In competitive situations, good strategies — those that succeed — are invariably based on exploiting asymmetries between the opposing sides. Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis of the epic duel 3,000 years ago between the Israelite shepherd David and the Philistine giant Goliath centers on an asymmetry between the combatants that only David perceived. Goliath was a heavy-infantry warrior accustomed to close combat with sword and shield. David, with his sling and stones, was a projectile warrior. He prevailed because he chose to fight as a projectile warrior rather than honoring the rituals of single combat with sword and shield.
Since the mid-1990s, a similarly elementary and potentially consequential asymmetry appears to have emerged between the U.S. military and the People’s Liberation Army. This asymmetry stems from the divergent approaches the Pentagon and the PLA have taken to what the Chinese term the “informationization” of warfare.
This asymmetry has a history that predates the end of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. In the late 1970s, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment examined U.S. and Soviet approaches to command, control and communications, or C3. The assessment found that while the United States enjoyed technical advantages in C3 sub-functions such as data processing and battlefield sensors, the Soviet General Staff had taken a more integrated top-down, holistic approach to C3.
The Soviets singled out C3 as a high-priority area of warfare and developed planning processes, tactics, operational concepts and systems for attacking enemy C3 while protecting their own in both conventional and nuclear scenarios. Soviet planners stressed disrupting or disabling enemy C3 in wartime through radio-electronic combat that combined electronic warfare with physical destruction. They planned to attack NATO C3 at every level down to battalions, with the goal of disrupting or destroying 50 percent of NATO’s C3. Indeed, there was evidence that the size of Soviet mortar shells was based to some degree on the accuracy of the radio direction-finding equipment their ground units carried.
In Eastern Europe opposite NATO, the Soviets invested heavily in hardening their fixed C3 facilities and fielded airborne command posts, satellite and ground-mobile communications. At the same time, they gave much greater emphasis than NATO to communications security. In sum, the Soviets concluded that troop control processes were fundamentally about information and could play a decisive role in future wars.
By comparison, the large American advantages in C3 sub-function technologies were marginalized by the U.S. military’s fragmented approach to C3. The U.S. military lacked the integrated doctrine, overarching concepts and priority evident in Soviet troop control. Reviews of U.S. and USSR exercise training indicated that both were constrained by similar factors in this area, but that the USSR achieved greater realism. ONA’s 1978 assessment identified C3 as a major weakness of U.S. and NATO forces.
In the wake of this finding, then U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown directed the Defense Department to pay more attention to C3 and counter-C3. The result was an upsurge in C3 research, including a number of Defense Science Board C3 studies. But by the mid-1980s U.S. interest in developing a more comprehensive, integrated approach to C3 had waned, and the military services went back to business as usual.
Today, U.S. thinking and emphasis on the broader aspects of the information dimension of warfare are little changed from what they were in the early 1980s. The area remains badly fragmented across a series of disparate communities and enterprises, including electronic warfare; signals and electronic intelligence; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR; information operations; and cyber attack and defense. Despite the lip service given to “system of systems” in the 1990s and network-centric warfare in the early 2000s, the 2006 Joint Publication 3-13, Information Operations, banished “information warfare” from the U.S. lexicon and narrowed information operations to the cognitive task of “affecting enemy decisions and decision-making processes” while defending friendly decisions and decision processes. Instead of taking a holistic approach, U.S. information operations have been relegated to enablers added as appendices to joint campaign plans by IO cells. As the director of the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, Andrew W. Marshall, remarked in 2003, comprehension of C3 in the U.S. military continues to be akin to the practice of medicine in ancient Greece.
Since the late 1990s, PLA open-source writings have suggested that China’s military has been according greater, if not decisive, importance to the information dimension of regional or local conflicts fought below the nuclear threshold under high-tech conditions. In 2005, Peng Guangqian and Yao Youzhi (retired major generals at the PLA’s Academy of Military Science) published the second English version of their authoritative volume, The Science of Military Strategy. In it they argue that against a major power such as the United States, information superiority has not only “become a prerequisite for seizing the command of land, sea and air” but has “become a decisive factor of the battle effectiveness of modern weaponry and equipment.”
In 2010, Yuan Wenxian — a major general and head of the information warfare, command and training section of the PLA’s National Defense University — went even further in his lectures on joint campaign information operations. “Seizing the control of information power is the direct purpose of information operations,” he said. “In the modern military, each combat unit and each weapon system are coagulated to become one operational body through the bonding action of the military information system, and if it loses this bonding action, then the military becomes a plate of loose sand.”
In other words, the PLA views information as an increasingly critical, if not dominant, resource in local wars under high-tech conditions. Nations and militaries can be wealthy or poor in this resource relative to their competitors, and a nation’s relative wealth in information is what will ultimately matter most in peacetime competitions, crises or military conflicts.
How seriously should such views be taken? The recent upgrading of the Strategic Planning Bureau in the PLA’s General Staff Department to a full-fledged department, along with converting the former Communications Department into the Informatization Department, indicate the PLA is making organizational changes to pursue informationized operations. In 2013, China’s most recent biannual defense white paper argued that war is changing from mechanization to informationization, and Beijing is committed to building an informationized military able to win local wars under informationized conditions.
And in contrast to the Soviet Union during the latter decades of the Cold War when military spending was crippling the Soviet economy, there is every reason to believe that the PRC has the resources to pursue the goal of an informationized military with Chinese characteristics.
How likely is it that the Chinese will reach this goal? It is too early to offer a definitive answer, but the principal uncertainties are easily captured in two questions. First, will the American military undertake the hard intellectual effort to develop the analytic framework needed to assess and dominate the increasingly decisive information confrontations of future warfare? Second, will the PLA develop the organizational competence and combat skills to conduct integrated network electronic warfare that can achieve the ambitious goals of Chinese theory and doctrine for informationized operations — even against a superior power?
There is some indication that the U.S. Navy is at least waking up to the challenge of war in the Information Age. As Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, stated in 2012: The challenge is essentially an intellectual one, but for the U.S. military to seize the high ground in this new domain, “we need to fundamentally change our approach to operations and warfare.”
As for the operational competence that the PLA will need to develop informationized operations, the fact remains that the PRC has not engaged in major combat operations against a high-tech Western opponent in decades — indeed, since the Korean War. How successful the PLA may be in acquiring such competence is anyone’s guess, but there can be little doubt about the Chinese intention to master the information dimension of future warfare.
After an Air Force career that included a combat tour in Vietnam, Barry Watts has held a number of defense analysis positions, most recently as a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments from 2002 to 2014.
