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"Bitzinger, Richard"
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China’s Shift from Civil-Military Integration to Military-Civil Fusion
This essay examines how China has come to value Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) as a critical strategy for next-generation military-technological innovation and how the country is attempting to apply MCF to its weapons development process.
MAIN ARGUMENT
MCF is part of a long-term and broad-based strategic effort by Beijing to develop China into a technological superpower by pursuing both guns and butter and using them to mutually support each other. Chinese leaders, particularly Xi Jinping, are using MCF to position the country to compete militarily and economically in an emerging technological and strategic competition with the U.S. In this respect, current efforts are far more ambitious and far-reaching than previous initiatives, particularly in their determination to fuse China’s defense and commercial economies. At the same time, China is only at the beginning of an arduous, multiyear process to leverage advanced commercial technologies for military modernization, and there is no certainty that MCF will work any better than earlier efforts. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Xi, the Chinese Communist Party, or the People’s Liberation Army will abandon MCF anytime soon.
POLICY IMPLICATIONS
• Despite the availability of advanced technologies in the commercial sector, MCF is a gamble, and it will require considerable effort and resources to adapt and apply these technologies to military innovation. Legal, regulatory, and cultural hurdles could impede the pace and intensity of MCF.
• Nevertheless, should China successfully implement MCF and achieve significant results, the resulting “world-class” military could pose a worrying challenge to the U.S. and its allies in the Indo-Pacific.
Journal Article
A New Direction in the People's Liberation Army's Emergent Strategic Thinking, Roles and Missions
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has been undergoing a profound transformation in terms of its operational capabilities, both with regard to its hardware as well as its heartware, i.e. the softer aspects of its development including its operational culture and military ethos. These changes have permeated every facet of the PLA – technological, organizational and doctrinal. Despite successive generations of Chinese leaders having declared their adherence to “peace” and “development,” it has become clearer that Beijing's security policy under Xi Jinping has shifted steadily away from “keeping a low profile.” In that regard, the status of the PLA in the domestic and international calculus of China's new commander-in-chief has, unsurprisingly, become more pronounced, with Xi taking noticeably greater interest in harnessing the Chinese Communist Party's coercive forces as his personal domestic powerbase and foreign policy instrument complementing China's hard economic power. 中国人民解放军的实力在硬件及 “心” 件方面, 正在经历着巨大的变革。这些变化已渗透军队各个方面, 包括技术、组织、及军事行动上的教义。尽管中国几代领导人宣称维持 “和平” 与 “发展”, 中国安全策略在习近平领导下的转向明显逐步疏离 “韬光养晦”。在新形势下, 解放军在中国内政与外交的战略地位也变得更加显明。
Journal Article
Strategic Contours of China’s Arms Transfers
Over the past two decades, China has gone from being a significant importer of conventional arms to being an increasingly competitive exporter of major weapons systems. Its increasing presence on global arms markets reflects the relative progress of Chinese defense, science, technology, innovation, and industry in terms of developing and manufacturing relatively advanced military platforms and technologies. China aims for relative parity with the global military-technological state-of-the-art base by fostering indigenous innovation—mitigating foreign dependencies on technological transfers and arms imports—while leveraging civil-military integration to overcome entrenched barriers to innovation. At the same time, China’s current arms export strategy reflects varying “competitive” paths. In the developing countries of Latin America, Africa, and even Central Asia, China is trying to position itself as an alternative to Russian arms exports while also counterbalancing the influence of Western powers. Consequently, China has a growing capability to shape the direction and character of the varying regional arms competitions—not only through its military-technological development and diffusion of arms exports but, more importantly, through its strategic choices that influence the development of strategic alliances and balance of power in different geographic areas.
