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The US-China competitive relationship is very complex, reaching every aspect of society, the economy, and the military. In this episode, Ken Miller talks with Dean Cheng of the U.S. Institute of Peace about China’s doctrine on information dominance and its implications for global power politics.
Dean Cheng is the Senior Advisor for the Institute of Peace and Senior Fellow at
the Potomac Institute. Ken and Dean discuss China’s approach to intelligence gathering, their long-term goal and end game, and the greater implications of the China-Taiwan conflict. They also discuss how China is capitalizing on the Russia-Ukraine War and approaching oil production in the Middle East.
To learn more about today’s topics or to stay updated on EMSO and EW developments, visit our homepage.
Creators & Guests
What is From the Crows' Nest?
Featuring interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.
Ken Miller (00:10):
Welcome to From The Crow's Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations, or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. You can follow me on Twitter @FTCNHost. Thank you for listening in this episode. I welcome Dean Cheng, senior advisor for the Institute of Peace and senior fellow at the Potomac Institute to talk about Chinese thinking on the establishment of information dominance. Before I get to the interview, I want to share with you an exciting new initiative here on From The Crow's Nest. We are going to be live-streaming our show from AOC Europe in Bonn, Germany, May 13th to 15. We are going to be live from the conference using Twitter Spaces. And how this is going to work is that each day, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of that week, May 13 to 15, we are going to air local time from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM This translates to I believe 10:00 AM to 12 noon on the East Coast.
(01:03):
And we're going to be live, and so all you have to do is go to our Twitter page @FTCNHost, follow me and you'll get prompted when we go live on air, and we're going to have special co-host, special guest. We're going to interview speakers, we're going to talk about the themes of the conference, talk to exhibitors and you can listen in, ask questions, give your opinion however you want to engage. So you can tune in anytime during those two hours and pick up what you can. You can come in and out of the programming without any problems. It's very easy to use and if this works, we can incorporate this as a regular feature at AOC events and possibly have some livestream episodes within our regular scheduled programming. So we're very excited about this. A little nervous with it being a live show, but I think it'll be fun and I think it'll be a great way to engage our audience and followers and I hope you enjoy it.
(01:55):
Without further delay, then let's get to my interview with Dean Cheng. All right, I'm here with Dean Chang. He is senior advisor for the Institute of Peace and senior fellow at the Potomac Institute with me here today to talk about Chinese thinking on the establishment of information dominance. Dean, it's great to have you here on From The Crow's Nest. Thanks for joining me.
Dean Cheng (02:14):
Thank you for having me.
Ken Miller (02:15):
I had the privilege of moderating a AOC webinar with you a couple of months ago on this topic, and I wanted to bring you in for an additional conversation on this because obviously US-China competition, it reaches every part of our society, economy, military, industrial base, you name it. You can't get away from this topic. And so I wanted to come have you start to peel back the layers of this very complex relationship and as well as the dynamics in INDOPACOM region and around the world.
(02:46):
So thank you for being on here and just to basically get started, for our listeners who might not be familiar with the US Institute for Peace, could you tell us a little bit about your role as senior advisor and what you bring to that position and the role that they're playing in this conversation?
Dean Cheng (03:01):
Well, the US Institute of Peace was founded during the Reagan administration. It was Congress's effort to balance what they perceived as Ronald Reagan's overly aggressive attitude. But in the intervening 40 years or so, what has happened is that the institute tries to explore a variety of aspects of critical relations. During the media post Cold War phase, it was about peacekeeping. Now it's obviously with China being the focus, how to think about China from a somewhat different perspective, I guess, than either state OR DOD. But they asked me to come on board because of my background in particular in Chinese security thinking, military doctrine and things because I think they also recognize that sī vīs pācem, parā bellum, right? If you want to preserve peace, be prepared for war, and certainly the PRC is prepared for conflict and war.
