so much. Really happy to be

joining and looking forward to the conversation. I am just finishing my PhD at long last at Harvard University, and I've been focusing on U.S.-China relations, Chinese military power, and cross-strait relations, among other issues, for over a decade now. Earlier this year, I was a visiting scholar for a while at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies while finishing my dissertation, which is a fantastic experience. And I've also been engaged in a number of policy-oriented and think tank projects the past couple of years, including with the Center for New American Security. So a lot of my research has looked at different dimensions of Chinese military power, especially how the PLA, the Chinese People's Liberation Army, is approaching future warfare

and the operationalization of emerging capabilities. That is quite a background, and I think you're the exact expert we want on the show. And the subject that you're going to discuss and your air of expertise is very, very topical to many of our listeners. So thank you so much for joining us. So, Dr. Kanya, can you walk us through the big blue arrows on your dissertations or thesis? Like, what is your elevator pitch? Sure.

Well, I'm still working on my elevator pitch or still rethinking aspects of it, so we'll see how this goes. I am a perpetual student of the PLA and of these issues, but the core question that motivated me for this topic was how and why has the PLA's approach to command and control evolved across its modern history? And it gets the backdrop of some of the technological developments in this time. So really, I'm looking at Chinese military command from Mao till now and wanted to unpack what I see as a puzzle of sorts. That often the conventional wisdoms and prevailing assessments is that command capabilities remain a critical weakness for the PLA. I've often heard American colleagues claim that the PLA could never execute anything analogous to mission command because they are the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party, they are a military organization that is political and politicized by design, which runs contrary to most of our American or more generally Western notions of military professionalism. And there is some truth in that. But and certainly if looking at recent events, including the purges or removal from the Chinese Communist Party and People's Liberation Army of nine very senior military leaders in the PLA, there are some very serious and persistent problems with corruption, misconduct, discipline that are still getting resolved.

But at the same time, we've seen the PLA undertake these dramatic transformations in its modern history, from a guerrilla force that was laughingly dismissed as a military museum to the force that we saw on parade on the 3rd of September that is presenting itself as a would-be world-class military, really at the forefront of capabilities. So I'm essentially trying to reconcile some of these apparent contradictions where there's, on one hand, there is this high degree of centralization and aspect of Chinese military command and control and some of these weaknesses and challenges that are quite readily observed and documented. But at the same time, if you delve more deeply into how the PLA has approached command over time there is a greater flexibility and pragmatism and the chinese communist party for all that they are adamant that the party controls the gun i mean malpractice mission command one might argue

there is definitely a there's a strong tradition of decentralized decision making that carries forward and we've seen a great deal of innovation and how the pla has developed and approached its and command capabilities over time. So, sorry, a little bit long for an elevator pitch there, but really tried to explore some of these changes across the time frame 1975 to 2025, approximately breaking down and looking at different elements of Chinese military command capabilities, contextualized within some of the existing literature and prevailing assessments, but ultimately arguing that there is more innovation than one might expect occurring, and there continues to be this evolution based on how the PLA regards the requirements for future warfare.

The degree to which ideation and expectations about the future operational environment are leading the PLA to innovate in command and innovate by command is something that I think is important to appreciate as we think about the competitive challenges here. Hey, if nothing else, I'm going to give you bonus points for a bumper sticker of command and control from now to now. That just pops, so I think that's a winner. But your topic is absolutely compelling,

and I think a lot of our listeners, especially, like you mentioned, your military colleagues, should find this very intriguing because there is a very common assumption regarding limits of Chinese or PLA ability to command and control in the midst of friction because of the party controlling the gun. But if you watch what's happening, you've probably seen some significant transformational changes. And so what I would challenge many of our military colleagues to do is to open up the engine of what they're seeing and look a little bit deeper, which is exactly what your dissertation

does. So you've taken yourself, a very smart person, committed years and years of your life to analyzing that deeply and providing some pretty significant observations and analysis that I think we can all benefit from. So I'll stop there for now and turn it back to you and your dissertation. So the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, it's often characterized by that strong Communist Party political control, which we just discussed. And much of the literature on the topic describes that as an impediment. But you have the observations to the contrary. So how has the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, how have they managed to reconcile that

paramount loyalty requirements with the need to promote decentralized command and initiative at lower levels, like at the operational and tactical level? so among the arguments that i make is that some of these apparent contradictions can to some extent be reconciled and i think it's important to think about command and control at different echelons and across different different domains and contexts i think it's important to break down military command and command decision making across different domains and contexts because certain features that may appear contradictory can tend to coexist so certainly from the ccp's perspective the ethos the party commands the gun and that the pla must maintain political loyalty

is an absolute requirement from Xi Jinping's perspective and something that he has consistently reinforced, including in terms of trying to assert stronger command over the PLA to generate reform to overcome some significant challenges with corruption. But at the same time, I think we can also break down this distinction between the preference for highly centralized control at the strategic level and on issues where there is a particular political sensitivity or strategic consequence, for instance, around nuclear command and control relative to other echelons and domains. So there's a tendency towards the centralized paradigm of command relative to more decentralized

or skip-echelon concepts that reflect the fact that Chinese military leaders have historically been relatively pragmatic in adapting their approaches to command based on the style of operations. So, for instance, very decentralized approaches to decision-making in early eras of the Chinese Civil War in a style of guerrilla warfare, but as the Civil War progressed and as ccp leaders of the red army recognized the need for greater centralization they gradually centralized approaches to command and control today we can look at the way the theater command for instance the eastern theater command when it's exercised command over some of these large-scale multi-domain pressure campaigns targeting taiwan described as as a combination of centralized and

