An ancient Chinese proverb: It is foolish to waste good iron in making nails or good men in making soldiers.

We in the west must be very careful not to make the mistake of projecting or mirroring when we analyze China, its economy, policies and especially, its military. The PLA is NOT a traditional national armed force.  It is the military wing of the CPC.  To use an historical analogy, the PLA is not the German Reichswehr. It is the Nazi SA or SS. Each military unit has a commander and a Political Commissar who have the same rank, but the Commissar has the ultimate authority.  Commissars are NOT normally command and staff trained.  They are political appointees and in the past have demonstrated a disconcerting lack of understanding of military operations.

The general public respects the PLA, but not as a fighting force. How could they? The PLA has not seen combat since 1979.  Rather, the general public sees the PLA as a rescue force, an emergency response force after floods, disasters etc. Will they feel the same way when their sons’ bodies start coming home in caskets (or not at all)? Hard to say but if the Russian example is instructive, it won’t take long for support to begin eroding.

Like the West, the PLA seeing growing challenges in attracting tech savvy recruits to man all the new equipment. Modernization is a good thing, but when the army is composed of mostly tech-illiterates and you modernize with more and more complex technology, you merely compound the problem. Enlisted retention is also a growing issue.  These issues are worse for China than in the west because of the one-child-policy (the demographic curve has turned negative). For those who are considering a life in uniform or even a two-year enlistment, the austerity of life in the PLA is a huge dis-satisfier. Many Chinese youth have grown up with exposure to western comforts, few of which are to be found in monolithic barracks.

Xi Jinping’s spending on the PLA has been enormous and spending is obviously important, but how do we analyze any QUALITATIVE changes in the PLA?  I use the word changes knowingly because increased spending does not necessarily guarantee improvement. Again we have the Russian example. Vladimir Putin spent vast sums to modernize the Russian Army, and what did it get him?

Training whatever recruits do come through the door is not what we would expect in the west. Up to 25% of recruit training is focused on the “Thought and Teachings of Xi Jinping”, which makes sense when one considers that the PLA’s purpose is to protect the Party. And what about senior leader training? Command and staff training is critical to large, modern armies. Fighting in the modern battlespace required high degrees of coordination among commanders and the various staffs. Even if the staff colleges are teaching this (which we know they are only doing so within the confines of a dogmatic command structure), do the troops whose focus is on the teachings of the Party, have the ability to execute? Training is not realistic and often “operatically scripted”.  The senior leadership cannot fall back on their combat experience when things go wrong; no one has any combat experience. 

The last word goes to big issue that is too often neglected. The PLA has serious issues with logistics. Any potential invasion of Taiwan would require a logistical build-up equivalent, if not greater, than the Allied invasion of Normandy.  The PLA does not have the capability to logistically support such an invasion or even worse, the ability to sustain an invasion force after it has been launched.