Ken Miller (03:56):
So you say that the PRC is prepared for war and recently our language in the US here has changed from competition with China to more conflict with China. And we understand that China is a communist country, but not all communism looks the same, just like not all capitalism. It's an operating system behind governance, economy, society. Can you help us understand a little bit about what Chinese communism looks like inside China, from the party to how it flows into everything that they are?
Dean Cheng (04:25):
Sure. So that's a good but very complex question. So I think we need to sort of start from an 80,000-foot level and we'll drill down a little bit. The first thing I keep in mind is that the Chinese Communist Party runs China, and by running China, it's not simply Republicans or Democrats running the country. The CCP permeates every part of society. There is no civil society in China. There is nothing outside the party, whether it is trade unions, whether it is religious organizations, whether it is homeowners associations, there is a party committee integrated into the management of everything down to the smallest up at the highest. And so the CCP is the actual powers that be in China. So when we look at China's ability to conduct whole of society activities, it is in no small part because the CCP is able to tell companies, to tell universities, to tell any institution that it needs to, this is what you're going to do, and woe betide an organization that tries to not cooperate.
(05:42):
The second thing to keep in mind is that the People's Liberation Army is not a national military. The PLA is a party army. It is the armed wing of that Chinese Communist Party. For your listeners, people who have served in our military, what did they do? They swore an oath to uphold, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States. Doesn't matter who is in power, that is their loyalty, the constitution. Their Chinese counterparts on the other hand have sworn an oath to uphold the rule of the CCP, which makes perfect sense because as a PLA officer, they are first and foremost a member of the CCP, because the entire military is the armed wing of the CCP, and that in turn means that the PLA one, can draw upon all the resources of the country because it basically, as part of the party, the party says to a university, to a factory, to a corporation, "Hey, the PLA needs X, you're going to provide X."
(06:45):
It's interesting because it works in reverse as well. This is why the Chinese military's cyber units would hack private companies for information, not about the F35, they did that too, but about the formula for white paint, the kind of white paint that goes into, say a clean room, or Coca-Cola's bidding plans to take over a Chinese soft drink manufacturer, not because it was a national security piece, but because the PLA would respond to party orders just like all the other institutions. Where this goes in the issue of information dominance then is again, it works both ways.
(07:26):
On the one hand, it is from the CCPs perspective, vital to maintaining information dominance at all levels at the strategic level, at the operational level, at the tactical level, because the CCPs main goal is to stay in power and knowing what is going on ahead of the other side, being able to outthink outmatch, outwit their adversaries, foreign and domestic, is a vital part of staying in power. That's information dominance. Conversely, the military is therefore also going to be employed both in gathering that information and then converting what they know into information dominance, especially at the operational and tactical level.
Ken Miller (08:11):
It seems that when it comes to this, all information is good information. One of the things that's been really impressive when you kind of watch how they go about their methodology, it's their ability to aggregate information that they're gathering that is maybe seemingly innocuous or it's obviously open source, but they're able to aggregate it and be able to analyze it and then operationalize it in some way. Could you talk a little bit how they break that down?
Dean Cheng (08:38):
I'd love to. Part of the problem there is that this is where China turns very opaque very quickly in many ways. What's interesting is that the Chinese often make their processes even harder to understand than the technical aspects. It's not like they advertise the performance parameters of a J20, but it's probably easier to figure out the J20s rough operational envelope than the decision making process ranging from how do they pick what kind of satellite to build, to how do they filter and analyze who gets what information, who can task, et cetera. What we do know is that the Chinese broad approach to intelligence gathering information gathering is very different from ours and the Soviet/Russians. We and the Russians both tended to aim for exquisite, if only we could get the head of the FBI, the head of the KGB to be our agent, then we could know all sorts of things.
