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4 March 2023

Reflecting on One Year of War: Is China’s Military Learning Anything from Ukraine?​

Dr. Joel Wuthnow

A year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we still don’t have good insight into what China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is distilling from that conflict and applying to its own major contingency—forceful unification with Taiwan. Despite the occasional newspaper commentary and a handful of articles in Chinese defense industry publications, mostly focused on specific weapons being used on both sides of the conflict, we lack an authoritative Chinese post-mortem on the early phases of Russian operations and a sense of how those observations might be influencing PLA training and capabilities. There’s good reason for this reticence: any such analysis would require the PLA to explain the reasons for Russia’s failure to achieve its initial war aims, undermining China’s pretense of respect for their Russian brethren.

The absence of direct evidence, however, creates an opportunity to revisit our assumptions that the PLA might be adapting from the Russian experience in the first place. Such an outcome is only one of three possibilities. China’s military could also be learning the wrong lessons – such as assuming that U.S. leaders and our allies can be easily deterred through nuclear signaling at the outset of a conflict – or downplaying the need to learn from the Russian by overstating their own proficiency and discounting the prospects that Taiwan will fight as vigorously as Ukraine. None of these possibilities are particularly reassuring for Taiwan, which could be faced with a revitalized PLA or one prone to strategic blunders.

The first possibility is that Ukraine has been an important “battle lab” for the PLA, just as the Gulf War spurred the PLA to reconsider its outmoded Cold War era doctrine. Based on Russia’s surprising failure to achieve a rapid victory in the opening months of the conflict, and Ukraine’s success in employing a combination of new and older technology, the PLA might be inspired to take a closer look at its own vulnerabilities and correct flaws that otherwise might have gone unnoticed. In a potential nod in this direction, Xi Jinping’s speech to the 20th Party Congress in October called for an improved “command system for joint operations,” and enhanced “reconnaissance and early warning, joint strikes, battlefield support, and integrated logistics support.”

The Ukraine conflict might also redouble the PLA’s commitment to succeeding in another area where Russia failed—achieving information superiority. It is notable that Chinese trade publications have produced a number of articles on various aspects of the information war in Ukraine, including electronic warfare, intelligence, and perception management, ruminating on their applications in a contingency closer to home. There is a particularly rich vein of PLA writings assessing Starlink, which has provided invaluable communications support for Ukraine. Chinese assessments suggest that similar systems could not only complicate their ability to impose an information blackout on Taiwan but also provide the United States with more resilient communications across the Pacific. Adapting to such realities could become intertwined with the PLA’s 2027 modernization goal under which, according to U.S. officials, Xi has required the PLA to improve its ability to conduct cross-Strait operations.

A second possibility is that the PLA could draw questionable inferences about its prospects for minimizing the scope of U.S. and allied intervention. Since President Clinton sent two carriers toward Taiwan in March 1996, the PLA has assumed that any conflict over Taiwan would necessarily involve the United States and thus focused on ways to defeat U.S. forces through long-range strike and non-kinetic options (such as cyber operations) against U.S. logistics and communications networks. According to a recent CSIS survey, U.S. analysts still concur that the PLA holds this view. Moreover, recent moves from Japan and the Philippines signaling an openness to supporting U.S. forces in a contingency require the PLA to imagine an even larger conflict. Such attitudes have served a deterrent function by raising the military costs and risks of a prospective conflict.

Nevertheless, Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling and subsequent U.S. and NATO decisions not to support a no-fly zone or boots on the ground might have led Chinese analysts to a different conclusion: that neither Washington nor its allies can stomach conflict with a nuclear-armed rival when its vital interests are not at stake. To make it threats more credible, Xi has instructed the PLA to build a “strong system of strategic deterrence” focused on its expanding nuclear arsenal – some elements of which are designed for regional deterrence against states such as Japan – and strategic non-nuclear systems such as hypersonic missiles. If Xi comes to doubt the likelihood of U.S. and allied intervention, he could be more likely to use force against Taiwan.

A final possibility is that China fails to absorb lessons based on a misperception of its own relative capabilities. British historian Sir Michael Howard argued that states often fail to prepare for the next war based on foreign examples; those conflicts might provide clues on “whether certain weapons and techniques are effective or not; but it is always a doubtful fix.” One reason why China might make a similar mistake is an air of overconfidence that it has engaged in more sophisticated planning than, or possesses superior military technology to, the Russians. A recent article in Shipborne Weapons, a publication of the PLA Navy’s main shipbuilder, concluded that PLA forces would be less vulnerable to counterattack than the Russians; China’s “Aegis fleet,” for instance, has more capable air defenses than the doomed Russian Black Sea flagship Moscow.

Another reason could be that the PLA understates the resolve of the defense. Ukraine has put up a courageous defense, but China could convince itself that it will meet less resistance in Taiwan. This could be a result of confidence that Beijing could buy off large parts of the Taiwan military—in one recent case, a Taiwan colonel was detained for accepting Chinese payments to stand down in the event of a conflict—or from the view that Taiwan’s insular geography increases the chances of successful coercion through an information and physical blockade, stifling popular resistance. Such confidence could lead China to minimize ongoing Taiwan defense reforms designed to embolden the public.

None of the ways in which the PLA may encounter lessons from Ukraine—digested, misguided, or ignored—should reassure Taiwan. The first avenue could spur deeper reforms and ultimately increase China’s military effectiveness, even if those changes imply a reduced appetite to use force in the immediate future. The latter two pathways involve biases in terms of overstating China’s ability to deter the United States, underestimating Taiwan’s capacity to resist, and gliding over similarities that make the Ukraine and Taiwan cases more alike than different. In concert with a new Central Military Commission composed of officers defined as much by their personal loyalty to Xi as by their professional competence, such biases could result in skewed perceptions of the costs and risks of war.

The different outcomes for China imply a broader range of responses for the United States and Taiwan. If the PLA manages to leverage Russia’s experience to improve itself, the defense will need to emphasize counters such as larger precision munitions stockpiles, more survivable delivery systems, and decentralized command and control. By contrast, if the PLA fails to adapt due to biases that make it more willing to use force, the response should focus more on shaping those perceptions. Examples include highlighting the escalation risks of nuclear saber-rattling and suggesting that a conflict would quickly engulf the whole region. In sum, we need to address the dangers of both an adversary that does adapt and a more obstinate one that has failed to learn the right lessons from the ongoing “battle lab.”

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