Digital Commons @ NDU National Defense University
Not a member yet
916 research outputs found
Sort by
China\u27s Strategic Support Force: A Force for a New Era
No full textIn late 2015, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) initiated reforms that have brought dramatic changes to its structure, model of warfighting, and organizational culture, including the creation of a Strategic Support Force (SSF) that centralizes most PLA space, cyber, electronic, and psychological warfare capabilities. The reforms come at an inflection point as the PLA seeks to pivot from land-based territorial defense to extended power projection to protect Chinese interests in the “strategic frontiers” of space, cyberspace, and the far seas. Understanding the new strategic roles of the SSF is essential to understanding how the PLA plans to fight and win informationized wars and how it will conduct information operations. The SSF combines assorted space, cyber, electronic, and psychological warfare capabilities from across the PLA services and its former General Departments. In addition to expected efficiency gains from this approach, the SSF was created to build new synergies between disparate capabilities that enable specific types of strategic information operations (IO) missions expected to be decisive in future wars. Despite a lack of transparency and the fact that the SSF is still in transition, a coherent picture has emerged of how the SSF’s components fit together and the strategic roles and missions they are intended to fulfill.
The SSF reports to the Central Military Commission (CMC) and oversees two co-equal, semi-independent branches: the Space Systems Department, which leads a space force responsible for space operations, and the Network Systems Department, which leads a cyber force responsible for information operations. The Space Systems Department is largely built around elements of the former General Armament Department and now controls nearly every aspect of PLA space operations, including space launch and support; telemetry, tracking, and control; information support; and space warfare. This appears to resolve previous PLA bureaucratic power struggles over responsibility for space missions. The Network Systems Department is built around the former General Staff Department 3rd Department and incorporates all strategic IO units in the PLA, including those responsible for cyber warfare, electronic warfare, psychological warfare, and technical reconnaissance. This centralization addresses longstanding challenges in operational coordination between the PLA’s cyber espionage and cyber attack forces. Below the strategic level, the Network Systems Department shares operational- and tactical-level missions with units under the services and regional theater commands. The PLA has thus far pursued a “bricks, not clay” approach to the creation of the SSF. Instead of building the organization from scratch, the PLA has renamed, resubordinated, or moved existing organizations and their component parts and then redefined their command relationships.
The SSF has two primary roles: strategic information support and strategic information operations. The SSF’s strategic information support role entails centralizing technical intelligence collection and management, providing strategic intelligence support to theater commands, enabling PLA power projection, supporting strategic defense in the space and nuclear domains, and enabling joint operations. The SSF’s strategic IO role involves the coordinated employment of space, cyber, and electronic warfare to “paralyze the enemy’s operational system-of-systems” and “sabotage the enemy’s war command system-of-systems” in the initial stages of conflict. The SSF improves the PLA’s ability to conduct information operations by integrating multiple disciplines of information warfare into a unified force, integrating cyber espionage and offense, unifying information warfare campaign planning and force development, and unifying responsibilities for command and control of information operations. The SSF also appears to have incorporated elements of the PLA’s psychological and political warfare missions, a result of a subtle yet consequential PLA-wide reorganization of China’s political warfare forces. This may portend a more operational role for psychological operations in the future.
The PLA reforms have substantially altered the command context for many of the missions now under the SSF, redefining longstanding organizational relationships and creating new responsibilities across the PLA command bureaucracy. The reforms dissolved the four general departments and created an expanded Central Military Commission, including a new Joint Staff Department (JSD) with responsibility for supervising joint operations. The CMC now oversees a dual command structure where services are responsible for force construction and five theater commands are responsible for conventional joint operations in their respective regions. The SSF and Rocket Force fall outside this bifurcated arrangement, maintaining responsibility for both their own force construction and strategic operations. The PLA has created a new force-wide structure under the JSD for managing cyber and electronic warfare missions. Along with the creation of the SSF, this framework aims to institutionalize the PLA’s longstanding goal of “integrated network and electronic warfare.” The exact division of responsibilities between the JSD and SSF remains unclear, including how the PLA will integrate SSF espionage and offense-oriented cyber operations with CMC management of the PLA’s cyber defense mission. The SSF has been entrusted with technical reconnaissance capabilities supporting operations, but not with intelligence capabilities supporting strategic decisionmaking. In context, this reform gives the PLA more latitude to move away from its army-dominated past and direct intelligence resources toward critical operational needs.
The PLA reforms can be compared to U.S. reforms after the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, which were similarly aimed at transforming a peacetime military structure toward one more optimized for joint warfare. The SSF is partly modeled on U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), with modifications reflecting China’s unique approach and challenges. The PLA’s decision to construct the SSF as a separate service rather than a joint force construct like USSTRATCOM was ostensibly driven by lessons learned from observing foreign militaries and is intended to avoid redundancies in force development and counterproductive rivalries for funding and resources. Unlike U.S. Cyber Command, the SSF’s Network Systems Department (the closest comparable organization in the PLA) is responsible for a much broader range of operations, including kinetic, cyberspace, space, electromagnetic, and psychological operations. Questions remain about how the SSF will integrate its cyber espionage and attack missions, which have historically been separated. Integration will require developing new strategy and doctrine on the use of force in cyberspace without the benefit of substantive operational experience or robust real-world case studies.