(09:39):
The Chinese really are much closer to a Hoover vacuum cleaner. I mean, just picking up everything. This we think is one of the reasons why they are so emphasizing the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning is that, especially in today's world where there's literally terabytes of data floating around all the time, flowing everywhere. How do you manage that? Chinese writings make very clear, one of the key things they want AI, ML to do is to go through all of that data that we're awash in to try and find nuggets, key aspects, key information to wade through it, organize it, be in it, but not to analyze it. That's still a human function, and one of the things we also know about the Chinese in that regard is that officers in the PLA, and we think the same is true in their intelligence organizations, there's no problem with them staying in the same field, on the same subject for years and decades.
(10:40):
We have much more of an up and out system. If you want to get promoted, you serve a few years as a Navy lieutenant commander, then you become a commander and a captain, probably not even staying on the same ship, maybe not even in the same squadron. From the Chinese perspective, no, we want you to develop that depth and then you will quite likely have the same office, or the same unit, the same organization as your responsibility for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, maybe your entire career. That develops a level of expertise. It also develops an understanding of SOPs, of normal behavior, which will probably help you detect anomalies and changes.
Ken Miller (11:24):
So is this the case with say the Chinese weather balloon controversy? There seems to be a difference of opinion in terms of the amount and type of intelligence that was collected, but they were collecting a lot of information and transmitting it back real time for analysis, and you can aggregate a lot of data using AI and machine learning and gather as much if not more value. Is that accurate?
Dean Cheng (11:48):
Well, let's take a somewhat different example and then we can apply it to the weather balloons. The Chinese, we believe stole millions of records from the Office of Personnel Management, which gave them insight into the entire US federal workforce, including many people who may have retired. What other data did they collect at roughly the same time? Target, the consumer goods, yeah, the department store, they got a lot of their records. I think it was Equifax, one of the credit scoring companies. Ashley Madison, the dating service for married people, Anthem Healthcare, each of those is a bunch of fairly sensitive data. What could you assemble if you had all of that data? Could you identify not only who might be good to recruit for Chinese intelligence, but broad patterns of behavior who might have credit problems, who might have a need for money, who might be dependent on variety of different substances, et cetera? There's some interesting things you can derive. Once you have all of that data.
(12:55):
With the weather balloon, so-called weather balloon, it apparently sat for some time over sensitive sites. Now, did it necessary therefore develop a knowledge of our nuclear targeting? Probably not. Might it have picked up communications from maintenance crews? The pattern for security patrols and the response times to any kind of alert or alarm? Might it have picked up radio chatter just based upon what people were doing inside hangers that that had B52s or B2s? There's a lot of interesting information that when you add it to the data the Chinese already would've been collecting from satellites and human intelligence, ELINT, et cetera, down at that very tactical level, radio chatter among security teams, which isn't going to go more than probably a few miles just because of the strength of the radio signal, you could really develop some interesting understanding about behaviors, about like I said, response time for a ICBM field security team that could be pretty helpful.
Ken Miller (14:04):
So with the establishment of the information dominance, a lot of times in our conversation we talk US versus China, but if you look at how China is conducting this policy, you see them involved integrally in so many different regions around the world. You see them investing heavily in South America and Africa and all over the world. How does their doctrine of information dominance apply and is it much more global than it is just more or less bilateral US against China?
Dean Cheng (14:36):
Oh, it's certainly more than just bilateral. So Israeli, German, British security services have all complained in public in the news about Chinese hacking of their respective governments, of their respective communications networks. A couple of scholars up at the Naval War College have talked about how China has redirected the internet's flows to China. Essentially, imagine if you were flying to London, but your baggage wound up in London by way of Beijing. You can be pretty sure that your baggage probably got searched in the process. The Chinese have apparently been doing that to internet traffic in Europe as well.
(15:16):
One most interesting examples though was the Organization of African Unity. The Chinese donated a new headquarters building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Later after it was completed, after people were working there, they started noticing a very strange pattern in power, in the middle of the night all of a sudden there would be massive power consumption out of this building. They delved into it and it turned out that every computer in that building was squirting all of their records, everything they had done, their hard drives back to an IP location in China. Chinese response was, huh, weird. No idea how that happened and the OAU could not afford to build a new headquarters. This is Africa, this is not Wall Street. Yes, the Chinese are doing this worldwide.
