Day: December 16, 2024

China has big plans. It aims to become the world’s foremost economic and military power by 2049, the centennial of the People’s Republic. This is what Xi Jinping calls his “China Dream.” Dreaming is one thing, but reality often tells a very different. story.

True, China has been spending a lot of money on its military, and on the surface, the results appear to have paid off.

The country has modernized its air force, created an arsenal of missiles, and built up its navy. However, these efforts didn’t stop a scandal from breaking out in late 2023 and early 2024 that brought significant embarrassment to China’s military, and that was only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the hood of this grandeur, not all is as it seems. Behind the glittering façade,  China faces personnel, logistics, command, and even equipment problems that would  prove troublesome in a real war.

In this video, we’ll look at some  of the reasons why China’s military is actually weaker than you think. Number ten.

Keeping its soldiers  alive is one of the more important things a military organization can do. The loss of too  many soldiers not only risks the political capital needed to keep a war effort going,  it also ensures the loss of experienced troops, forcing the need to call up less experienced  replacements.

These less experienced replacements tend to die faster, and so a cycle is created.
Russia has experienced such a spiral in its war in Ukraine. The steady influx of poorly trained conscripts has resulted in the Russian military taking more casualties than Ukraine even in the times it’s been on the defensive, as was the case in the Zaporizhzhia campaign a year ago. Providing proper body armor goes a long way in keeping soldiers alive on the battlefield.  This has proven to be a notorious problem in the Russian ranks, especially for the  soldiers that were mobilized after the war began. These troops tend to come from the country’s poorer and minority backgrounds, who cannot easily afford the body armor the Russian state has often been unable to supply.
Russia turned to China to provide components or completed sets of body armor to mitigate some of these disadvantages, but as it turns out, the Chinese equipment hasn’t done dashingly. Ukrainian soldiers that have captured some of the sets of Chinese body armor have taken to selling them online.

Tests of the same armor in  American military laboratories provide some clues about the reasons why. The ceramic plates in the Chinese body armor succeeded in stopping common small arms rounds, like the 7.62mm, meaning that these bullets would not puncture the body of the soldier wearing the vest.

However, the plates also  showed significant deformation from the impact, meaning that they would not be as effective in  preventing their wearer from suffering blunt force trauma. They failed to stop and disperse  the energy. Significant injuries or deaths would be common to the wearer of this particular form  of body armor. Since many Chinese soldiers would be wearing similar body armor in a confrontation,  we can expect similar results on the battlefield. Maybe the soldiers in China’s People’s Liberation  Army understand this, which brings us to number nine.

Service in the armed forces  of some sort is mandatory in China, but the military nevertheless has trouble keeping its  ranks intact. In January 2021, the PLA announced it would be giving its troops a 40% pay increase,  particularly for troops on the stationed on the border and promising officers. This decision  was made in an effort to boost recruitment of career soldiers, especially among troops with  college degrees, which the Chinese brass wants to make up 70% of the total going forward.  Incentives for future employment are part of this strategy, too, as China’s state-owned enterprises give preferential treatment to PLA veterans. This, and the pay raise, seems to have worked in boosting desired recruitment.

However, China is falling far short of retaining its personnel,  especially the most talented among them.

Only 35% of troops who completed their service in the PLA chose to reenlist to active duty. Even fewer of those who had college degrees have chosen to stay. In contrast, 55% of the total troops across the branches in the US military reenlist.  This ensures the creation of steady career officers and NCOs with experience that pays  dividends in an actual confrontation.

China does not have similar resources to call on. Senior officers in the Chinese military are also lowly-paid. For example,  a colonel in the PLA made about $37,200 per year in 2021. Brigadier generals made $42,000.  This is less than a private in the US Marine Corps, who made $43,800 in the same year.
Additionally, China does not have an equivalent to the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

Veteran care and benefits is much less robust than in the United States. China might have a large defense budget, but it spends its money unevenly. Weapons and equipment are prioritized overcompensation for personnel. This is a problem for recruitment, retention, and building capable, experienced soldiers.
It has also led to corruption. For example, there have been reports of Chinese officers selling the solid fuel in their units’ missiles to use as flammable material for cooking food. Russia’s incompetent handling of its invasion of Ukraine proved how much personnel can matter in conducting a conflict. Corruption within  the Russian ranks has ensured that troops are not adequately supplied,  ballooning casualties. China would likely face many of the same problems in a war even with its  smaller neighbors, let alone the United States.

Problem number eight is that China’s navy lacks  aerial capability. In contrast, the United States Navy is as capable in the skies as it is on the seas.

It has the world’s second largest number of total aircraft for any military force, just behind the Air Force. The US Navy in fact flies about as many aerial missions as the Air Force does. Such missions give it an intelligence and experience advantage that China cannot compete with in the skies above the waves.

China, on the other hand, has a serious shortage of trained naval aviators. It may have built the world’s largest navy and prioritized maritime warfare in recent years, but this is atypical of China’s historical experience. With the brief  exception of the treasure fleets commanded by the admiral Zheng He in the early 15th century,  China has been a land power, concentrating on creating the strong army it needed to  defend its long frontiers.

