U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124.

Transcript

Laura Coates: Joining us now is Dean Chang, the USIP's China program senior advisor. He's written an interesting op-ed now where he tries to explain why Xi created a new Information Support Force (ISF) and really why now. Dean Chang, welcome and good morning. How are you?

Dean Cheng: Good, how are you?

Laura Coates: I'm doing good. Thank you so much for joining us. Bring us up to speed for people who might not have been knowledgeable about what was going on, there was a decision by the Chinese military recently to transform its Strategic Support Force (SSF) and launch a new military organization. It caught many observers by surprise. First, bring us back to the Strategic Support Force, what exactly it is and how the launch of a new organization is impactful.

Dean Cheng: So, in 2015, the Chinese military known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and by the way, the term army here applies to the entire military, not just the ground forces, underwent what was the most significant transformation since its founding in 1927. Without going into all the various details, one of the big things was the creation of a number of new services to go alongside the ground forces and the Navy and the Air Force. And one of those new services was what was called the Strategic Support Force. And it brought together electronic warfare people electronic warfare involves things like jamming, radars and radios, network support forces, which includes their cyber forces, the hacking groups, and their space forces. And what tied these three elements together is information. And for the PLA, they had been writing for a number of years, fighting and winning the next war means achieving what they termed information dominance, the ability to generate information, move information and exploit information more rapidly and more accurately than your adversary. So, these three elements, electronic warfare, which involves impacting the equipment, or information, network, or cyber warfare, which involves the information itself and space, which is how a lot of information is collected and moved. This force was going to basically fight across these three domains, these three areas. So, that's 2015.

Here we are eight years later, and all of a sudden, Xi Jinping, basically and the top Chinese leadership say, yeah, thank you very much for your service in national defense, you're gone. And what happened was each of those components, information, space, and cyber or network warfare is now its own support force. And what we're not sure about is bureaucratically, how is that supposed to play out? Are each of these equivalent? Are they subordinate to something? In the budget and resource fights that every organization has no matter where you are in the world, how do they stack up against the ground forces, the Navy and the Air Force?

Laura Coates: That's an extraordinarily important question in terms of why the world is watching to see the impact of a new military organization. I mean, how could this have gone under the radar and caught so many people by surprise?

Dean Cheng: Well, mostly because nobody expected something so momentous, this is the new force. When it was established back in 2015, Xi Jinping, there's photographs, and there's news reports of Xi Jinping giving the banner, sort of like Napoleonic eagles to the new commander of the Strategic Support Force. And doing that meant, "I, Xi Jinping, representing the top leadership and the force behind us." And here he is eight years later, basically giving a comparable banner to this new Information Support Force. The PLA for a good almost 100 years had no major changes on this scale. So, for them to do it again, just eight years later, is quite extraordinary.

Another piece of this is of course, that the PLA has been saying and our own military has been commenting on this, that they are supposed to be what they term fully modernized by 2027 and 2027 is less than three years away. And that's a lot of work that they've been doing, the equipment is being modernized, the doctrine is being modernized, the recruiting and training are all being modernized. For them to suddenly introduce such a major change is going to be disruptive. And that hasn't changed the due date of 2027. So, that's another reason why nobody was expecting this. With 2027 so close on the horizon, you sort of assume that if you're going to do something so momentous, you might wait till after you've sort of checked the box. So, we're all sort of left wondering what this is going to mean, and why they did it. Is it because SSF wasn't doing the job? Was it always transitional? Or are there other forces at work?

Laura Coates: I mean, I wonder what do you mean by the other forces that are potentially at work? What could be the case?

Dean Cheng: One possibility is that there were issues of corruption at the highest leadership levels within the SSF. We know that with the Rocket Forces, China's nuclear rocket force elements, its senior commanders were relieved reportedly for corruption. Now, in China, corruption is the official charge. It's not always about corruption. But that's what they said it was about. Another possibility is that the effort simply sort of petered out, that it did what it was supposed to do, it got these people that need these elements, electronic warfare, space, etc., to talk to each other. And that was sort of all that they were able to achieve. And now we're going to try and let you specialize, go back to specializing in your respective stovepipes. There are services in every military around the world for a reason, naval warfare is different from air warfare. Maybe their conclusion was, you know what, yeah, they all deal with information. But pushing them all into a single entity doesn't necessarily work very well. We see this in our own bureaucracy at times. Not everyone thinks that the Department of Homeland Security which brings together the FBI, the TSA, the Border Patrol necessarily is a great uber-bureaucracy.

Laura Coates: And you've suggested to at some point, just to dig deeper into this, that either it may have been always intended to be a transitionary organization or that there was an inability to get the elements within to work together. How likely is that?

Dean Cheng: Hard to say, it's certainly possible. Part of the problem is that the Chinese, particularly when it comes to security issues are incredibly opaque. They are not in the habit of telling anyone much of anything. And so, we wind up if you'll pardon the expression of sort of reading tea leaves. So, you know, the fact that the Deputy Head of SSF and the Political Commissar for SSF, now are both in charge over at this new Information Support Force suggests that there's a lineage issue here that that basically SSF has devolved into ISF. But that still begs the question of what happened with these other two elements. Unfortunately, this happened after the meetings for example, between Secretary of Defense the virtual meeting with Secretary Defense Austin and the Chinese Defense Minister, Dong Jun. So, an opportunity perhaps to ask questions was missed.

Laura Coates: This is really, really interesting and informative. Thank you so much for bringing this up to speed Dean Chang, the USIP China program senior advisor, you can read the full piece as well. It's available at breakingdefense.com. Thank you so much for helping us to better understand this.

Dean Cheng: Thank you for having me.