Ken Miller (16:07):
So what is their end game? I want to kind of shift a little bit to what is their long-term goal because it's not just simply that they want to take control of Taiwan. I mean it has to do with their views of a successful and legitimate dynasty, and having Taiwan as an independent country or entity kind of speaks against that legitimacy of the current dynasty. Could you talk a little bit about what they're thinking is from a dynasty perspective, what their long-term plans are in terms of being a global power?
Dean Cheng (16:42):
So the Chinese actually tell us what their core interests are. Their three core interests are to keep the CCP in power, to preserve territorial integrity and national sovereignty. That's where Taiwan comes in, Xinjiang and Tibet, and to maintain economic development, because from the CCPs perspective, legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people is as much about answering the question, are you better off today than you were 10 years ago? Are your children better off today than you were when you were a child, as any of the other aspects? And that really is tied to economic development. So that's what their interest is. What is it that it's aiming for?
(17:25):
Xi Jinping has talked about the China dream and when you read what that means in Chinese, he says quite openly, the great revival of the Chinese people. China is back. Making China great again, so to speak. Returning China to its proper place in the constellation of great powers, meaning at a minimum a great power, but ideally the great power. Everything else, Taiwan, South China Sea, China-India border, technological development all feeds into this idea that China has long been the dominant power in Asia, China should be the dominant power in Asia and increasingly the world population-wise, technological innovation-wise, and that is where China belongs. And I Xi Jinping, we the CCP, that is what we are striving for. Yes, Taiwan is part of that. If we are not a unified country, how can we be a great power? But also basically overcoming things like chip sanctions, software sanctions, being able to know what other nations are doing and staying ahead of that is also fundamental to this great revival of the Chinese people.
Ken Miller (18:51):
You mentioned obviously Taiwan is a key to a unified China. How does their thinking then apply to navigation and through the South China Sea? Is that as much of an importance to their concept of a unified China and global power as Taiwan?
Dean Cheng (19:05):
I don't think its control of the South China Sea per se. What it is getting all of China's neighbors to recognize that they need to give deference to China. That basically the Filipinos, Vietnamese, Malaysians, these little countries need to understand that they're dealing with great big China and they need to just shut up and sit down and stop making claims that they have no right to do. That I think is Beijing's perspective. So the South China Sea becomes almost in a sense symbolic. We will blockade some of your islands in the South China Sea, we will build up hours, we will fortify them, we will threaten you, as they've been doing with the Vietnamese off Vietnam's coast, not even down in the Spratleys, to basically try and browbeat these countries because over the course of 5,000 years that's what's worked.
(20:03):
All of these Asian countries, for the most part have been tributary states to great big middle kingdom, central kingdom China. The other thing is for places like South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, you need to stop being allies with the United States. You need again to understand you should be looking to Beijing for your signals not to Washington, and the sooner you understand that, the less I'm going to have to hurt you. I mean it's a very to Tony Soprano's approach to international relations, nice country, you got here, nice economy, be a shame if something happened to it. And they've done that to the Philippines, they've done that to South Korea to try and force them through economic means to basically give way.
Ken Miller (20:49):
Well, and looking at it throughout the course of human history, I mean like you mentioned for 5,000 years it's been that way and really only for the last 100, a hundred plus years, has it been such a matter of the divided loyalties of countries in that region to the US because US has only been a global power since maybe the late 1800s. Does that feed into their thinking that the US global power is more of a blip than it is some sort of long historical trend?
Dean Cheng (21:19):
I like to say that the United States and China are both status quo powers. The problem is how each defines a status quo and you've hit it on the head. It is a temporal issue. Our status quo is defined by us being the major power which owns only the last 100 or so years. The Chinese status quo is defined by 5,000 years, almost all of which has seen China dominate the Asian region. But as important, the weakest period of Chinese history has also been during the last 250 or so years, the so-called century of humiliation, 1842 to 1949 is China's weakest period when it truly nearly became somebody else's colonies.
(22:07):
And so absolutely, China sees the US as an upstart in some ways. China definitely sees the US as causing Asian nations to not follow the natural order of things. And we do have a clash of approaches to international relations. We believe in ballots power politics. We also believe in rule of law at some level, we believe that countries should all have a voice to some extent China has never been a rule of law society and China has openly said big countries do small countries put up with or accept. Very different model, especially once we get out of national security to areas like international trade, territorial disputes and the like. Beijing has made very clear we are first not even among equals we are first you defer. That's not how the US has tended to operate.
Ken Miller (23:05):
So in our efforts to advance rule of law in the region and a stable balance of power, obviously freedom of navigation and trade across the region, US has a number of really strong allies in the region. And not to exclude, but obviously it includes Japan and South Korea and some of the smaller countries like the Philippines. And obviously then you get the more western style countries like Australia, New Zealand, so forth.
(23:31):
And so as Chinese power grows or say they begin to more actively pursue kind of their long-term plans to unify with Taiwan and take greater control of South China Sea, how does that affect our ability to have strategic partners in that region? If we're unable to protect Taiwan from China, what does that do to our ability to maintain strategic partnerships with South Korea and Japan, some of the other countries that are on our side. So could you talk a little bit about that kind of tenuous hold that we have with these partners in that region and why it's important for us to maintain a strong presence so that we can continue to have allies in and along China's sphere of influence?
Dean Cheng (24:21):
Well, first off, we as inheritors of the Western political tradition tend to view alliances as strengtheners, and we often openly say China doesn't have allies, therefore they're worse off. Very different view from Beijing's perspective, which historically hasn't had allies and hasn't needed them. So one of the things that the Chinese do is to attack our alliances because they are seams. Because if they can get allies to part ways with the US, even if it's just on a single issue, what does that then do to our plans? What does it do to our public debate? Because you know that if the Brits aren't there, where the Aussies aren't there for us, you will have people say, even the Brits and Aussies don't agree with this policy, why are we doing this? So we have seen the Chinese engage with weaponized tourism to try and get South Korea to flip on its decision to deploy THAAD, the theater high altitude air defense system.
(25:20):
We have seen the Chinese put a lot of pressure on Australia attacking beef exports, wine exports, iron ore exports to try and make very clear, you siding with America is to your economic detriment. Attack the alliances to disrupt the adversaries plans and political overall effort. In an ideal world, from Beijing's perspective, you would reduce American presence in the process of doing this. And we've seen this in their efforts mostly under President Duterte in the Philippines where there were real doubts about whether or not the US would be able to deploy forces there. The current president, Marcos has sort of come away from that, has aligned himself more closely with the US but even he has recently said, Hey, there's a limit to what you can do in my country as well. It's also why the Chinese have openly harassed Canadian, Australian, other countries ships and aircraft when they have been conducting a variety of tactical operations in what the Chinese consider to be their territorial air and sea space, which by the way is far more extensive than what is accepted as territorial air and sea space under international law.
(26:37):
If Taiwan becomes the center of an actual war, absolutely you should expect to see the Chinese redouble these threats to basically say, look, if you participate in a war, all bets are off. You are making yourself our enemy and there will be consequences including military ones. If Taiwan were to fall, I think that you would see an enormous fun... It would be like asking what would happen if Poland fell to Russia, what would happen to NATO? Either the conflict continues in which case we're looking at a very different world or the conflict ends, in which case those alliance structures are going to be smoldering ruins because America credibility won't be worth the paper that it's written on.
Ken Miller (27:19):
So we're about a little bit more than a year into the Russia, Ukraine war, and obviously we see China capitalizing on this in different ways. How are they approaching that conflict in terms of learning how the west fights or the global strategic implications of that war? How are they capitalizing or what lessons are they learning in terms of advancing their goals?