decentralized command decision-making. And then when we look at also domains where there seem to be a greater premium on flexibility or autonomy, there is at least an exploration and experimentation of decentralized command or even mission command with Chinese characteristics, one might say. There's a focus on cultivating grassroots commanders. There's a recognition that at tactical and operational levels within the parameters of party control and political indoctrination commanders are being are being directed to respond to sort of task type orders understanding objectives but moving moving towards greater autonomy so to speak in decision making so there is training for instance in the eastern theater command and some of their army brigades

focused on decentralizing command authority down to the battalion level and autonomous or independent command decision making based on mission characteristics. So while on one hand there's reasons to believe that Xi Jinping may not trust some of his top generals, as recent news has highlighted, there is an attempt to reconcile this ongoing rectification and this fight against corruption, which Xi Jinping has described as a killer of combat effectiveness, with other aspects of the organization, trying to build a culture centered on more combat realistic training, cultivating grassroots commanders or commanders at lower echelons and their proficiency, and trying to overcome the PLA's peace disease, its lack of combat

experience, including through introducing blue forces, their equivalent of a red team. So I tend to be both critical and skeptical in how I look at the PLA. I think there is some credence or some validity to those who argue that the PLA may struggle with mission command or may struggle with more decentralized command. But at the same time, they do have a tradition of it, which they invoke in advocating for greater autonomy and commanders of lower echelons in their decision making in dynamic operational environments. And there is this overriding pragmatism that there are contexts in which Chinese political and military leaders believe that greater centralization and command decision making is critical, seeing that that play out not just in nuclear, but in their thinking on space and cyberspace capabilities, anything that is sensitive and strategic or conveys political valence. But when it gets down to the tactical and operational levels or to thinking about unmanned systems or sort of future more decentralized operations with swarms, with greater deployment of unmanned systems across domains, especially in a contested environment with more complexity than a single senior leader can appreciate, There is this recognition that combat units need to be able to be more flexible and adaptive within the framework of the coordination and ultimately the party leadership. I really like that description of mission command with Chinese characteristics.

I think that's a really good lens through which to look at this problem set. And your discussion of the mission command at Echelon is really worth unpacking a bit more. When you think about where mission command will be most effective, I mean, do you need it from the Xi Jinping down to an Eastern Theater Command commander, or do you need it with brigade commanders down to battalion commanders if they're in the thick of it? Where will it matter most to achieve tactical and operational effects? I think that's something that folks on the other side of the map need to really think about and contend with, and also not to anchor too deeply on – you raise a good point with the PLA, the peace disease. Lots of armies have peace disease until they start a war, and then it really becomes a matter of adaptation, and we can look at that through the American lens, through our own experience through World War II as an example. But World War II from the American lens is not the topic of this episode, so I'll turn it back to you. So really appreciate that insight you just provided. So your analysis, you've got a good model. You divide military command capabilities into five functional components. And those were concepts, structures, political work, systems, and human factors, with significant change defined as major shifts in three or more of those components. So how have these shifts occurred within the PLA? How have they impacted PLA command and control?

uh sure so i see the pla as in in the course of its modern history even within the past decade as having undergone really dramatic changes across each of these elements of command so we've seen command theories really evolve as the plas thinking on the form of warfare has changed in reaction to observed changes in technology and the operational environment. So without getting too much into the political science and my attempt at theorizing here, I sort of define a theory of command innovation that is both sort of innovation in command and innovation by command, where ideation about future warfare informed by observation of technological developments leads to this process and a mechanism where new ideas about

command and about future warfare generally are constructed, are refined, and are socialized based on leadership guidance and prioritization, but within these expert networks of military scientists, theorists, command designers, and systems engineers in ways that enable experimentation. So we've seen from a theoretical perspective, the introduction of an emphasis on the centrality of information technology to military power, concepts of informationization that gained a lot of traction starting in the 1990s as the PLA was looking at U.S. success in the Gulf War, American concepts of network-centric warfare, and trying to understand the implications and develop a framework and approach that was consistent with

China's priorities and technological challenges. We've seen a focus on information that ties warfare and styles of command enabled by more integrated command platforms and systems of systems. And some of these theories have also driven the design of systems. And we've seen the PLA undertake quite dramatic progression from scarcely having computers to having much more advanced software and command systems and increasingly looking to integrate and integrate AI and both new theories around intelligentization, the leveraging of artificial intelligence to enable the overall military system of systems to include functions of command decision making as well as new concepts of human machine fusion or integration in command so i'd

say from a theoretical perspective there is this emphasis on a fairly technologically driven approach to command and also on recognizing how the balance between centralization and decentralization in styles of command needs to change as the form of warfare does so for instance that might vary based on the level of complexity or whether the PLA is on offense or defense. So we often talk about highly centralized approaches to command as a disadvantage. But if China is, say, preparing for a campaign targeting a certain island where they have highly pre-planned exquisitely synchronized uh operations with great complexity across domains that that is a scenario where there could be certain advantages to centralization at least

in early stages to ensure that those effects and the strikes both uh information and firepower are effectively coordinated when it gets down to the more tactical fight as we were discussing there is this consistent emphasis on sort of the concept of grassroots or frontline commanders so that's sort of the theory piece and where theory starts to influence some of their some of their approach to to to training and systems design in terms of command structures we've seen the PLA undertake starting under Deng Xiaoping massive downsizing and streamlining of its force of command relationships and really an emphasis more and more on quality over quantity reducing the number of military regions and then setting up theater commands or war zones and i suspect most

listeners will be familiar with the broad contours of the pla's military reforms which kicked off in the 2014 to 2016 time frame including the establishment of the theater commands of which the Eastern Theater Command is listed first in priority protocol order and is the main strategic direction aimed at a Taiwan contingency. Those were set up back in February 2016. And at the time, the prevailing metaphor was that this was China's Goldwater nickels. They are decades behind us. They are just starting to work towards jointness and having more coherent command structures.

