The Military Personnel (Talent) Cultivation System. This MCF system seeks to blend and cultivate military and civilian S&T expertise through education programs, personnel exchanges, and knowledge sharing. The purpose of this effort is to improve the utilization of experts able to participate in S&T projects irrespective of whether they are military or civilian (or even foreign) experts and allow expertise to flow more freely across sectors. This aspect of MCF also seeks to reform the PRC’s talent cultivation system, which encompasses hundreds of talent recruitment plans, in order to improve China’s human capital, build a highly skilled workforce, and recruit foreign experts to provide access to know-how, expertise, and foreign technology. It takes into account all levels of education from the Party’s nationwide “patriotic education” programs for children to the matriculation of post-doctorate researchers within China and at institutions abroad. Many of the PRC’s named talents programs are likely influenced by MCF planning, as are reforms in its military academies, national universities, and research institutes.
The Socialized Support and Sustainment System for the PLA. This system entails two major efforts that seeks to shift the PLA away from its inefficient self-contained logistics and sustainment systems and towards modern streamlined logistics and support services. First, it seeks to harness civilian public sector and private sector resources to improve the PLA’s basic services and support functions—ranging from food, housing, and healthcare services. The concept is to gain efficiencies in costs and personnel by outsourcing non-military services previously performed by the PLA while also improving the quality of life for military personnel. Second, it seeks to further the construction of a modern military logistics system that is able to support and sustain the PLA in joint operations and for overseas operations. This system seeks to fuse the PLA Joint Logistic Support Force’s (JLSF’s) efforts to integrate the military’s joint logistics functions with the PRC’s advanced civilian logistics, infrastructure, and delivery service companies and networks. These arrangements seek to provide the PLA with modern transportation and distribution, warehousing, information sharing, and other types of support in peacetime and wartime. This fusion also seeks to provide the PLA with a logistics system that is more efficient, higher capacity, higher quality, and global in reach.
The National Defense Mobilization System. This MCF system binds the other systems as it seeks to mobilize the PRC’s military, economic, and social resources to defend or advance China’s sovereignty, security and development interests. The Party views China’s growing strength as only useful to the extent that the party-state can mobilize it. China characterizes mobilization as the ability to precisely use the instrument, capability, or resource needed, when needed, for the duration needed. Within the PLA, 2015-16 reforms elevated defense mobilization to a department called the National Defense Mobilization Department (NDMD), which reports directly to the CMC. The NDMD plays an important role in this system by organizing and overseeing the PLA’s reserve forces, militia, and provincial military districts and below. This system also seeks to integrate the state emergency management system into the national defense mobilization system in order to achieve a coordinated military-civilian response during a crisis. Consistent with the Party’s view of international competition, many MCF mobilization initiatives not only seek to reform how the PRC mobilizes for war and responds to emergencies, but how the economy and society can be leveraged to support the PRC’s strategic needs for international competition.
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OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