Dean Cheng (27:41):
So usually I work top down, but to answer this question, I'm actually going to try and go from the more specific to the more general. The PLA hasn't fought a war since 1979, so they are very careful students of other people's wars. That's been heavily influenced by us because unfortunately we fought a lot of wars, but especially with something like Ukraine, it's also going to be an influence because it's a high intensity which fortunately or unfortunate to haven't been that many of. So I think that we can see the Chinese trying to learn from the Ukraine war at a tactical level, just how hard joint operations are, how hard coordinating air and land forces are, and then trying to port that over to the even more difficult issue of an amphibious invasion across a hundred miles of some of the worst water in the world.
(28:35):
I think that the Chinese have absolutely learned, and this should really not be a surprise to anyone. Consumption rates for munitions in modern warfare is multiple times that of whatever your worst case planning was in peace time. So I think that the Chinese who have a lot of up and running hot production lines from munitions probably are putting in additional orders saying, yo, we're probably going to need even more anti-ship ballistic missiles and air-to-air missiles and artillery rockets than we had before. Looking at the issue of sanctions that the West has imposed on Russia, that's a much more mixed bag. I think everyone thought when the SWIFT, International Financial Transaction Network kicked in that Russia's economy would collapse, and what we're seeing is that it's actually soldiered on and in fact energy prices for Russian oil haven't collapsed. Russia's energy production seems to be running at about normal, partly because China's been buying so much of it.
(29:39):
But I think that the fear of devastating sanctions has probably lost its luster, which really may say to Beijing when it's time to go, if the West can't strangle the Russian economy, which by most accounts is smaller than Belgium's, do you really think they could strangle China's economy, which is the second largest in the world. And then at the broadest strategic level, I do think that the fact that the West has hung together for at least a year so far over a war that they are not directly involved in worries Beijing especially because NATO has said, we're concerned about China. But President Macron's visit this past week and where he came back and he said, Europe should not be drawn into wars and conflicts that aren't of Europe's interest and we should certainly not be American followers, I think Beijing is delighted by that. It says that there is not a clear transatlantic agreement on China, and in the event of say a Taiwan crisis, large portions of one of the few expeditionary militaries out there probably won't show up. What does that tell us?
Ken Miller (30:48):
It seems to speak to your earlier point about alliances being seams that Chinese can exploit. A statement like that does show a potential area where they could exploit that seam and then create a little bit more separation between the US and its NATO allies.
Dean Cheng (31:05):
Absolutely. And the Chinese took advantage of it and unfortunately, so did President Macron.
Ken Miller (31:10):
So another thing that was in the news recently was Saudi Arabia, some of the US relations in the Middle East, obviously with OPEC and oil production, there was some talk or possible threat of Saudi Arabia recognizing the yuan as the base for oil production. Could you talk a little bit about how China is approaching that topic of Middle East oil production?
Dean Cheng (31:33):
I think you meant the yuan, but yes. So there's a couple of pieces to this. The Saudi announcement came that it was joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization might be thinking about redominating some of the oil to the yuan or renminbi about the same time that Brazil said it would start settling its trade with China in yuan. And Malaysia said that it was sinking that it should redenominate trade with China into yuan or renminbi. So I think that first off we need to look at this as a broader global reaction and that is tied to a lot of economic issues including our inflation rate, overuse of sanctions and the application of SWIFT sanctions because that only affected dollar denominated trade. The Chinese are the world's largest importer of hydrocarbons including oil, also coal. Interestingly, they are importing oil from Saudi Arabia, also from Iran, so that was part of the reason they could broker a diplomatic deal between those two countries.
(32:34):
A lot of this is driven by the recognition that whoever the Saudis choose to use as their oil denomination, that's huge. That is a global game changer. I mean, the financial equivalent of setting off a dozen multi megaton weapons. If Saudi Arabia switched, that would have global repercussions, it would immediately affect the United States because since the 1940s essentially, we have not had to go and find somebody else's currency to pay for stuff. We could actually just print more dollars if necessary. Bad idea, but you could. If the Chinese said we're going to denominate all oil in renminbi, all of a sudden we have to go and get renminbi to import Saudi oil. If every other country then went along with that and Saudi's a huge player in this regard, then any oil we imported would in theory require us to go and find renminbi, that would be huge because other commodities would then likely switch, lithium for car batteries, copper, rare earths, which China has a huge position in.
