Chinese Views of Future Warfare

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by Peter W. Rodman

Chinese Views of Future Warfare, edited by Michael Pillsbury (National Defense University Press, 421 pp., $22)

Americans who think of China's military as a rag-tag outfit mired in premodern strategics of "people's war," human-wave assaults, and so on are in for a shock. Mr. Pillsbury, a China scholar and Pentagon consultant, has translated forty-odd contemporary articles by Chinese military strategists, all gleaned from specialized but open-source books and journals. The subjects range from general doctrine to reforms of the Chinese defense industry to the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (i.e., the computerization of battle management which is revolutionizing U.S. strategy and capabilities, as we saw a hint of in the Gulf War). Most important are the articles in Section IV, which focus on the latter topic. The analyses of what warfare (land, sea, air, and space) will look like in the Information Age of the twenty-first century are more sophisticated than most American military writings on the subject. More than that: the Chinese, who recognize that they are a generation behind in this field, are zeroing in on the vulnerabilities of a high-tech superpower that relies on this stuff. Antisatellite, anti-radar, anti-stealth, and anti-computer techniques have deFinitely piqued their interest; they are thinking about such things as how weaker powers can defeat stronger ones by "crippling attacks" on their opponents' information systems. The book is an eye-opener (with a good introductory summary by the editor), and it is already causing ripples in our heretofore complacent Pentagon and intelligence agencies. A very important book.