And aspects of my argument, I actually push back on that, because if you look back at the history, the idea of a jianqiu, of a theater command or war zone could be another literal translation or operational area, these do date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. If we look back at the 1980s and 1990s, around the time that the U.S. was pursuing Goldwater Nichols and the Soviet military was pursuing some of their own reforms with their establishment of their commands with sort of a front and focus on the strategic direction the PLA didn't did appear to model aspects of its approach off of the Soviet model also informed by a study of U.S. lessons learned and the notion of a theater command or war zone existed conceptually and as

the wartime command structure dating back to that time frame. So for instance, if we look at the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis, the Nanjing military region, the precursor to the Eastern Theater Command, exercised command over the PLA's pressure operations trying to intimidate Taiwan at that time through the Nanjing War Zone or the Nanjing Theater Command. So these theater commands and war zones weren't fully established or functional in peacetime but existed as the wartime structure so what happened in 2016 might be compared more to the stand-up of a joint task force as opposed as opposed to goldwater nickels the focus on these theater commands is about creating a command structure that is integrated across peacetime and wartime and is and is designed to

be more of a warfighting organization and a permanent structure so i think that's one of the significant aspects of the changes in command structures that we that can sometimes be not fully appreciated that the eastern theater command is is operating and is rehearsing in a manner that is quite similar structurally to how it would function in a in a wartime scenario and then when we look at for instance the political work system this is an area where at first glance there is a great deal of continuity their political work has been a feature of the PLA's approach to command back to the days of the Red Army it's something that Xi Jinping and Mao before him have emphasized as necessary to maintain loyalty to enable indoctrination to enable fighting spirit

and morale as well, but beyond the very traditional features of the system, which many in a U.S. context tend to dismiss as archaic or outdated, there has been an emphasis on how to operationalize this and render this more relevant in modern warfare. The notion of dual capable cadres who have both political and operational proficiency, then experimenting with what does political work look like in an era of multi-domain joint operations and intelligentized warfare this notion of of really focusing on manipulating the political factors in conflict and disintegrating enemy forces while maintaining the morale of one's own and uh the three warfares for instance uh public opinion warfare psychological warfare and legal warfare emerged from this

context. So we often tend in a U.S. context to dismiss the PLA as a force unlikely to fight because they have political commissars. When we think about political commissars, we shouldn't think about a sort of Soviet era, the political commissar is going to shoot the commander in the head. It is much more, in some respects, Clausewitzian, one might say, a focus on these political elements in military affairs and the notion, at least in theory, of political commissars and commanders being a team something like a command triad in a U.S. military context distinct functional responsibilities that are seen as complementary elements of continuity here but also change as they've tried to ensure that this political work system can fulfill the requirements

of modern operations so those those are three elements of of the PLA's approach to command a lot of complexity there and then of course there's the technical and the human factors which we can get into as well wow that was a very great analysis and a breakdown of uh some of these changes and the context behind them uh with respect to the people um so much to unpack there i'll just drill on a couple bits that i found really really compelling uh the notion of the eastern theater command being likened more to uh what we what the u.s would conceive of as a joint task force and already being uh organized as it would for warfare for war fighting i think that's really important and it kind of steals a march in the sense of through the u.s lens you see many c2

organizations that have maybe like a uh i don't perhaps peacetime is not the right phrase but a time now current state c2 construct with plans to potentially transition to something else for wartime, or we assume, hey, more joint task forces or a joint task force would have to be stood up in conflict. And if the PLA is already structured how it would in any time of war, that is a significant advantage because they're rehearsing every single day. They're operating as they would without that need to transition command and control. And if you look at military history anywhere, C2 transitions are always points that are rife with risk because you're reorganizing in real time while you're under military pressure.

So that's something worthwhile for our military colleagues to really focus on. I was also riveted by your comments regarding the utility being more centralized, especially capability at the strategic level. On the US side, I mean, we might focus exclusively on like nuclear command and control. And of course, that's something that should absolutely be centralized. But we have other things that we keep at very high levels as well. Multiple authorities that might be retained by a combatant commander, especially things regarding information operations, you know, psychological operations, just messaging, you name it. And you could think of very savvy special technical operations, and all those need to be sequenced very deliberately to achieve a desired effect. So when you take that and you put it templated against the PLA and see some of the things they're doing, it doesn't seem nearly as restraining or create a weakness. Instead, it might seem like that is deliberate and that is a strength. That is not a bug, that's a feature and something that should probably concern us a bit more.

So that's a good transition to talk about some of that technological development. You mentioned intelligentization. So let's talk about that. Later in your dissertation, you described the history of technological development and the PLA's drive for command automation, or maybe I'm getting this wrong, but the 781 project. Can you discuss that and how it informs that current PLA strategy of surpassing competitors in the intelligentization of warfare? Sure. So I think it is, I find it striking looking back at the PLA's history, just how far they've come, starting from a baseline of technological backwardness relative to where they are today.

