Analysis of RAND Corporation's "Preparing for Great Power Conflict"

LI JIN WEI

The premise, this analysis is the author's brief analysis of the full text of the latest RAND Corporation report, the purpose is to help readers understand the key parts of the RAND Corporation report, so this analysis is neither a comment nor the author's Suggestions, the author hopes that through the analysis, the diplomatic and military authorities concerned about the rapid evolution and development of the international situation, and at the same time suitable for this evolution and development. The author hopes to maintain world peace and wants to avoid all parties entering into conflicts, let alone conflicts between major powers. Otherwise, the three major wars will come soon, and the people suffering after the wars must be the masses.

As we all know, the RAND Corporation is the premier think tank of the US government and one of the top think tanks in the world. The global pattern has witnessed major changes in power dynamics in recent years. At the end of 2022, the RAND Corporation wrote a very detailed report, "Preparing for Great Power Conflict," through a large number of studies; because the report involved many sensitive contents of the US national security and military, it was approved for official publication after being reviewed by the US security and defense agencies. The report's release is telling the world that the United States is ready for conflict with major powers. The report's publication thus raised concerns about a potential great power conflict. The report is designed to provide policy recommendations for how the US government should respond to the changing global environment.

The RAND report offers insights into changing global dynamics and the potential for conflict between great powers, specifically China and Russia, primarily China, on the other side of the list.

The report outlines that since 2001, the US and Chinese militaries have been shaped by a unique set of direct and indirect experiences. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military focused its energies and resources on counterterrorism and peace insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even into 2023, America's emphasis on great power competition conflicts with other national security priorities, including the current crisis and continued global deployment. Conversely, the PLA is primarily concerned with modernizing and reorganizing its military to prepare for regional conflicts that may involve U.S. military intervention. Despite having no combat experience since the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, the PLA has conducted in-depth studies of U.S. military technology and combat capabilities, including organization, command and control, logistics, and joint operations.

The dichotomy presented by the experiences of the two militaries raises questions about how they might prepare for a possible great-power conflict. Since the early 1990s, the U.S. military has gained much direct combat experience, but that experience has been against technologically backward, nonadversary adversaries. In contrast, the PLA has no direct combat experience. Although its operational concepts are designed to counter great powers, they are largely derived from indirect observations and lessons from U.S. operations since 1991. How each military acquires and processes experience and incorporates it into training will significantly affect readiness and performance in future wars.

Analysis: When the United States concentrated on invading Iraq and counter-terrorism in 2001-2003, it is the current year, and the PLA is in continuous reorganization and modernization, reminding it to pay attention.

The report asks questions and examines the extent to which experience gained by the United States and the Chinese military since 2001 has shaped how those militaries train and how these experiences and recent training trends will have an impact on both countries' readiness for great power conflict potential impact. The report focuses on two main research questions: (1) How has the military experience the U.S. and PLA gained since 2001 influenced how their militaries train? (2) How do these experiences and training trends affect preparedness for great power conflict?

Analyze the questions raised, the impact of experience and training

The research methodology consists of three parts. The first is a review of historical examples that provide insights into how military organizations adapt training to meet emerging security requirements and why some countries have successfully adjusted to prepare for great power conflict: How Experience Shapes Military Training in the United States and China, while others failed. Specific types of experience in historical examples are considered, focusing on factors that may help or hinder adaptation. Defining and categorizing experience suggests that the military either develops operational models internally to drive experiential learning and training or imports models from other militaries. These operational models help to create connections between experience and the political, economic, and social factors that play a key role in how militaries adapt. For the second part of the study, concluding historical examples, a logistic model was developed to assess how empirical and institutional factors affect the training of the U.S. military and PLA. Finally, this logical model is applied to a limited number of current case studies of the U.S. military and the PLA to assess how experience shapes U.S. and Chinese military training today.

Analysis: research method evidence, model case, and evaluation

The study reached seven main conclusions:

1. The PLA gains experience through a structured process that includes observing warfare through a Marxist-Leninist lens and studying military science, concept development, experimentation, demonstration, implementation, and training of the entire force. The U.S. military has a model of homegrown experience based on direct combat. Still, indirect experimentation has become more prominent as the global threat landscape changes and peered adversaries seek to undermine the U.S. global security position.

2. The nature of what the U.S. and Chinese militaries have experienced since 2001 raises questions about their preparations for great power conflict, particularly whether the training component of these preparations is sufficient for operational success.

3. China has an advantage in that its focus applies to the concepts and capabilities needed to deter, delay, or defeat U.S. forces entering China’s periphery—emphasizing home-field advantage. The U.S. is forced to consider that China might have a way to make such U.S. intervention too costly, thereby putting the U.S. military in reactive mode to develop the concepts and capabilities to change the situation.

