Oriana Skylar Mastro
Over the past 25 years, Chinese military modernization has taken the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from a peasant army with obsolete equipment to one of the largest and most capable militaries in the world. Thanks to a 790% increase in defense spending from 1992 to 2020, most Chinese military equipment in service is now modern, meaning that anything from fighter planes to anti-satellite laser technology is sufficiently advanced to pose a danger to cutting-edge technology.1 The Chinese nuclear force is now survivable, meaning that enough nuclear warheads and delivery systems would survive a preemptive attack that they could threaten a retaliatory nuclear strike. In October 2021, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) became the first country ever to test hypersonic nuclear missiles, prompting the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley to say, “they have gone from a peasant army that was very, very large in 1979 to a very capable military that covers all domains.”2 Indeed, with 20,000 more scientists than the United States and a 15% per year average rate of growth in research and development spending over the past 25 years (compared with 3% for the United States), it is no surprise that China is now considered more advanced than the United States in many emerging technologies relevant to warfare, such as artificial intelligence (AI), hypersonics, and quantum computing.
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