So if we look back at the Red Army's early history, communications were a major challenge. They were trying to steal and repurpose radio equipment. And then through Mao, through the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, technological development really wasn't a priority in the PLA in its early decades, really did not have all that much in the way of effective or resilient or sophisticated command, control, and communications. We can trace the start of these changes to the decision under Deng Xiaoping to really elevate and place the development of more modern command systems on the agenda as a core priority. So Deng oversaw the launch of this 781 project in January 1978, a major initiative focused on command automation, which really was about bringing computers into the PLA to enable command functions. This was actually, I actually traced this back earlier, Joanne Lai in 1973 had launched a pilot program in the PLA 2nd Artillery Force focused on enabling them to start to develop more modern command systems and introducing computers. But at that stage in the 1970s and 80s, the PLA was really struggling to start to develop indigenous information technology and to integrate it effectively into the PLA as a military organization. But the precursors to the more sophisticated software and command systems that the PLA has produced today can be traced back to these decades of development and all of the technical challenges the PLA had to overcome.

And one anecdote that I find striking, just illustrating how much this can change in a single generation, is that one of the original commanders of comms units in the Red Army, this guy Wang Zheng, he was essentially trying to scavenge radio equipment so that the Red Army could communicate. His son later became one of the major designers of the PLA's integrated command platform, which was the software system that they started developing

after these initial efforts in command automation that proceeded through the 1980s took shape in the 1990s when Jiang Zemin further emphasized this information revolution and military affairs. And then you had this command designer Wang Jianxin within the General Staff Department working on informationization who oversaw major efforts to develop this highly sophisticated informationized command system that started to integrate more modern software and really focused on enabling greater jointness in command capabilities. So I do find that striking and just an illustration of we're often quick to dismiss the PLA and the PLA is often highly concerned about its own relative technological backwardness,

but they have over decades consistently invested, progressed and advanced and these early efforts in command automation, which essentially we could describe as analogous to C3 development, created a foundation both in terms of human capital expertise and systems engineering perspectives that set the foundation for some of the efforts we're seeing today that are sort of going from command informationization, sort of C4SR development, to these emerging notions of intelligentization that focus on how data analytics and artificial intelligence can start to be integrated into command and control. And among the features that's striking here that also gets into the human capital element is the consistency with which some of these

engineers, these command systems designers, these special technical officers have been aligned to these projects and research programs. There are some folks who started doing this kind of work back in the 1980s who are now in their 80s, close to retirement, but still part of this community of experts who are now looking at how to upgrade command systems from the information age to an age of AI. And I think this does speak to the fact that the PLA does have this culture of sort of strategic scientists or engineers. We can look back at Qianxuesen, who initially was the father of China's nuclear bomb and also involved in many, many things, including advocating for greater war gaming or military simulations and sort of scientific approaches to warfare, including

scientific approaches to emphasizing systems engineering and command. And we can trace the lineage from folks like Qianxuesen to some of the command systems designers who had that background and sort of intellectual foundation of focusing on system science and engineering and started to work on command automation and consistently have looked to upgrade the technological enablers of these military information systems and networks to enable sort of the totality of C5ISR that's required to be effective in modern warfare. So I do find this sort of fascinating as a case study of Chinese innovation in command and by command that we've sort of saw Deng Xiaoping and before to some extent Zhou Enlai highlight that this technological backwardness is a problem. China

of has to catch up. Modernization must leverage advances in information technology and accelerate these developments. And then with this robust network of specialists and often an approach that leveraged civil-military integration or military-civil fusion, we saw these dual-purpose advancements in information technology and today increasingly artificial intelligence starting to be pursued and implemented such that the end state is that a force that once struggled to build or use and integrate any computers is now now has a really sophisticated resilient extensive architecture of of the underlying communications and connectivity of the command systems and software and is looking to continue to upgrade and advance those based on ideas about what the

requirements for future warfare will be and the notion that data today is a lifeblood of military operations is a critical enabler of combat capability and the sort of the design the development and this highly scientific approach to enabling systems for command has created created a foundation that the PLA can build upon as it's moved from command automation to informationization to now exploring intelligentization. I really like that story. That's from father to son scrounging for radios to command automation. That's very compelling, and that's quite a leap.

So let's talk about other things that the PLA might be fixated on that it might worry about and that's been working on very, very hard. So the PLA's reforms targeted internal deficiencies that are described as the five incapables. Can you explain, first of all, what are the five incapables and how the PLA has sought to address them? Sure. So the notion of the five incapables first came into the conversation around 2015. And this was something that was quickly highlighted as a priority problem and concern, something that Xi Jinping personally emphasized, and the basic framework or self-criticism was that some, quote-unquote, Chinese military commanders at that stage were incapable of

judging the situation, understanding higher authorities' intentions, making effective operational decisions, deploying and commanding their forces, and dealing with unexpected situations. So at first glance, this sounds very damning. And this does sound like CCP leaders or senior military and political leaders in China just simply did not have confidence in their commander's capabilities and proficiency. And that is how the five incapables are often understood and discussed in a U.S. context to this day. But what I find significant here is that the PLA is a learning organization and they identified over a decade ago now this to be a problem and they have since been systematically looking to resolve it and if you look at the peak of mentions of the