4. The U.S. military has an advantage in adaptability. It is based on direct experience and innovative capabilities of leading operational concepts, emphasizing network precision strikes on key system nodes. Ultimately, one of the most important and enduring advantages the U.S. military enjoys is the quality of its training and the ability to update it to meet changing conditions and threats.

5. When the time comes, time is an advantage for the United States—conceptual and functional changes to prepare for major power conflicts. The PLA focuses on preparing for the war of resistance.

6. The United States appears almost unique in some respects but involves a massive modification of the PLA command culture. These modifications must take place in an environment already fraught with changing priorities on other fronts.

7. The training and exercise methods, tools, and infrastructure required for PLA joint operations are improving but still in their infancy compared with those of the U.S. military. U.S. direct experience since 2001 has provided the basis for a training system that the PLA can only fully emulate with similar experiential pressures.

Analysis: Through the past 20 years, China's Marxist-Leninist guiding ideology and the actual combat innovation of the United States have compared the training and exercise methods of the two sides.

Two main recommendations were made:

1. Further comparative studies of U.S. and Chinese experiments, training, and exercises related to major war concepts and capabilities will benefit U.S. campaign development planning and strategy. A comprehensive database quantifying these activities' number, scope, and scale, together with qualitative assessments of capabilities and vulnerabilities in the evidence, will inform network assessments and scenario-specific play and analysis.

2. U.S. policymakers and senior warfighters should do the same, seeking additional insights from the intelligence community and federally funded research and development centers on how China’s leadership assesses the PLA’s readiness for great power conflict. Understanding how senior Chinese Communist Party policymakers evaluate the experience of the PLA as a factor in deciding to use military force is a key component of designing the U.S. approach to deterrence.

Analysis: The United States focuses on obtaining Chinese military intelligence, especially from the perspective of high-level officials. If this goal is to be achieved routinely, it will deploy a spy network and buy it (Note, the US spy network in China was cracked in 2010-2012, and More than 30 informants have been severely punished. According to the recent public speech of the US Central Intelligence Agency, the US confirmed that the US intelligence network in China was destroyed, and at the same time, indicated that the US has reorganized the intelligence network in China)

The chapters of the report are very detailed and are omitted except for Chapter 9

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 History Lessons: Experience, Training, and Change

Chapter 3 Combat Models and Military Training

Chapter 4 Factors Affecting Training Decisions

5 Definition and Classification of Experience

Chapter 6 US Experience and Training

Chapter 7 Experience and Training in China

Chapter 8 The Influence of Experience and Other Factors on Training

Analysis: Chapters 1-8 mainly introduce in detail the military theories, actual combat, and final results of different countries in different historical stages, and also cite military books written by military writers from different countries as well as officially announced military policies and documents comparative analysis and research

Chapter 9 Conclusions and Implications

The change and adaptation of any military organization is a complex, difficult process, full of uncertainties, often leading to results that do not meet the original expectations. The factors that spark these calls for change—including the emergence of new technologies, foreign military innovations, and major failures—may be well understood by a country's political and military leaders. The ability to effect change often depends on the determination and skill of these leaders to navigate complex political, economic, social, and cultural dynamics that can limit the possibility of significant change. Likewise, the military's success may hinder its ability to adapt because of the belief that current models and practices do not need to adapt following past successes. In either case, direct and indirect experience are central factors in how political and military leaders identify the need for change and develop plans to implement new policies and programs.

The examples provided in this report illustrate these complexities. When national leaders' rule and relative power in the international system are under immediate threat, willingness to change is often insufficient to determine the success of change.

In the nineteenth century, China, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire faced significant internal and external challenges that prompted their leaders to act; however, many factors limited their ability to adapt and implement the foreign business models they pursued.

Similar problems emerged later in the Egyptian and Iraqi examples. In each case, competing political priorities, social conditions, and cultural realities created problems that needed to be more complex to resolve or required policy solutions that the political leaders were unwilling to consider. In contrast, in the case of the Meiji period in Japan,

Political and military leaders in Israel, India, Singapore, and Cuba could either make significant changes to state institutions or build relationships and pursue pragmatic models that fit social and cultural realities.

These examples demonstrate the importance of experience (whether recent or historical) in shaping organizational responses and determining the success of these desired reforms.

During his tenure as a military adviser in the Middle East, the Soviet adviser learned how deeply entrenched the military experience of Egypt and Iraq under British colonial rule was. Likewise, long-term empirical influences from party or revolutionary politics, foreign military sales relations, alliances, and ancient combat experience play an important role in many aspects of military reform, especially in training.

Operational models add to this complexity as militaries attempt to adopt derivative models.

