The centrality of unit training to military effectiveness is widely recognized. As has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout history, a well-trained military unit will almost always outperform a poorly trained unit in battle, no matter which side is more numerous or better equipped. The challenge for the researcher is identifying objectively measurable characteristics that distinguish a well-trained military from a poorly trained one. The most obvious and commonly used measure is the amount of time spent training. Without question, for a unit or individual to reach a given level of proficiency, a certain minimum amount of training time will be required. However, simply logging a specified amount of training time does not guarantee that a given level of proficiency will be achieved. More important than the amount of time spent training is the quality of the training that occurs during that time. As one example, number of flying hours is a commonly used measure of aircraft crew proficiency. But a training mission that consists simply of an aircraft navigating to a fixed point, conducting a single action (e.g., a simulated bombing run or fighter engagement), and then returning to base does not provide nearly as much training as a mission of shorter duration that presents a flight crew with multiple challenging situations in the course of a single flight.

A review of the extant literature on military training did not uncover any explicit generalizations about the characteristics of effective training. Analysis of publications of the U.S. military and related sources, however, reveals a number of implicit beliefs about the characteristics of an effective training regime. According to these publications, effective military training has the following characteristics:

• Unit commanders have primary responsibility for training. Armed forces exist to conduct military operations. When not actively conducting military operations, their primary mission is to be prepared to conduct such operations when called upon. Ensuring that the unit is prepared, therefore, must be the primary responsibility of the unit commander. If a unit's commander is not the person with ultimately responsibility for the unit's training, it is unlikely that the unit will be well trained.

• Training is intensive. The more actual training and the less idle time that occurs during a training period, the more effective the training period will be.

• […]

The importance of organizational culture to organizational performance has become widely recognized in recent years, and this relationship unquestionably applies to military organizations as much as to any other type of organization. Theorists on organizational culture conceive of it as a multilayered phenomenon. At the surface level it is exhibited in observable behaviors and physical artifacts (such as the layout of an organization's facilities or how they are decorated). Underlying these observable behaviors and artifacts are norms and values that are shared by members of the organization. Underlying these norms and values, in turn, are a set of assumptions that are also shared by members of the organization but are often not consciously recognized.

There is no universally recognized set of cultural characteristics that have been identified as key to organizational success. Indeed, which characteristics are most important depends on the specific circumstances of the organization – that is, its goals, the environment in which it operates, and so on. Two widely used methodologies, however, one developed by Cameron and Quinn and one developed by Denison, focus on the norms-and-values level of culture. Both methodologies group values that have been identified as associated with organizational effectiveness into four clusters. The four clusters represent the degree to which the organizational culture is internally focused or externally focused and the degree to which it emphasizes stability and control or flexibility and discretion.

Although there are slight differences, the four clusters of values used by the two methodologies are largely similar to each other. One cluster consists of values associated with participation and collaboration in the organization. These include the importance of teamwork, of the welfare of individuals within the organization, of developing the capabilities of individuals within the organization, of the organization's mission, of involving all members of the organization to some degree in generating new ideas and making decisions, and of loyalty to the organization. A second cluster of values consists of those associated with consistency and predictability. These include the importance of following established rules and procedures, of efficiency, of coordinating activities within the organization, of smooth operations, and of reliability and dependability. A third cluster consists of values associated with mission accomplishment.

Differences in personnel quality can have dramatic effects on military capability. This is illustrated by an experiment that was conducted at the U.S. Army's National Training Center (NTC) a few years ago. The NTC maintains a dedicated “Opposing Force” that, in simulated battles, routinely defeats the visiting units that deploy to the NTC for training, largely because of its familiarity with the terrain, scenario parameters, and so on. When a visiting commander was allowed to create a battalion entirely out of high-performing soldiers and officers, however, his unit was able to defeat the Opposing Force in every simulated battle.