five incapables in PLA media along with other related self-criticisms over time around the time of the initial reforms starting from sort of 2015 onward the spike and the discussion and the debate on the five incapables and how to resolve them spiked dramatically and in parallel there were dedicated initiatives to improve the education and training of commanders improve more combat realistic training these concepts i mentioned of cultivating frontline or grassroots commanders at lower echelons to be more capable and so i think that the significance of this that we overlook is that the pla took a hard look in the mirror impelled by xi jinping and other sort of senior military senior political and military leaders who forced them to reckon with

their shortcomings and then got to work to remedy this and most and if you look at PLA media and accounts of their training and discussion of command capabilities today that narrative has changed dramatically so I worry the number of times I see five incapables mentioned in a U.S. context or in reports on chinese military power it's sometimes characterized as if this is a static problem and something we can expect or assume will continue to be a weakness for the pla but if if you actually trace the number of mentions over time and the discourse around it it peaked and then the mention started to fall off and most references to the five incapables today to describe it as a problem that is not completely resolved but on which the pla has

made considerable progress since it was first identified so if we think about the five incapables at 10 just about a decade after this first came into the into the literature the PLA arguably appears to be getting more capable or believes itself to be becoming more capable in these fronts and Xi Jinping has personally and repeatedly emphasized that command capabilities are critical to operational effectiveness and will be integral to victory in future warfare and this human factor may remain a challenge or weakness in certain respects especially considering the PLA's lack of operational experience which is another recurrent concern and self-criticism but there is also seeming to seeming to be a greater degree of confidence that the PLA has

come a long way and the the reforms and emphasis on more complex combat realistic training the introduction of blue forces their equivalent of an op for uh in either case they are red and we are blue but uh they've really tried to take their commanders to school both in their professional military education or their sort of education and cultivation of commanders and in their approach to training and tried to force progress on these fronts so i worry that sometimes our thinking or our mental model of the PLA is close to a decade out of date on some fronts. And this is a great illustration of how I cannot validate or confirm with high confidence that they are less incapable on these fronts, but at least they seem to think that they are.

And I think that their self-assessments, both of their weaknesses and of their progression towards resolving those problems, are worth examining. that's a really great analysis and i want to credit you you've helped you know fast forward my own or i should say mature my own uh perspective on the same problem and i think many of our military colleagues and myself included i i used to i would cling to those five incapables and i i think part of that was a reaction to the massive military build-up the massive growth in uh pla ship production, for example. And so when you see the correlation of forces and means kind of tipping in the other guy's favor, you start looking for, well, I can still take them because

of X, Y, or Z reason. And those five incapables, they make for really comforting reasons. But that's kind of naive if you think, well, the PLA is advancing along all these other fronts. Why would they not also be advancing on the fronts that they have self-diagnosed are the fronts they need to advance upon. So I think we definitely need to update our thinking across the force as far as where the PLA actually is to inform our own analysis, specifically joint operations. So you touched on this a little bit already, touched upon theater commands. So we may not need to unpack that element so much, but the establishment of those commands and other organizations like, say, Information Support Force, those all represent a profound structural

revolution for the PLA. So can you discuss that evolution, in particular, their growth in joint operations? So the creation of the theater commands or these war zones with their directions of alignment and operational prioritization is significant. And for the reasons we've already started to discuss that this is creating a joint operations command system with permanent and specialized organizations that is designed to bridge between peacetime and wartime operations and when we look at the eastern theater command in particular from the PLA's response to speaker of the house Pelosi's visit in August 2022 to the initial joint sword in 2023 to the two iterations of joint sword in 2024 and straight thunder in 2025 as well as of course the routine posture

and presence that the eastern theater command maintains in the vicinity of taiwan which has remained consistent uh despite some of the recent disruptions including the apparent removal of their commander as we've just seen officially confirmed but uh but the dramatic expansion in In the presence the PLA maintains around Taiwan with consistent naval patrols and aerial incursions, which has also expanded dramatically since 2022, the Eastern Theater Command is, as Admiral Paparo has highlighted, is rehearsing, is simulating the core elements of what a island offensive campaign targeting Taiwan would be, and they are doing it jointly in a multi-domain manner and also combining these military operations in physical domains with an emphasis

on the cognitive domain aligned with new concepts of cognitive domain operations and i think this also highlights the ways in which the pla pressure operations have to be thought of as intended to have cognitive effects on target audiences in the U.S. and Taiwan as well. And this is perhaps a slight tangent relative to the topic of Joint Operations Command, but I do find significant that among these changes that occurred structurally at the time that I think enables the Eastern Theater Command, for instance, was how the PLA realigned their three warfares or primarily psychological warfare capabilities with their cyberspace force at the time, including the entity known as the 311 Base, which has some history of political work and psychological

operations targeting Taiwan, from front organizations that conduct broadcasts to co-production with the Eastern Theater Command of some of the videos and media products that you've probably seen circulating against the backdrop of these joint swords straight thunder and other major pressure campaigns so there's also this thinking of of campaigning in the cognitive domain so to speak and trying to uh really target the will resolve and and commitment to fight or intervene in both the u.s and taiwan so i think the the cognitive domain operations and how that is aligning in support of eastern theater command priorities is a fascinating uh fascinating enterprise in and of itself and then i think that does really highlight as well how much the pla

sees the cognitive domain and information capabilities as integral to modern warfare because beyond the cyberspace force which now has this sort of associated psychological operations capability integrated we can also look at some of the other new forces established around that same time in april 2024 when the former strategic support force was disbanded for reasons that are still still debated but the the creation of the information support force i was really i think focused on trying to operationalize network information systems their their continued construction and deployment essentially enabling different elements of c4 isr and sort of systems integration and multi-domain support to joint operations and if you look for instance at