Preparing for Great Power Conflict: How Experience Shapes U.S. and Chinese Military Training, Assumptions, and Sociocultural Conditions That May Not Be Applicable or Difficult to Coordinate Within Their Respective Organizations and Agencies.

These realities are perhaps the most striking contrast between the U.S. military and the PLA today, as both adapt to the challenges of great-power conflict. The U.S. military operates primarily within a system of its creation, developed from its own experience and based on a set of political, cultural, and social rules, political and military relations, etc. This observation should not be interpreted as a relative value or effectiveness statement. It is argued that the modes of operation in most Western militaries are familiar and require relatively little compromise of political, social, or cultural norms to function effectively.

The situation in the PLA is markedly different and potentially more complex, as it seeks to create an informationized military based on elements of three existing modes of warfare: Soviet and Russian, Western or NATO, and People's War. The PLA's inexperience in combat has made these adaptations more difficult since the last major conflict in 1979 and its reliance on indirect experience. Furthermore, some conflicting assumptions and underlying principles behind these three models make coordinating and adapting them a significant challenge for the PLA. This factor has limited the success of their reforms in many areas, particularly training.

The achievements of the United States and its allies in combat since the first Gulf War led the PLA to seek to emulate key elements of the Western operational model—a greater emphasis on tactical proficiency, jointness, initiative, transparency, and adaptive decision-making— This is understandable. The CCP’s main difficulty in its military modernization efforts has been coordinating and instilling these attributes in a party force based on the conscript model, which continued to be dominated by ground force commanders. The CCP and PLA have failed to reconcile the need for greater innovation, creativity, and initiative with demands for party loyalty and orthodoxy.

The findings of this report have several implications for how U.S. policymakers and commanders should view the role of experience in the U.S. military and what this means for U.S. readiness for future great power conflicts. The first implication is that a key advantage is a learning system within the U.S. military that helps it take lessons learned and distill those lessons into updated operational concepts and training. This discussion focuses on the operational use of the United States and its allies rather than the lack of success of the United States' strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beijing recognizes the value of the former and views the latter as a pitfall to avoid in its strategic decision-making.

Conclusions and implications are largely embodied in a training infrastructure that is second to none. China has attempted to replicate aspects of the system, but its efforts are still in their infancy for several reasons. The most prominent reason for the success of the U.S. learning system is the enormous effort that each Service has made to capture the lessons and experience gained from combat operations and ensure that these lessons are incorporated into training and retained. The U.S. military has also demonstrated a willingness to adapt its training to changes in the security environment, failures or shortcomings, and new technologies and concepts of operations. Ultimately, one of the most important and enduring advantages the U.S. military enjoys is the quality of its training and the ability to update it to adapt to changing conditions and threats.

The second key impact is based on the quality of personnel and the effectiveness of the volunteer army.

Several military examples in this report demonstrate that reserve or conscript armies can be effective and achieve the proficiency required to carry out highly complex operations and missions; the militaries of Israel and Singapore are prime examples. However, in recent decades the most successful conscript armies have faced significant, sometimes existential threats to their existence and survival—such as Israel and its Arab neighbors, Singapore and Malaysia, and Indonesia. Other examples include Taiwan and South Korea. The modalities of these units vary, including periods of compulsory service and designated reserves. While some of these countries' views on compulsory military service are changing (Taiwan, for example, has attempted to develop its volunteer army), every country needs a high-quality, full-time, professional cadre in peacetime. What these countries have in common is a widely shared perception of threat and a widespread belief that the military as an institution plays a key role in shaping national identity.

One of the major challenges the PLA has faced in recent decades has been the issue of reliability.

Reliability includes political loyalty—a major element of PLA reliability—and other issues related to work style, motivation, and willingness to comply with institutional guidelines and directives. When asked by the Chinese state, the question of whether the PLA would go to war was one of four concerns Xi described as his top concern for the PLA in a 2017 speech. The PLA's inexperience in combat, the development of "peacetime habits" (i.e., a negative experience), and concerns about the reliability of rank-and-file soldiers are compounded by the continued reliance on conscripts to fill ranks. Therefore, the PLA emphasizes political work, ensuring that training is aimed at improving proficiency and maintaining loyalty and reliability.

The problem is not new to the U.S. military, as evidenced by concerns over hollow forces that emerged in the 1970s. However, the U.S. military has not had to address such issues since adopting the Volunteer Army. In addition to the technology and combat capabilities provided by the Volunteers, the U.S. military has proven to be extremely reliable in many ways. Thus, the ability of the U.S. military to sustain a volunteer force is a distinct advantage as long as the system is sustainable.

Analysis: This chapter has been described very clearly.

Dr. LI JIN WEI

20230731

The author is an international relations expert and a Harvard scholar