To this day, China is tied with Russia at having the most neighbors,  bordering 14 other countries. Not all of these frontiers are naturally defensible,  meaning that China must maintain a comparatively larger land force than the United States.
Nevertheless, because of China’s containment within the First Island Chain and its vulnerability to a hostile power cutting off its maritime trade routes, Beijing has felt the demand for a strong naval force. Unfortunately for the Communist Party, institutional knowledge and experience doesn’t come as easily as building new equipment. Traditionally, China’s Navy and Air Force trained in the same institution – a talk about its “new kid on the block” status when it comes to naval aviation. This was contrary to more experienced maritime countries, and China’s Navy finally established an independent school to train its aviators in 2017. However, this institution has lacked the expert knowledge and equipment needed to train China’s naval aviators up to the standards of their American counterparts.

It will  be a long time to accrue the experience to reach parity with the United States. China’s equipment in this area is also lacking. Its current plane for training  aviators for carrier-based missions is the JL-9G. This plane is too slow and too light to produce all of the maneuvers needed to take off and land on a carrier, which is why pilots need to train on land-based simulated carriers. China also lacks carrier planes.

The Shenyang J-15  Flying Shark is its go-to plane for now, but only 60 have been built as of 2023. The end result?

China might have three aircraft carriers with a fourth on the way, but it will struggle to fully staff these carriers. What good is an aircraft carrier without aircraft or pilots? At that point, you have only built an expensive parade ship.
Number seven – more ships does not mean more power. China’s navy has a lot of vessels, but most of these are lighter, less combat-ready ones, like corvettes and frigates. China’s navy has no cruisers and 49 destroyers, compared to America’s 22 cruisers and 70 destroyers. China therefore remains far behind the United States in ship tonnage. As of 2022,  the PLAN had a combined total of about 1.3 million tons between all its ships.  The US Navy had about 4.5 million tons. China has the advantage of being able to concentrate all of its forces in the waters where a confrontation would happen. The US Navy wouldn’t be able to do this because of its global commitments.

However, leaders in Beijing still understand that they would lose in a direct confrontation with even part of the US Navy.

This is why China relies on an anti-access/area denial strategy.

This strategy centers on electronic warfare and an arsenal of missiles. China’s ships may be capable of bullying smaller nations like the Philippines, but against the US Navy, they have a much taller task, despite their outward show. Number six – China is even more severely lacking in underseas warfare.

Although it is developing two new nuclear submarines, the Type 095 and Type 096, that would make up for some of its disadvantages, these are still years away.

In the meantime, China is operating mostly with diesel-electric submarines that don’t have the depth, speed, or staying power of America’s nuclear submarines. Meanwhile, its current nuclear  submarines, the Type 093 and 094, are few in number and very noisy. They are too small to  cancel noise effectively, making them easy to discover by a competent anti-submarine force.  Meanwhile, China is lacking in anti-submarine warfare experience, and this will be even harder for it to get than the new submarines.

China hopes to break the threat that the US submarine fleet poses to it at critical chokepoints in the First Island Chain, but this hope is still many years away. Number five – inadequate strategy. As mentioned, China relies on an anti-access/area denial strategy to mitigate some of the disadvantages it would face in a direct confrontation with the US military.

However, the United States has methods to mitigate this strategy. Its advantage in submarine warfare is one, but even some surface vessels, like the three Zumwalt-class destroyers, would be hard for China to detect.

America’s stealth aircraft are also present in the region. All of these assets can be armed with long range missiles that can destroy critical infrastructure, like China’s artificial islands, even before their platforms enter the A2/AD zone. The stockpiling of the stealth  and jam-resistant LRASM anti-ship missile also poses a severe threat to China’s navy that the  A2/AD strategy cannot adequately compensate for. The United States is also focusing its efforts to  developing technologies specifically designed to further counter China’s A2/AD strategy and  equipment in the region.

The arsenal of missiles it is hiding behind will not be as effective a decade from now as it is today, which is a big problem for Beijing.
Number four – incomplete or failed military reforms. The PLA used to have an incomprehensible command structure. Xi Jinping began to change this in 2015, streamlining chains of command along American lines and creating new services, such as the Rocket Force, Joint Logistics Support Force, and Strategic Support Force, which manages information and cyberwarfare. Since these organizations are new, they haven’t fully established how to effectively operate. The new units were not specialist forces created from scratch but cobbled together from formerly disparate entities.

The same people and even phone numbers have been more or less retained from old organizations and combined, which has led to problems with cohesion. For example, China’s new JLSF, now tasked with providing logistical support to theater commands, is still in its infancy, and it is still figuring out how to conduct operations like airlifts. Although China now has heavy-lift transport aircraft like the Y-20, the JLSF is still in the process of designing methods of airdropping armored vehicles.