Xi Jinping's comments about the information support force was very focused on sort of an information-led or dominant theory of victory for joint operations, integration of information resources, more effective information assurance and protection and then integrating information capabilities into the whole joint operation system of systems in ways that can be an enabler of this military capability. So a lot of the PLA's future innovations, future developments in intelligentization of information capabilities, the leveraging of different aspects of AI, ML to enable the system of systems will likely occur under the information support force, though this

new force in some respects is likely still taking shape and still under construction that was a really great analysis there i appreciate the breakdown uh and there's so much to unpack there i really appreciate the discussion of the pla movement toward uh cognitive warfare uh as a key element of victory um and how you connected that to the information support force uh and in many ways there's a long tradition of this right winning without fighting uh there's a lot of Western or American analogs in terms of maneuver warfare and cognitive defeat mechanisms. And you can even see within the U.S. the movement towards CJAT-C2. You can see some parallels there. And you can see within the Marine Corps specifically trying to create commands

optimized to employ information-related capabilities like the MEF information group. And then there's arguments for even standing up an information combat element within the Marine Air Ground Task Force structure. It's interesting to see all this movement toward that. And I think the proof is in the pudding in terms of how is your target responding to that effort. By that, I mean, Taiwan's National Defense Report recently was released a few weeks ago. And within that, the resistance to and defenses against Chinese cognitive warfare or Our PLA cognitive warfare definitely appears again and again and again as an emphasis, a point of emphasis to provide for national resilience. Because if you can convince a target like, hey, there's no way you're going to win, we will crush you so hard, resistance is futile, you erode the will to resist.

And if you convince other potential intervening parties, such as the United States, like there's no way you can stop us, you will simply be blooding your own nose to no avail. then you simply deter intervention at all. So I think all that's really, really valuable to unpack. So thank you for that discussion. And then that's a good segue for AI. You mentioned AI. So let's jump into that. So your dissertation, it details the intensive focus of the PLA on leveraging artificial intelligence, in particular for command and control AI agents. So how does the PLA view this technology specifically and how are they trying to implement that? the PLA's interest in leveraging AI to enable and enhance command decision making dates back at least a decade at this point and the moment where I first started to look at this

was when I was watching how the PLA responded to AlphaGo and for those who may not remember alpha go back in an earlier age of ai progress and enthusiasm was this ai tool or agent that defeated the world's top human players and the game of go back in 2016 and in the u.s context this news didn't receive very much attention beyond oh that's that's neat in in the pla this sparked a lot of inquiry and soul searching in a sense that at the risk of over generalizing the game of go does convey greater culture cultural salience in china generally than in a u.s or western context including because it's a game that centers on strategy and developing moves and stratagems and maneuvers that in ways that are seen as at least roughly analogous to warfare a

sort of game of game of uh strategy or an early war game in some respects and perhaps because of this to some extent, Chinese military theorists and strategists started to wonder if AlphaGo can defeat the world's top human players in the game of Go and can devise these moves that humans had never envisioned in thousands of years of playing the game. What does that mean for the future of decision making and military affairs? So this did prompt some initial debates and discussions of what would an alpha go for warfare look like? Or what are the most effective approaches to employing AI in command decision-making in ways that leverage the best of both human and machine intelligence?

I've been getting asked the question on and off since 2016 of, do I think the PLA will take humans fully out of the loop and practice a fully automated style of warfare in which AI is in command? And my answer to that has always been, I have high confidence when it comes to strategic decision-making, there will always be at least one human in the loop, and that would be Xi Jinping for however long he may remain in power. But when it comes to operational decision-making, when it comes to certain tactical applications, the PLA, for nearly a decade now, seemed to be quite pragmatic in recognizing that with

advances in artificial intelligence that are ongoing and accelerating, which the PLA sees as changing the form of warfare from informationization to intelligentization, this will have profound implications for the future of command. And this may not be you have an AI commander, or I still wonder when someone will, well, I believe there are AI systems trained on Xi Jinping thought. I think we're still some ways away from having a full Shibot or AI tool for that sort of strategic and political decision making. But certainly, the PLA is interested in AI in command more so than AI commanders. The notion of human machine hybrid intelligence or human machine integration has been a longtime emphasis. The idea of really leveraging the best of both

worlds, between human and machine intelligence, and often invoking a sentiment traced back to Mao about human factors being critical in warfare and being able to overcome technological challenges. So there is this emphasis on enhancing and augmenting human commanders, but also at the same time a pragmatic recognition that in certain domains or use cases, AI may surpass or may exceed human cognitive capabilities, especially as operations become ever faster and more complex. So I think I would tend to expect, based on some of what we can see so far in terms of trends in theory, as well as interest in developing and integrating AI tools, For instance, for cyberspace operations, to enable psychological and cognitive domain operations, as well as in swarming, in applications such as air and missile defense, the PLA seems to be pragmatic in recognizing there will be instances where having a human more on the loop is comparatively advantageous in terms of reactions and precision.

or of responses but at the same time there is an interest in in extending and expanding human capacity in this intelligent era as opposed to as opposed to fully replacing ai and that is sort of since extended into this interest in large language models the chat gpt moment and surge of interest after deep seek as well about how how these tools could be leveraged to process information more rapidly, to generate recommendations about courses of action. The PLA in early stages looked back a lot at a DARPA program known as Deep Green from the early 2000s, which was trying to develop a crystal ball for commanders and generate courses of action for them to evaluate and integrate into their planning. So I think there are aspects of the

