By John Costello
The changes will give China more confidence in its ability to deter and compel adversaries.
On December 31, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) announced its most recent and substantial military reform yet. The change, which created a separate Army leadership organ, a Rocket Force, and a “Strategic Support Force,” amounts to the culmination of a year of monumental change for China’s national security infrastructure. In many ways the move came as no surprise to long-time China watchers and analysts. PLA scholars have been calling for a separate Army leadership organization for years. The Rocket Force (PLARF) is essentially a renamed 2nd Artillery Corps (PLASAF), upgraded to be equal to the other services and was also a widely expected move, intended as both a strategic signal to the West and as force development measure to increase China’s intermediate and long-range missile capability. Both measures are clear-cut and expected. The odd one out is the Strategic Support Force (SSF).
Information on the newly created independent branch is scarce, but semi-official sources indicate that it will comprise space, cyber, and electronic warfare forces. More interestingly, these sources suggest that it will integrate and consolidate intelligence, communications, and technical reconnaissance with cyber warfare and electronic warfare to create an information dominance force.
Rumors and calls for large-scale military reform have been batted around for years but were never given any serious thought until Xi Jinping took power in 2012. In the years following Xi’s ascension, the party made limited changes to the military, instead focusing on updating China’s strategic guidelines and purging the military of corruption. That changed in 2015 when Xi announced a series of unprecedented organizational reforms, which would reorganize China’s leadership organs, the four general departments (staff, logistics, equipment, and political), transform China’s antiquated military-region system into five joint “theaters” or battlezones, and change its antiquated procurement structure.
When introducing the SSF on December 31, Xi Jinping was fairly vague, giving no concrete detail as to what role it will actually play, simply stating that it is a “new-type combat force to maintain national security and an important growth point of the PLA’s combat capabilities.” Yang Yujun, the spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense (MND), was even more circumspect, simply stating that the SSF will play a “strategic, fundamental, and supportive” role to China’s military.
The name of the force betrays nothing as to its mission, the official PLA dictionary entry for “strategic support” gives no added value, and the MND’s spokesman’s description was comically self-evident. Chinese “bureaucratese” aside, Xi’s description of the force at least offers some insight – “new-type forces” is often a by-word for units that use advanced technology and are heavily “informatized.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat