June 11, 2015
One of the most interesting topics broached in the “China’s Military Strategy” white paper released last month, at least from my perspective, does not seem to have received any attention in Western coverage or analysis of the document to date. Consider the following; underlined emphasis is mine.
In Section III: “Active Defense Guidelines”
“To implement the military strategic guideline of active defense in the new situation, China’s armed forces will innovate basic operational doctrines. In response to security threats from different directions and in line with their current capabilities, the armed forces will adhere to the principles of flexibility, mobility and self-dependence so that “you fight your way and I fight my way.” Integrated combat forces will be employed to prevail in system-vs-system operations featuring information dominance, precision strikes and joint operations.”
…and shortly thereafter:
“To implement the military strategic guideline of active defense in the new situation, China’s armed forces will uphold the following principles… to employ strategies and tactics featuring flexibility and mobility, give full play to the overall effectiveness of joint operations, concentrate superior forces, and make integrated use of all operational means and methods.”
In Section IV: “Building and Development of China’s Armed Forces” under “Military Force Building Measures”
“Innovating military theories. Under the guidance of the CPC’s innovative theories, China’s armed forces will intensify their studies of military operations, probe into the mechanisms of winning modern wars, innovate strategies and tactics featuring mobility and flexibility, and develop theories on military building in the new situation, so as to bring into place a system of advanced military theories commensurate with the requirement of winning future wars.”
The terms “flexibility” and “mobility” appear to be new in this edition; I couldn’t find them in the English versions of the 2010 and 2013 papers. Their use in the first above example alongside the term “self-dependence” to explain the idea of “you fight your way and I fight my way” leads me to think the Chinese might be talking about distributed operations.
Left unsaid (unsurprisingly) is just how far down the chain of command this doctrine would apply, and just how much decision-making authority would be delegated to those lower levels. Distributed operations depend heavily upon decentralized command and control rooted in methods such asmission command and command by negation. Tactical units or groupings might be physically dispersed in the battlespace, but they aren’t realizing their full combat potential if their on-scene commanders are under the tight control of a higher echelon commander.
It follows that forces conducting distributed operations must use some form of networking to enable vertical command and control, plus horizontalcollaboration and cooperation. The networking approach used matters greatly.
There’s no reference in the paper to the potentially dramatic PLA command and control philosophical shifts that would seem to be necessary for distributed operations. If anything, the paper’s frequent reiterations of the importance of the Party’s total control over the PLA highlights a possible source of factors that might affect command and control decentralization.
It would be interesting to see if the words “flexibility” and mobility” have been used in other authoritative PLA documents or in PLA-affiliated professional journals over the past few years in apparent reference to distributed operations—or if they begin appearing in such sources in that context over the next few years. Likewise, it would be interesting to see if other PLA sources begin making oblique references to something akin to distributed operations (if they haven’t already). Given the command and control implications of a PLA move to embrace some form of distributed operations, this bears watching.
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