Pele's approach that are not wholly unique and very closely looking to how the U.S. has approached aspects of algorithmic warfare or recent emphasis on use of LLMs for planning and decision-making in U.S. military discourse. But there is this desire to start to experiment and to start to accelerate AI-enabled or intelligentized techniques whether that is in public opinion warfare or faster analysis of uh of imagery from space-based systems or other aspects of intelligence some of this is closer to being on the horizon some of this is more distant and speculative but there is quite active research development and experimentation in uh quite a range of applications here including things that

are quite practical and pragmatic recommendations for weapons target assignment or pairing of capabilities and strong emphasis on military simulations and war gaming as well of all the very valuable stuff you just relayed i just fixated immediately on the idea of a shibat and some bold company out there selling a subscription to Indopaycom. And also, by the way, in the fine print, there's surge pricing. So when the shooting starts,

they start jacking those prices up. So, hey, if you want to go to business together, I think we got a really good model. It's just that would create the malicious incentive to start a war to maximize profit. Forgive me. So, hey, I know we're kind of running up on time. I'm going to leap ahead a little bit,

but there's one key question I do want to make sure we make time to unpack. So your dissertation, it noted the challenge of studying the PLA. They're very, you know, opaque and you have to rely on textual sources in PLA research. You can't just, you know, corner a PLA officer and get them to openly discuss their deepest thoughts with you, right? But let's say you did. If you had the opportunity for direct engagement or field work, like you could talk to those officers, you could access those restricted documents, what would you prioritize for testing or validating your theory of command innovation in your dissertation? So while I haven't had a chance to do traditional field work or dedicated

interviews, I have continued trying to seek out opportunities for engagement in venues where that is feasible. So for instance, I was initially involved in a series of track 1.5 and track 2 dialogues with Chinese academics and military officers between about 2016 and 2019, talking about military cyber issues, as well as initial concerns about artificial intelligence and why, say, integrating untested technologies into your command decision-making may not be such a good idea if that could increase the results of escalation. So I had some initial interactions with primarily Chinese military academics and retired officers, And I also had a chance to visit the PLA's Academy of Military Science back in 2019, where I heard about AMS's efforts to integrate the old AMS, which was more military theory, and the new AMS, which is more military science in a scientific and technological sense of the term.

And also had a chance to participate in a meeting at the PLA's National Defense University back in 2023, where we had some rather heated debates and discussions about issues in U.S.-China relations, military-to-military relations, and debates over the Taiwan Strait. So those interactions have at least given me something of a frame of reference, or enabled a couple of conversations about how the PLA thinks about future warfare, technology, the military balance as it evolves within the Indo-Pacific. and among the observations that has concerned me most and this was validated to some extent by a couple of conversations on the sidelines of the beijing xiangshan forum which i attended as an american delegate in september of this year which is often characterized as china's would-be shangri-la dialogue that in some respects is more sweeping in its ambition but was actually organized by the PLA Academy of Military Sciences, de facto, and China Institute for International Strategic Studies, which is their military think tank. So I did have a couple

of sidebar conversations there, none directly pertinent to my research, but among the observations that has come out of this series of episodic interactions is growing confidence, or at least claims of growing confidence on the PLA's part and among Chinese military scholars and strategists focused on defense issues that the military balance is indeed shifting in their favor in ways that may have enduring implications. The PLA has been very insecure about the notion of an era gap, of falling behind a generation relative to the U.S. military and the decisive technologies of that era of warfare that is some of what it catalyzed back in the 1990s the focus on pursuing this information revolution in military affairs and the how quickly the PLA reacted to and

tried to keep pace with uh initiatives like the U.S. third offset strategy and other defense innovation and I think there's now starting to be greater uh appreciation that the playing field is becoming more level and when it comes to unmanned systems and other emerging frontier technologies whether that is artificial intelligence and its various manifestations or quantum computing and communications as well as of course hypersonics and biotechnology China is in a more advantageous position in ways that may have significant implications so this is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of issues of command, but I've at least had a chance to discuss informally some of my, some of aspects of my theory or thinking on, for instance, how

the PLA sees political work as advantageous when most Western militaries see it as archaic or laughable, and I do believe that strategic empathy is important to understand how the PLA sees themselves, how they see their reforms and progression. The sort of questions I'd be curious to discuss or try to validate if I could have more candid unstructured conversations would be, I can look at PLA textbooks or journal articles or media accounts of training and exercises or descriptions of how the PLA National Defense University is training their joint commanders but it's all I tend to approach those sources with a degree of skepticism because it's difficult to validate what is written relative to what is happening or what the

underlying environment is to those who are living and experiencing it so most of my interactions have been with military academics or those who aren't really frontline commanders or operators so to speak so if i ever had the chance to talk to folks who came more from from that world and who could speak to those who are the grassroots commanders who the pla is supposed to be cultivating do they feel empowered do they feel that their training is preparing them Do they feel more confident that they can exercise a mission command, so to speak, or that they can engage in decentralized autonomous decision-making within the purviews of a clear mission? Or are they still constrained or concerned? Or to what extent are current dynamics like the anti-corruption campaign, with the removal and purges believed to have been occurring of these senior leaders,