Journal Article
Modernising China’s Military, 1997-2012
The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has since the late 1990s been engaged in an ambitious, concerted, and methodical transformation. As a result, the PLA has noticeably improved its capabilities in several specific areas - particularly missile attack, precision-strike, power projection at sea and in the air, and joint operations. In particular, it has made significant advances in exploiting \"informatisation\" when it comes to developing advanced weaponry, accelerating the pace of military modernisation, and creating new levers of military power for the PLA. While Chinese military power may still pale in comparison to the US armed forces, the strength of the PLA relative to its likely local competitors in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Taiwan and Japan, has grown significantly, and will likely continue to grow over the next ten to 20 years. As a result, China is definitely gaining an edge over other regional militaries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Journal Article
A New Arms Race? Explaining Recent Southeast Asian Military Acquisitions
There is growing concern that Southeast Asia is in the midst of a regional arms race. Certainly many nations in the region have been on a veritable \"shopping spree\" for advanced conventional weaponry, and this has been enabled by a corresponding increase in military spending. However, these acquisitions do not fit the pattern of an \"arms race\" as laid out in prevailing theory: mutually adversarial relationships, explicit tit-for-tat arms acquisitions, the intention of seeking dominance over one's rivals through arming and intimidation, etc. Additionally, the actual numbers of arms being acquired are, for the most part, relatively small. That said, the regional re-arming process is significant in that the types of arms being acquired go beyond the \"mere modernization\" of regional armed forces and could greatly change the nature and character of potential regional conflicts. The resulting arms competition, or \"arms dynamic\", has at least the potential to contribute to a classical \"security dilemma\", a situation whereby actions taken by a country can actually undermine the security and stability that they were meant to increase.
Journal Article
Revisiting Armaments Production in Southeast Asia: New Dreams, Same Challenges
Several states in Southeast Asia have long attempted to produce their own armaments, both to support national security and to aid in national economic and technological advancement. In most cases, however, such efforts have been decidedly disappointing, and few local arms industries have been economically or technologically selfsustaining. Nevertheless, we may be witnessing a new phase of renewed interest among several Southeast Asian nations in expanding their capabilities for indigenous arms manufacturing, as evidenced in particular by new defence-industrial initiatives in Indonesia and Malaysia. These efforts have been supported by a long-term growth in defence expenditures and new efforts to utilize industrial offsets (such as technology transfers and localized production) as a part of arms acquisitions to build up local arms industries. It is unlikely, however, that these efforts alone will suffice to create economically viable local defence industries. Consequently, countries in the region will still have to make tough decisions about the future course of their defence industrial bases. Most likely, they will have to either invest considerably greater resources into developing their defence sectors (which may beyond their capacities and which are still no guarantee of success) or else they have to scale back their ambitions and choose to concentrate in niche areas where they have a better chance of being competitive in the global arms marketplace.
Journal Article
Just the Facts, Ma'am: The Challenge of Analysing and Assessing Chinese Military Expenditures
Defence budgets can be a useful, even critical, indicator of national defence priorities, policies, strategies and capabilities. Consequently, knowing better where China is spending its defence dollars can be a useful mechanism for analysing and assessing current Chinese strategic and military intents, resolve and priorities, and whether the Chinese are devoting sufficient resources to meeting these needs. The dilemma with exploiting Chinese defence budgets as an analytic tool is that it is a highly data-dependent approach forced to work with a near-absence of usable data. Consequently, Western analysis of Chinese military expenditures has been forced to rely heavily upon extrapolation, inference, conjecture and even gut instinct in order to come up with “reasonable” guesses as how large China's actual defence budget might be – an approach fraught with many pitfalls. This report argues that Chinese defence budget analysis has largely reached a methodological dead-end, and while it puts forth some suggestions for improving and refining this line of research, one should accept that, given the continued paucity of reliable data, this approach is a severely limited line of enquiry.
Journal Article
COME THE REVOLUTION
Asian & Pacific powers have in the past decade begun to pay more attention to \"defense transformation\", which is both a modernization of their armed forces & the ability to perform military paradigm shifts so that the countries can fight entirely new kinds of wars. This transformation has important implications for the United States, both in terms of how American forces may work with allies as well as how both competitors & adversaries in the region will interact with the United States. As each national force transforms itself, there is a complicated ripple effect in the regional security calculus of which the United States is a part. D. Knaff
Journal Article