By John Costello
There has been talk of radical reform of decades. Finally, it looks like it might happen.
The PLA is long overdue for a complete overhaul. We’ve been saying it for years, and so has the PLA. Leading China military scholars of today all agree. The PLA is an outdated, unwieldy force that belies a growing technical prowess. I am not the first to note the PLA’s glaring issues vis-à-vis fighting and winning wars; Dennis Blasko has already made many excellent points in his article earlier this year.
The chief issues can be boiled down to this: If the PLA wants to fight and be effective, it needs to enable a joint operational command environment, reform defense acquisition, reduce the role of its ground forces, and rein in regional parochialism. Of course, this premise is based not on its often vague and tepid stated goals – “defend Chinese sovereign interests.” Rather, we should look deeper to the strategic signaling indicating its military intent over the last ten years. Greater global power projection, humanitarian aid, anti-piracy participation, among other objectives (the creation of the carrier notwithstanding). If the PLA wants to do the things it seems to want to do, it needs to change.
Aside from the ground forces issue, the United States faced similar problems (albeit of a different degree and scale) before the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act (or the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, or, “GNA”).
Until 1986, each service maintained their own logistics, doctrine, and planning apparatus independent of the others, causing a costly redundancy and duplication of effort. Operational authority was directed from the president, through the Secretary of Defense, down through the services to operational units, mired in a bureaucratic game of telephone resulting in a grossly unwieldy military. GNA abolished the operational distinctions between different services and allowed national command authorities – the president and secretary of defense – to exercise direct operational control over combatant commands, regional or mission-defined areas of responsibility. To put it bluntly, GNA cut out the operational middle-man, simplified the chain of command, and allowed the defense establish to benefit from a more centralized acquisition and logistics structure.
Read the full story at The Diplomat