One Chinese source summed it up best: “owning advanced weapons does not equate to being able to use them well.” Because the JLSF is new, with personnel still mostly taken from pre-existing organizations that sometimes did not specialize in logistics, progress has been slow.

This brings us to number three – lack of  logistical capability. Russia’s logistical hardship in its geographical backyard was an embarrassment for the Kremlin. China has a much harder logistical mission. It seeks to build a “strategic” military capable of power projection beyond its borders into its region and further afield. However, China lacks the necessary bases to do this.

Its only overseas military base is in Djibouti. More importantly, China still relies on civilian ports of call, tankers, and strategic airlifts to conduct its operations overseas. This is part of China’s military-civil fusion strategy, which has some benefits, but a lack of specialized military transports severely limits Beijing’s ability to project power overseas.

Civilian technology cannot fully compensate for all military functions. It simply cannot bring as much stuff to a fight over the  same distances as the United States can, despite the American homeland being even  further away from contested regions of the world.

China is slowly growing more capable, with 67 Y-20  military transport aircraft in its fleet as of 2023, but production has been slow.

In 2014,  China’s air force recommended the acquisition of 400 Y-20 aircraft by 2030, but Jane’s estimates  the most realistic goal is between 100 and 125. China will therefore continue to rely on civilian  transports, which will weaken its ability to deploy troops and specialized military equipment.  China’s lack of equipment and experience in logistical operations over vast distances would be a big problem in a confrontation, which leads to the next hidden weakness. Number two – China’s military has not seen combat in half a century.

The last time was in the brief Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979.

This conflict came after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. China’s initial attack across the border achieved modest successes, but the PLA wound up performing poorly against the battle-hardened Vietnamese troops and failed to succeed in its goal of dislodging the Vietnamese from Cambodia. Nonpartisan sources estimate that China suffered between 7,900 to 26,000 deaths and between 23,000  to 37,000 wounded. Vietnam’s total casualties may have been between 20,000 and 50,000.

Since the war lasted for only a few weeks, the losses were high and made worse for the PLA because it usually did not face Vietnam’s most elite units.

PLA troops succeeded when they had had significant enough numerical superiority to overwhelm the defenders in costly frontal assaults, a little like Russia’s situation in Ukraine today – and recall that Russia’s military had more experience before its costly invasion than China’s currently has. China has conducted routine drills, including with partner countries like Russia, in an attempt to get its units more experience, but there is no substitute for the real thing. China’s show of military prowess off Taiwan in recent years is a clear demonstration of the increase in its power.

The comparison between now and the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of the mid-1990s is obvious.
Yet, these are still just demonstrations. Russia’s military was good at making demonstrations before its invasion of Ukraine revealed deep-rooted problems. China’s military is almost certainly the same, which brings us  directly to the last big problem on this list. Number one – by law, the People’s Liberation Army  and all of its branches is not even a national military. It is the Communist Party’s armed force,  representing its wishes and doing its bidding, not the nation’s.

For all of the progress it has made on the equipment front, the PLA cannot shake off this ideological mandate. 20 to 30% of the training time for a soldier in the PLA is spent on ideological functions, with 40% of the time in induction training spent on such tasks. The PLA also has political commissars. These troops have an official rank equivalent to commander and ensure that all soldiers in their units (which they have dossiers on) are behaving correctly.

The commissars must approve of any promotion or disciplinary action, which in effect makes them superior even to the commanding officer of a particular unit.

The commissars also act as the unit’s spiritual, mental health, and welfare officers. This is not something the PLA can change.  Lessening the ideological training and power of the political officers would negate the military’s quality of being the armed forces of the Communist Party, rather than the nation. China cannot make its military apolitical. A politicized military is essential to keeping the Communist Party in power.

While all wars are first and foremost political affairs, having your military act as a political organization is a recipe for failure, and we need not look far for an example. In 2018, a battalion in China’s 15th Airborne Army did a simulated combat jump against an opposing force in China’s western desert.

It was not an ideal time to do such an operation, since there were high winds, but the CO ordered the exercise to go ahead. Many injuries occurred in the jump, including some platoon and company commanders. In one company, the political commissar took over.

He did not immediately establish a new chain of command and attempt to make the mission work. Instead, he first ensured that the political commissar system was still in place to carry out ideological conformity. In the time he lost doing so,  the enemy force the battalion faced in the exercise inflicted  crushing casualties on its remaining troops. This would be a major problem in a confrontation  with the United States. China may have much more sophisticated weapons than it did years ago,  but without the right training and doctrine, their use will be less effective than their  potential.

We have seen this dynamic play out on the battlefields of Ukraine,  and China’s military is less experienced and equally or more politically charged  than Russia’s is. It’s for this reason more than any other why the PLA is weaker than you think. Do you agree with our list of China’s hidden military weaknesses? And for what other reasons might China’s armed forces be comparatively lacking? Don’t forget to let  us know in the comments.

Also make sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons for more military analysis from military experts! Now go check out How China’s Military Got HUMILIATED in First Combat Disaster or click this other video instead!

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