Personnel quality is a function both of the innate abilities of individuals (intelligence, intuition, work ethic, etc.) and of the knowledge they acquire through experience, formal training, and so on. Studies of the U.S. military have found that personnel who are above average in innate ability (as measured by Armed Forces Qualification Test scores) perform significantly better in a variety of military tasks – such as tank and air defense simulations, making communications systems operational, and maintaining equipment – than personnel who are below average in innate ability, even when controlling for other factors such as training and experience. Training and experience are important, too, however. Multiple studies have found that experienced personnel are anywhere from 25 percent to ten times more productive than first-term personnel in a variety of different military specialties. Studies of naval pilots showed that those with the most lifetime flying hours (forty-five hundred to fifty-five hundred hours) were three times less likely to make an unsatisfactory landing attempt on an aircraft carrier, up to twice as accurate in marine bombing exercises, and only a fifth as likely to be “killed” in simulated air-to-air combat as compared to pilots with the least lifetime flying hours (five hundred hours).

Thus, quality of personnel is an important aspect of any military. Since the late 1990s, however, its importance for the PLA has steadily increased, for two main reasons. First, the modernization of the weaponry of the PLA is transforming it from a force in which the only piece of equipment many of its personnel needed to know how to operate was a rifle, into one in which growing numbers of personnel must be capable of operating and maintaining a variety of modern vehicles, weapon systems, computers, communications devices, and sensors.

As recently as the late 1990s, China's military, known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA), was being described as a “junkyard army” or “the world's largest military museum.” Aside from being equipped primarily with weapon systems based on 1950s Soviet designs, the PLA's combat doctrine was also outmoded, its training was lackadaisical, and its personnel were poorly educated and led. Indeed, the primary focus of the PLA was not on conducting military operations but on making money from a wide range of commercial operations.

Changes since that time have been rapid. Today China's defense industries are now producing weapon systems comparable to the M1 Abrams tanks, Aegis destroyers, and F-15 and F-16 fighter aircraft that are the mainstays of the U.S. military. In 2007, China tested a ground-launched missile that intercepted one of China's own weather satellites, making it only the third nation (after the United States and Soviet Union) to demonstrate the capability to destroy a satellite in orbit. In 2011, while U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates was in Beijing for meetings with China's leadership, China conducted a test flight of an advanced stealth fighter that looks remarkably like those recently developed by the United States.

In addition to modernizing its weaponry since the late 1990s, moreover, the PLA has revised its combat doctrine, upgraded its training, personnel, and leadership, and divested itself of its business interests. All of this progress has been accompanied by a massive increase in defense spending. In 1998, China's official defense budget was $11.3 billion. Beijing's announced defense budget for 2014 was $132 billion. If these trends continue, how powerful will the PLA be in the future? Will its military capabilities soon rival or surpass those of the United States? Or is the U.S. military edge over China so great that it will take decades for the PLA to catch up?

The answers to these questions are of more than just abstract interest. Although China's economy is increasingly intertwined with that of the rest of the world, China has territorial disputes with many countries in Asia and is becoming increasingly assertive regarding its claims. Most significantly, China claims that Taiwan, which has been politically independent from the mainland since 1949, is part of Chinese territory, and Beijing asserts that it has a right to use force to incorporate the island under its governance.

This study has proposed a seven-dimensional model of military capability comprising doctrine, organizational structure, equipment, personnel, training, logistics, and organizational culture. For each dimension it has identified a set of criteria by which the capability of a military in that dimension can be assessed. Using this model and these criteria, the capabilities of the Chinese military were assessed for two periods: the years around 2000 and the years around 2010. The amount of progress between 2000 and 2010 was then used to estimate the Chinese military's capabilities in each dimension in 2020.

