DEFENSE POLICY AND MILITARY STRATEGY
Key Takeaways
- In 2022, the PRC’s stated defense policy aims remained oriented toward safeguarding its sovereignty, security, and development interests, while emphasizing a greater global role for itself. The PRC’s military strategy remains based on the concept of “active defense (积极防御).”
- PRC leaders stress the imperative of strengthening the PLA into a “world-class” military by the end of 2049 as an essential element of its strategy to rejuvenate the PRC into a “great modern socialist country.” In response to perceived personnel deficiencies within the PLA, Xi approved and issued a new series of regulations in July 2022 on the management of PLA soldiers seeking to improve recruiting, training, promotions, benefits, and demobilization efforts for non-commissioned officers (NCOs).
- CCP leaders increasingly cast the armed forces as a practical instrument to defend the PRC’s expanding global interests and to advance its foreign policy goals within the framework of “Great Power Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics.”
- Xi secured his third term as the general secretary of China’s Communist Party at the Party Congress in October 2022 and his appointment of loyalists to top positions in the CMC probably will enable Xi to expand upon military modernization and operational goals during his next 5-year term. In his speech at the 20th Party Congress, Xi detailed PLA goals of enhancing party loyalty in the military, while simultaneously strengthening the military through reform, science and technology, personnel training, mechanization, informatization, and modernized military strategies.
- In 2020, the PLA added a new milestone for modernization in 2027, to accelerate the integrated development of mechanization, informatization, and intelligentization of the PRC’s armed forces, which, if realized, could give the PLA capabilities to be a more credible military tool for the CCP’s Taiwan unification efforts. During his October 2022 speech at the opening ceremony of the 20th Party Congress, Xi stated that China intends to complete the plan to modernize the PLA by 2027.
- In 2021, the PLA began discussing a new “core operational concept,” called “Multi-Domain Precision Warfare (多域精确战)” (MDPW). MDPW is intended to leverage a C4ISR network that incorporates advances in big data and artificial intelligence, what the PLA calls the “network information system-of-systems,” to rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities. The PLA’s official newspaper continued to emphasize the importance developing MDPW in 2022, citing “several informatized local wars” as evidence for the need for MDPW capabilities.
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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