The creation of the SSF heralds a new era for China’s strategic posture, both in terms of the PLA’s preparations for fighting and winning informationized wars and its shift to projecting power farther from China’s shores. The SSF embodies the evolution of Chinese military thought about information as a strategic resource in warfare, recognizing both the role it plays in empowering forces and vulnerabilities that result from reliance on information systems. The SSF’s responsibility for both information support and information operations is prescient, enabling more rapid adaptation as China shifts from reliance on asymmetric capabilities as a weaker power to contending with adversaries on more symmetric terms as a near-peer competitor. The consolidation of information operations under the SSF could act as a limiting factor for the development of service space, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities necessary for tactical warfighting needs. It remains an open question how the SSF will manage conflicting or overlapping responsibilities between its space and cyber forces. Force integration at lower organizational and administrative layers is challenging, and deficiencies in integration may impede the SSF’s ability to integrate its in-house space and cyber missions as well as its coordination with theater commands and other entities. The SSF’s ability to execute its envisioned roles will depend in large part on the PLA’s ability to address weaknesses in its broader organizational culture, including a historical emphasis on top-down control and distrust of bottom-up decisionmaking.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/china-strategic-perspectives/1006/thumbnail.jp
United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Environmental Sustainability
No full textUnited Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKO) are deployed to create, maintain, and secure peace in countries and regions struggling with violence and war. The environmental sustainability of UNPKO mission sites is not essential to the purpose of each deployment, but good sustainability practices can benefit the mission, host nation, troop-contributing countries, and the global environment. As a major contributor to UNPKO efforts, the United States has a direct interest in improving the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of each mission.
This paper identifies gaps in sustainability practices at local and organizational levels and recommends an increased focus on sustainability practices that can benefit the mission, host nation, troopcontributing countries, and the environment.
The United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL) is a long-term mission, likely to be in place for at least another five years. Investments in active technologies such as solar energy and electric vehicles are already paying dividends. Expansion of these programs, as well as standardized environmental awareness training and improvements to UNIFIL’s water management practices would enhance the sustainability of the mission.
The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) is a relatively recent mission, staffed with a high proportion of illiterate peacekeepers, in a politically unstable country with a harsh natural environment. Although required by Security Council resolution to manage its environmental impact, MINUSMA lacks the financial resources, manpower and timeline to invest in complex technologies with up-front cost. To comply with its environmental mandate, the mission should implement short-term, passive measures to improve water management and solar/thermal protection, as well as standardized environmental awareness training. If the situation in Mali stabilizes and MINUSMA is extended to a longer mandate, then the mission should follow the lead of UNIFIL and implement active technologies that are environmentally friendly and will save money over the life of the equipment.
All of these recommendations can be applied, to some extent, to all UNPKO deployments. UN headquarters should take the lead in standardizing environmental training, technology and practices for all UNPKO missions. Cost-benefit calculations will always be important, but the overall benefit of good sustainability practices will extend to people and the environment from the local to the global level.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/defense-tech-papers/1000/thumbnail.jp
Joint Force Quarterly 91 (4th Quarter, October 2018)
No full texthttps://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/jfq-full-issue/1022/thumbnail.jp
North Korea\u27s Strategic Culture and Its Evolving Nuclear Strategy
No full textThis book chapter, published in Crossing Nuclear Thresholds: Leveraging Sociocultural Insights into Nuclear Decisionmaking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), assesses how North Korea’s peculiar strategic culture might impact its decisions over nuclear doctrine and command and control arrangements, should Pyongyang continue its drive for an operational nuclear weapons capability.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/wmdcenter-books/1006/thumbnail.jp
Joint Force Quarterly 90 (3rd Quarter, July 2018)
No full texthttps://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/jfq-full-issue/1023/thumbnail.jp
Joint Force Quarterly 89 (2nd Quarter, April 2018)
No full texthttps://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/jfq-full-issue/1024/thumbnail.jp
Book Review: The End of Strategic Stability?: Nuclear Weapons and the Challenge of Regional Rivalries
No full textThe term “strategic stability” originated from the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. It referred to the idea that, despite their global competition, Washington and Moscow had a vested self-interest in establishing a stable, balanced deterrent relationship between their respective military forces and avoiding nuclear war. Reducing incentives for nuclear arms racing or launching a preemptive nuclear strike thus became central organizing principles for Cold War diplomacy and the pursuit of superpower detente.
Despite decades of talks, however, a fully realized and jointly shared understanding of strategic stability proved elusive. Both parties agreed strategic stability was an important end state, but neither could agree on a concrete definition of the term. As Adam N. Stulberg and Lawrence Rubin discuss in their introduction to this edited volume, this phenomenon persists in the Great Power competitions and regional rivalries of today. The concept of strategic stability remains a touchstone for scholars and policy makers attempting to understand the complex role played by nuclear weapons in contemporary international affairs. But it also remains devilishly difficult to define, negotiate, and implement between today’s nuclear rivals.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/wmdcenter-books/1008/thumbnail.jp
Alternative North Korean Nuclear Futures
No full textThis chapter, published in Alternative East Asian Nuclear Futures, Volume I: Military Scenarios, takes stock of what we know about North Korea’s nuclear motivations, capabilities, and ambitions to explore where it’s been and where it might be headed over the next 20 years. Drawing on available evidence, it maps one path it may take and explores what that path might mean for the shape, size, and character of North Korea’s future arsenal.https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/wmdcenter-books/1007/thumbnail.jp