The overall finding of the study is that the Chinese military has made progress in all seven dimensions, but that progress in some dimensions has been significantly greater than in others. Specifically, by 2020, the quality of the Chinese military's doctrine, equipment, personnel, and training will likely be approaching, to varying degrees, those of the U.S. and other Western militaries. Critical weaknesses, on the other hand, will remain in organizational structure, logistics, and organizational culture. In particular, although the Chinese military has adopted a doctrine of maneuver and indirection, it has neither the organizational structure nor the organizational culture required to effectively implement it. Thus, although the Chinese military may have what is on paper a modern and appropriate doctrine in 2020, it will likely be unable to implement its doctrine as written, thus weakening what would otherwise be an area of relative strength. As result, during a conflict, the Chinese military could find itself having to revert to a relatively static, direct engagement-based approach that would be unable to make full use of the capabilities of its equipment and personnel.

Despite the weaknesses that are likely to persist in the Chinese military in 2020, analysis of two plausible conflict scenarios involving China and the United States suggests that defeating China in these scenarios could nonetheless be difficult and costly for the United States. This is a result of the geographic advantages China would enjoy in such a conflict as well as the capabilities of specific systems the Chinese military has chosen to acquire, including short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles, supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, and long-range fighter aircraft.

Although the other contributors to military capability assessed in this study are important, quality and quantity of weaponry cannot be ignored. In 2013, for example, the U.S. Defense Department spent 31 percent of its budget developing and acquiring new weapon systems. Even if one regarded this proportion as excessive, few would argue that developing and acquiring new weapon systems was completely unjustified.

The challenge is to develop a methodology for assessing the quality of a military's weaponry in aggregate. One approach would be to simply total the numbers of each type of major weapon system a military possesses. The disadvantage of such an approach would be that it would not account for qualitative differences between different of weapon systems. Using this system, a 1950s-era main battle tank would be regarded as equivalent to late-twentieth-century main battle tank.

During the Cold War, the U.S. Army developed a system called Weapon Effectiveness Index/Weighted Unit Value (WEI/WUV). This system calculated an overall Weapon Effectiveness Index (WEI) for each weapon based on its technical characteristics (rate of fire, maximum effective range, thickness of its armor, road speed, ground pressure, etc.). For each unit, an aggregate value, called the Weighted Unit Value (WUV), could then be calculated by multiplying the WEIs of each type of weapon the unit possessed by the number of that type of weapon the unit possessed and computing a sum weighted according to the category of each weapon (small arms, tanks, antitank missiles, artillery, armed helicopters, etc.). This approach had several drawbacks, including the apparent subjectivity involved in assigning the weights for different technical characteristics of a weapon system as well as to different categories of weapons, and the fact that it only applied to ground forces, not air forces or naval forces. In any case the U.S. government does not appear to have released WEI/WUV scores since 1979, before many of the weapon systems in use in the PLA in 2000 and later entered service.

The approach taken in this chapter falls between simply counting numbers of each type of major weapon system and the WEI/WUV system in its complexity. Each major category of weapon (e.g., main battle tanks) is subdivided into a small number of subcategories that can be regarded as qualitatively different from each other.

Strategy and tactics play a key role in determining victory and defeat. In 1940, when the German military decisively defeated the combined forces of Britain and France even though the material capabilities of the British and French armies were arguably equal or superior to those of the Germans, this was in large part because of the strategy and tactics employed by the German military as compared to the French and British militaries. More recently the ability of U.S.-led forces to defeat the Iraqi insurgency beginning in 2006, after three years of futile efforts, was due not to improvements in the weaponry of the coalition forces but to a change in strategy and tactics.

A strategy is an overall plan for winning a war as a whole or a campaign within the war. Tactics are the methods used to win individual battles and engagements. The optimal strategy and tactics for any given war, campaign, or battle always depend on the specific circumstances – the objectives of the operation, the capabilities of the two sides, the geography, what the other side is doing, and so on. However, most militaries have a set of principles that they use to guide the selection of strategy and tactics. These principles are based on understandings about what methods were most effective in past wars as well as beliefs about what is most likely to be effective in contemporary conflicts, given changes in technology and other aspects of warfare. The term for these principles is doctrine. Sometimes militaries codify their doctrine in publications that they make available to their personnel, but in other cases doctrine is purely an oral tradition passed on from senior personnel to their juniors. In the U.S. and Chinese militaries doctrine is codified in official publications, although in each military there are undoubtedly also unofficial doctrinal principles that exist as purely oral traditions. Even when there is standardized official doctrine, moreover, different militaries treat it differently. In the U.S. military, doctrine is regarded as flexible, and the commander's personal military judgment is said to take precedence over official doctrine. Other militaries are more rigid about following doctrine than the U.S. military is.