is that impacting overall morale and operational effectiveness? I think there's a desire in a U.S. debate and context, for instance, to believe that the PLA is so corrupt it can't be combat capable or ready, or to believe that these issues with PLA senior leadership, including the nine very senior officers who were just removed from the PLA and the CCP, that those mean the PLA is likely to be ineffective. And I think there is some truth there. Certainly the expanding scope of the anti-corruption campaign and the extent to which these actions and decisions are perceived as political purging or potentially linked to factional rivalry, that may be impacting the culture and climate in the PLA in ways that impact command, given this lack of trust. But at the same

time, the PLA is a massive organization. And many of these seemingly contradictory tendencies can coexist to some extent. So it may be the case that senior military leaders at the CMC level are on a very short leash and extremely uncomfortable. And anyone who is in a former political work department director miau hua's network is uh not sleeping very well but perhaps uh grassroots commanders in the eastern theater command at the brigadier battalion level are starting to feel more empowered because their training is getting more realistic and they are being encouraged to to exercise greater greater initiative and how they are how they are how they are fighting within the within the lane of their their training and exercises so i perhaps a lengthier exposition or

this could be a whole nother conversation here but i do think that uh engagement that is pragmatic and principled is critical in in my view to having the strategic empathy empathy to understand our competitors and potential adversaries and their capabilities. But at the same time, given that lack of access and the challenges with having these more candid conversations I'd be interested in having to confirm aspects of my research, expect that there will be certain unknown unknowns or certain unknowables for the foreseeable future nonetheless. And thank you very much for that. So much to unpack. I think there's a really useful cautionary tale or rather just a note of caution to not fixate too much on the implications or meaning of some of these reliefs that are purportedly based off of corruption and link that to the entirety of the PLA. corrupt and incapable. Flip it around, we see stories of US commanders getting relieved for

name the reason, or I guess to point to scandal, say the Fat Leonard scandal. Should we interpret from that that the entirety of US naval warfighting capability and capacity is greatly limited because of that, and it's absolutely and completely corrupt? I don't think so. I think you do have elements of corruption that happen from time to time. We have a human enterprise run by human beings who can be flawed. But at the same time, I think you see a very powerful and capable military force that is largely in direction toward proficiency, such that we have a position of hegemony that we do in many regions of the world. All that to say is, again, it kind of goes back to the five incapables point as far as not fixating too much on an element of weakness

and assuming that that will remain forever static and so that we will always have this advantage. Rather, this is a human endeavor, it's a learning organization, and they are learning and adapting all the time. So I'll put a pin in that note. So Dr. Kanya, I know you've got plans to turn this incredible dissertation of yours into a book. And I would be remiss if I didn't give you the chance to plug it a little bit. And publishing, of course, it's a long game, and it's hard to pin down exactly when this might come out. But can you talk us through any plans you have in that regard? This will be something of a marathon, I suspect. There's always a hazard in discussing my dissertation and elements of this research and conclusions when I'm still working through

revisions and reframing and reattacking this project after a couple months getting pulled in some other directions. But my goal at the moment is to turn this massive, unwieldy draft into something resembling a readable book manuscript in the next six or so months and hoping to get it published later in 2026 or 2027. That is aspirational and my planning may not survive contact with reality and revisions can be a protracted war so to speak but i am going to be working on that and that's part of the reason why i really value the chance to have the conversation and and talk through some of these points and topics because my goal is to make the book relevant to both military and academic audiences and to hopefully bridge the gap so

to speak between these different worlds that my research is hoping to contribute to Well, I'll tell you right now, the topic itself, again, I found it absolutely compelling. That's why I wanted to schedule an interview with you as soon as possible and get this word out there. I know this is going to occur with our military colleagues, as well as any academics that are focused on this area. And if there are any savvy publishers out there listening, they would be wise to jump on this and reach out to you as soon as they could. So let's go ahead and wrap it up there. So finally, Dr. Condon, where can listeners find you online and what else are you working on? So I am on both Twitter or X, I guess, and LinkedIn. I've been resisting the urge to start

a sub stack or personal website because I'm a contrarian. But in the near term, I'm working on a couple of different projects to include a red book for the U.S. Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute that will look at China's deep sea and polar science. I'm collaborating on that with Dr. Crystal Tu from Taiwan's Institute for National Defense and Security Research. And we are hoping to get this massive draft out in the next couple months and excited about that project. And then I'm also in my capacity as a 2025 fellow with the Penn Project on the future of U.S.-China relations. I'm also working on a report with a policy angle looking at cross-strait security, stability, and deterrence, and specifically asking the question

as to impacts of U.S. security cooperation and defense engagement with Taiwan on China's outlook and calculus for the use of force. So delving into those topics, and we'll actually be visiting Taiwan in November for some academic research, and also we'll be in India for the Delhi Defense dialogue to talk about military-civil fusion and emerging technologies in November as well. So keeping busy and excited about a lot of different directions of research, but hoping to keep this book project on track as well going forward. Sounds like you're not busy at all, and that is all very manageable. But if there's anybody who can tackle all that with aplomb, I believe it's you.

So Dr. Kanya, thanks again so much for joining us. Good luck with all the projects you just described. Fair Winds and Following Seas. To listeners, bravo Zulu for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. Thank you so much. Put it on the shimbo now A pot of rum and a pot of gin Oh, way, hey, put it in the alley

A pot of wine, both white and red Oh, put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm putting in the alley Way, hey, put it in the alley Help me, Bob, I'm putting in the alley Put it on the shimbo now