"Is China’s Military Learning Anything From Ukraine?" - By CWP Alum Joel Wuthnow
A year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we still don’t have good insight into what China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is distilling from that conflict and applying to its own major contingency—forceful unification with Taiwan. Despite the occasional newspaper commentary and a handful of articles in Chinese defense industry publications, mostly focused on specific weapons being used on both sides of the conflict, we lack an authoritative Chinese post-mortem on the early phases of Russian operations and a sense of how those observations might be influencing PLA training and capabilities. There’s good reason for this reticence: any such analysis would require the PLA to explain the reasons for Russia’s failure to achieve its initial war aims, undermining China’s pretense of respect for their Russian brethren.
The absence of direct evidence, however, creates an opportunity to revisit our assumptions that the PLA might be adapting from the Russian experience in the first place. Such an outcome is only one of three possibilities. China’s military could also be learning the wrong lessons – such as assuming that U.S. leaders and our allies can be easily deterred through nuclear signaling at the outset of a conflict – or downplaying the need to learn from the Russian by overstating their own proficiency and discounting the prospects that Taiwan will fight as vigorously as Ukraine. None of these possibilities are particularly reassuring for Taiwan, which could be faced with a revitalized PLA or one prone to strategic blunders
Reflecting on One Year of War: Is China’s Military Learning Anything from Ukraine?
By Dr. Joel Wuthnow February 24, 2023
Dr. Joel Wuthnow is a senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University and an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. His recent publications include Gray Dragons: Assessing China’s Senior Military Leadership (NDU, 2022) and Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan (NDU, 2022, lead editor).
This essay represents only the views of the authors and not those of the National Defense University, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/exceptional_3d-16154516/