Assessing the overall military capabilities of a nation's military, as has been done in the previous seven chapters of this book, is valuable. It provides a way to compare the military power of that nation to that of the other nations of the world, and the overall military power of different nations affects the calculations and decisions of national governments and leaders. The actual outcomes of military conflicts, however, depend not just on the overall military capabilities of the combatants, but also on the specific nature and location of the conflict (as well as difficult-to-predict factors such as the competency of top military and civilian leaders, intelligence breakthroughs, and plain luck). Thus, in 1973 the world's most powerful military conceded defeat to a much less powerful military, in part because the nature of the conflict prevented the United States from bringing its full military capabilities to bear against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In addition to assessing a nation's overall military power, therefore, analyzing specific conflict scenarios in which that military power might be employed is also important. The purpose of such analysis is not to predict the outcome of a future conflict, but rather to provide a means of assessing how effectively the nation would be able to bring its military power to bear in a particular conflict. Such assessments can assist in understanding the calculus of different nations with regard to the issues over which the conflict could occur, as well as in understanding what changes to the capabilities of the participants in the conflict are likely to have the greatest effect on the outcome.

The number of imaginable conflict scenarios involving China is large, but it is not practical to analyze all of them. Instead, this chapter examines two scenarios that, at the time of this writing, appear to be among the more likely scenarios involving China. The first scenario entails a Chinese attempt to invade and conquer Taiwan in the face of U.S. intervention on Taiwan's behalf. The second scenario entails a war over the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea that involves China on one side and treaty allies the United States and the Philippines on the other.

The term logistics covers a wide range of activities and capabilities, some of which are more closely related to each other than others. They may be grouped into the following categories:

1. 1. Supply. Supply entails providing combat forces with the fuel, ammunition, spare parts, equipment, food, water, and other materials they need to operate. It also entails providing other logistics organizations, such as those responsible for repair and maintenance, mobility, engineering, and health care, with the tools, equipment, spare parts, blood, and other materials they need to perform their functions.

2. 2. Repair and maintenance. Repair and maintenance entails keeping weapon systems, vehicles, and other equipment in good working condition as well as repairing them, either in the field or at rear area depots, when they become damaged.

3. 3. Mobility. Mobility refers to moving combat and support units from one location to another (when such movement involves other than the organic movement capabilities of the moving units, such as the ability of a tracked vehicle to move cross-country or the ability of a soldier to walk). Note that many of the assets used for mobility can also be used for performing other logistics functions, such as delivering supplies, moving damaged equipment to rear area depots for repair and returning it when repaired, and evacuating injured and dead personnel to medical facilities and morgues.

4. 4. Engineering. Engineering includes activities such as constructing and repairing roads, railroads, bridges, airfields, seaports, base camps, and other facilities.

5. 5. Health services. Health services include both keeping personnel healthy (through vaccinations, regular examinations, etc.) and treating the wounded, injured, and sick.

6. 6. Other logistic services. Other logistic services include preparing food, providing hygiene services, operating base camps, and so on.

A common saying in military circles is that “Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics; professionals talk about logistics.” Thus, the importance of logistics to the success of military operations is well recognized. As in the case of training, however, students of military affairs do not appear to have developed a general theory of the characteristics of good logistical support. The issue is further complicated by the diversity of activities included under the rubric of logistics. The approach taken in this chapter, therefore, is simply to attempt to assess the principal factors that can affect the PLA's capability to conduct each of the five main types of logistics support listed above (supply, repair and maintenance, mobility, engineering, and health services).