By Francis Sempa
A new volume offers a cautious glimpse into the future of China’s military.
In July 2015, the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute published a collection of papers under the title, The Chinese People’s Liberation Army in 2025. The book’s editors, Roy Kamphausen, a senior advisor at the National Bureau of Asian Research, and David Lai, a research professor of Asian Security Affairs at the Army War College, describe it as “an effort to examine the drivers, potential vectors, and implications of China’s military modernization for the near-to-medium future.”
The contributors to the volume are experts on the Chinese military and the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region. The papers are grouped into three broad categories: (1) domestic, external and technological drivers of PLA modernization; (2) alternative futures for the PLA in regional and global affairs, including a weakened PLA; and (3) implications of alternative futures of PLA modernization for the Asia-Pacific region, the international system, and for U.S.-China relations.
Lonnie Henley, an intelligence collection officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), believes that the PLA has two major goals for the near-to-medium future: first, to prepare for conflict in China’s periphery, especially with regard to Taiwan, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Indian border; and second, to develop capabilities “to defend China’s interests outside the immediate East Asian region.” “[T]he most likely course of events for the PLA,” he predicts, “is to stay focused . . . on developing capabilities . . . necessary to fight and win a war with Taiwan and to thwart U.S. military intervention in that conflict.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat