Military experts speaking at an event on Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) diagnosed the Chinese military with “surprising shortfalls” in its ability to operate, leaving open the possibility of a disaster for the Communist Party in the event of active war.
The experts reportedly cited logistics issues — the sluggish bureaucracy that governs the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), in particular — as leaving China unable to properly respond to the rapidly evolving scenarios that surface during war hostilities.
The analysis follows years of Chinese communist propaganda boasting of the PLA’s unstoppable prowess and warnings from observers in the United States that America may not be keeping up with China’s military advances – in no small part fueled by intellectual property theft at the expense of the U.S.
“There seem to be some surprising shortfalls in logistics support for PLA Army combat at times,” the South China Morning Post, which covered the CSIS event, quoted Department of Defense senior analyst Joshua Arostegui as saying during a panel discussion on the Chinese military. “Without modern logistics methods, how long can the PLA really expect to operate at a tactical level where the fighting really takes place?”
“For other countries who are thinking about deterring China … the logistics system is something of a soft underbelly to the PLA that could pose problems,” he reportedly suggested.
‘Surprising shortfalls’ in China military logistics suggest lack of conflict readiness: US analysts https://t.co/nf7DgEE1EN
— South China Morning Post (@SCMPNews) July 19, 2022
Another panelist, Maj. James Roger “J.R.” Sessions, suggested that China may face similar problems in active combat that Russia has faced in escalating its invasion of Ukraine this year — including not being able to off-road supply convoys, potentially resulting in them getting stuck or becoming prime targets for attack.
“Feedback from PLA logisticians suggests that additional refinement and investment is required to overcome long-standing limitations of PLA supply in order to sustain ground forces in a maneuver conflict like that in Ukraine,” the Washington Examiner quoted Sessions as explaining. “PLA observers note myriad shortfalls in post-reform logistics that mirrors similar problems Russian forces reportedly have faced in Ukraine.”
Sessions observed that PLA bureaucracy often means “five or six layers of approval” for any one troop or supply movement, creating potentially unsustainable delays in a dynamic war scenario.
The Examiner quoted Arostegui as stating that the PLA also lacks enough officers to quickly process operations. A recent PLA restructuring “provided one staff officer to the battalion command team to oversee comprehensive support,” he explained, calling it “a real, significant weakness for China.”
“In contrast, the U.S. Army typically has four to six personnel performing similar roles,” the analyst reportedly said.
The panelists also noted that China — unlike Russia or America — has not engaged in any active hostilities in recent memory and lacks significant experience in operations. The last major wars featuring Chinese military operations were the Korean War — technically still ongoing, but without active hostility since 1953 — and the Vietnam War.
The PLA, they said, appeared to handle its last mission successfully, but that was a humanitarian mission to help in the fight against the Chinese coronavirus — not a war.
Supporting the experts’ conclusions that the PLA may be “surprising” in its weaknesses is the result of the last hostile engagement that it experienced: the 2020 border battle against Indian forces in the Himalayas. In June of that year, Indian and Chinese troops brawled in the Galwan Valley, a territory in India’s Ladakh state, after Indian forces claimed that the PLA had begun illegally setting up bases on Indian territory. Due to longstanding rules of engagement, neither side was equipped with firearms, so the soldiers used barbed wire, iron rods, and other rudimentary weapons to kill each other. Reports from both China and India indicated that many died falling off of cliffs or of hypothermia, in addition to being bludgeoned to death.
The Indian government admitted to 20 deaths, including the loss of commanding officer Col. Santosh Babu, who was allegedly shoved off a cliff. Indian officials stated that the Chinese endured “more than twice” that number of deaths, the loss of over 40 soldiers. Beijing refused to confirm a single death for about a year and, finally admitted to only four deaths, turning the event into a patriotic struggle and honoring veterans at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
China denied the Galwan Valley losses but appeared to immediately invest in improving its battle readiness in the Himalayas. State propaganda outlets like the Global Times reported that Beijing had begun investing in exoskeletons to help soldiers endure the dangerously low temperatures and climb the steep terrain. Reports in Indian media suggested a significant increase in the number of robots deployed to the Indian border including Sharp Claw unmanned ground vehicles, which can conduct patrols that may be too dangerous for poorly trained soldiers.
Conducting military operations in the frigid Himalayas is an entirely different challenge for the PLA than the feared, and often threatened, invasion of tropical Taiwan, a democratic island nation off the coast of China that the Communist Party illegally claims for itself. China has invested heavily in the military colonization of the South China Sea, where Taiwan resides, most prominently in the construction of artificial islands that may be used to house fighter jets, launch surface-to-air missiles, or refuel key crafts.
An invasion of Taiwan, despite the country’s much smaller military, may also prove costly for China, the panelists at the CSIS event predicted.
“I personally suspect that the PLA air force can only sustain their combat operations for about two weeks. But we really can’t answer that question because we don’t have the data,” George Washington University’s Lonnie Henley, another panelist, said, according to the Washington Examiner, “and we haven’t had the focus on those questions that we need in order to develop the data.”
“Can the PLA really get its forces across [the Taiwan Strait], and if it gets them across, can it sustain them in combat on the island?” Henley asked.
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