This past year the Institute for Future Conflict launched its first annual essay contest, open to undergraduate students at Colorado State University, CU Boulder, Denver University, the United States Air Force Academy, and University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
The prompt asked students and cadets: what lessons is the People’s Republic of China taking away from the war in Ukraine, and are these the lessons the United States wants it to internalize?
This week we are proud to publish the three winners of the contest.
To prevail in an era of strategic competition, the United States must understand the lessons its adversaries are extracting from ongoing conflicts to anticipate change in future conflict scenarios.
The war in Ukraine provides an opportunity for outside observers to better prepare for future fights, including US adversaries such as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The PLA has limited combat experience, but the Russia-Ukraine War may provide opportunities for the PLA to vicariously internalize lessons and strengthen its warfighting capacity.
Given the US government’s designation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the pacing challenge for the United States, policymakers should be attentive to how the PLA is responding to lessons learned from the war in Ukraine and how the United States can offset any potential advantages such lessons might provide the PLA.
Pivotal Lessons
States can learn two types of lessons: reinforcing or pivotal. Reinforcing lessons reaffirm the value of specific strategies and practices. In contrast, pivotal lessons challenge current strategies and practices and create pressures for actors to consider new directions.
My analysis focuses on the pivotal lessons the PLA might be drawing from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Pivotal lessons changing the behavior of a military organization would create challenges for the United States to understand in order to adapt US strategy and practices to combat these changes. Reinforcing lessons are important, but because pivotal lessons could present unanticipated challenges for US policymakers, they merit closer analysis.
Two pivotal lessons from the war in Ukraine may encourage notable changes to current PLA military planning. First, the advantages provided by Ukraine’s decentralized command and control systems may lead PLA planners to reevaluate military plans that are currently better suited to fighting an adversary with heavily centralized command and control systems. Second, the battlefield success produced by Ukraine’s empowerment of lower-level commanders may encourage the PRC to consider loosening its highly centralized command and control systems to provide greater autonomy and authority to lower-level commanders.
Countering Decentralized Command and Control
The PLA theory of victory is based on a systems destruction warfare approach. Systems destruction warfare is designed to “disrupt, paralyze, or destroy the operational capability of the enemy’s operational system.” This paradigm is important because it provides a lens on how PLA planners might analyze the Ukraine conflict from an operational perspective.
Decentralized command and control systems, however, challenge the PLA’s theory of victory. Systems destruction warfare is focused on paralyzing operational systems, capabilities ideal targets. In a centralized command and control system, information flows linearly up and down the chain of command. Thus, PLA doctrine focuses on severing as a critical component its adversary’s chain of command as a critical component in securing information superiority. A broken link in a chain can induce paralyzing effects within an operational system.
However, within a decentralized command and control system, key nodes are less prominent and do not provide clear targets for significant effects. There is no transparent chain to sever because a decentralized system is focused on self-contained units that can operate even if disconnected from other levels of leadership.
Ukraine has employed decentralized command and control to great effect. There is no command-and-control center that orchestrates every action for Ukraine’s military forces. Instead, decisions are made at the lowest level, providing self-sustaining units capable of conducting attacks. Communication is dispersed through distributed radio nodes, ensuring survivability, redundancy, and concealment. This capability remains a crucial but tentative advantage for Ukraine.
The challenges Russia has experienced in countering Ukraine’s decentralized command and control systems are especially notable for PLA observers, given Taiwan’s embrace of decentralized command and control. Indeed, Taiwan stated in December 2023 that it now prioritizes a decentralized command and control system because of Ukraine’s battlefield successes.
Taiwan’s emphasis on decentralized command and control systems reveals two matters of importance. First, it suggests that decentralized command and control can provide an asymmetric advantage against a numerically and technologically superior enemy. Second, it implies that the PLA has not developed doctrinal practices addressing a decentralized command and control system. Taiwan’s strategic decisions are grounded in analyzing PLA fighting capabilities, and such a change in doctrine is likely tailored to exploit PLA weaknesses and complicate PLA planning.
Given the apparent value of decentralized command and control and Taiwan’s transition to a more decentralized model of command, PLA planners are likely to start studying methods to combat decentralized command and control systems and incorporate those lessons into PLA doctrine. In practice, the PLA has been through this process before.
After the United States’ decisive military victory in the First Gulf War, the PRC’s Central Military Commission—the most senior command authority in the PLA—took note of US tactics, techniques, and procedures for fear of meeting a similar fate as the Iraqi armed forces in a potential conflict with the United States. The PLA has responded over time by undergoing significant changes in its planning, and recent moves by the PLA to professionalize their non-commissioned officer corps and implement joint operations may indicate a willingness to implement serious reforms based on pivotal lessons.
Decentralizing the PLA
The success of Ukraine’s decentralized command and control systems may also lead the PRC to consider increasing the autonomy of lower ranks. Such a transformation, however, would represent a significant departure from the highly centralized command and control systems that have historically characterized the PLA. Most decisions at the tactical and operational levels for the PLA are fed through the Central Military Commission and the Joint Staff Division, and lower-level organizations have little to no autonomy because of this decision-making structure.
However, evidence from the war in Ukraine reveals the limitations of a highly centralized military when fighting a largely decentralized opponent. In addition to revealing the challenges of countering a decentralized command structure, the war also demonstrates the value of employing decentralized command and control. Whereas Ukraine’s decentralized approach has enabled commanders at all levels to coordinate and initiate operations without headquarters approval, Russia has suffered from an overly centralized command and control system, creating slow decision-making processes on a highly dynamic battlefield that have caught Russian forces off-guard.
For the PLA, having many responsibilities vested in the Central Military Commission may lead to the PLA’s inability to keep up with the high-tempo requirements of a future conflict. This may cause an overload in the decision-making system, stretching the decision space and disrupting their tempo, and delegating authority and responsibilities to PLA theater commands may be a critical implementation. Additionally, the PLA could expand training on decision-making for officers in a limited information environment. The PLAAF non-commissioned officer corps currently receives this type of training where communication between leadership is limited.
Despite the apparent appeal of enabling lower-level military decision-making, however, institutional barriers such as a rigid hierarchy, class-based prejudice, and party membership are significant obstacles to achieving a decentralized command and control structure. The pivotal lesson is available for the PRC to internalize, but enduring barriers may inhibit the PLA from realizing the benefits of decentralized command and control in the near term.
The Future Fight
The PLA’s willingness and ability to learn and implement reforms should be carefully considered in crafting appropriate US responses. While many lessons the PRC are learning will likely reinforce many of their ongoing efforts—such as improved joint operations and expanded information warfare—special attention must be placed on those lessons that may cause an internal reassessment.
For the United States, understanding these lessons better enables the United States to deter the PRC from achieving its goal of reunification with Taiwan, especially by military force. These pivotal lessons may include the PLA developing a stronger counter to decentralized command and control systems, as well as the delegation of authority and responsibilities to lower levels of command.
It will be somewhat difficult to monitor such developments in the PLA due to China’s closed nature. But, given the implications for US military planning and extended deterrence, US policy must continue to guarantee the security of its decentralized command structure, while also planning for opportunities to exploit highly centralized command and control in the PLA.
The PRC may be learning important lessons for future conflict scenarios, but so too can the United States.
Connor Brezenski is a cadet first class at the United States Air Force Academy.