(33:50):
So the mere talk of this should scare the pants off of American strategists because at the end of the day, whether it was World War II or the Cold War, all due credit to the Pentagon, all due credit to our service people, it was our economy that was a key factor in winning those conflicts. And this is taking a demo charge directly to the cornerstone of that pillar.
Ken Miller (34:19):
So I wanted to go back in the last few minutes that we have together here to talk more directly about information warfare and China's position on that. In your opinion, how is the US positioning in itself to counter Chinese advances in information dominance, and what are some of the things that the US is doing right? And then to follow that up, what are some of the things that they could improve upon in the coming years?
Dean Cheng (34:41):
Well, I think that's a vital part of the US services is ensuring as always that they train, equip and provide forces that are capable of supporting the war fight for INDOPACOM. What worries me is that the PLA, unlike all of the other militaries, we have confronted since the end of the Cold War, recognizes that one of the key secret sauces, if you will, for our military success has been in the electronic warfare, broadly speaking, ability to sustain C4ISR and counter C4ISR. The Iraqis, the Afghans, the Taliban, ISIS none of them really had that kind of capability.
(35:29):
But when we look at the PLA, we see that they get it and they have been fielding more and more combat support platforms that reflect the reality that they have made major investments in EW, major investments across the board, whether it's in the intelligence gathering side or the jamming side, or the countering broad range capacities. We are going to confront an adversary, whether it's over Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Senkakus, et cetera, that is going to have a range of platforms that will qualitatively probably be close to us, partly because they've stolen our plans, partly because they've observed us, partly because they have a lot of engineers to do innovation and quantitatively may outnumber us.
(36:20):
And I remember during the Cold War, the Soviets were behind us technologically, but they had a heck of a lot of electronic warfare, ground units, air units, et cetera, that would support an invasion of West Germany. What I fear is that we will see something on that order in magnitude of numbers, but whose quality may be even better, and I can only hope that we continue the investments, but more importantly, acquisition of sufficient numbers of platforms that are of high enough quality to really make the difference in keeping the Chinese from establishing that information dome.
Ken Miller (36:57):
One of the assumptions that we made in the Russia-Ukraine war was, obviously Russia's military technology is often state of the art. It's very advanced in many ways and they also have a strong electronic warfare presence. But when the fighting started, the difference in training really became... The spotlight was really put on how much better trained... Could you talk about some of the training that the Chinese military is undergoing, how that differs from Russian training and what maybe some of the lessons they're learning from the Russia-Ukraine war in terms of putting their troops in a better position from a training perspective to fight or execute military objectives in the region?
Dean Cheng (37:39):
So at the very end, literally the last day of 2015, the People's Liberation Army underwent one of the most extensive reorganization in its history, literally turned the military upside down, lots of reorganization. One aspect that it pertains here is the creation of a general department responsible for training. Basically training was now elevated to, hey, we're not kidding here. This is really important and we are going to be monitoring you. So since the end of 2015, we have seen the PLA really try and amp up its game on training in terms of realism, in terms of operating what they term complex electromagnetic environments, meaning jamming, hacking, spoofing, all of that sort of thing. So they've made training a priority.
(38:28):
Two, the Russian military really hasn't seemed to have realized how much the world has changed since even the first Gulf War. And at this point, their approach to... Yo, their great-grandfathers under General Zhukov would probably recognize line the artillery hub to hub, pound the heck out of your target, advance. Problem is that the Russians don't have quite the numbers that they did back in 1944.
(38:59):
The Chinese have recognized that we now live in the information age and information warfare including electronic warfare. Cyber warfare is an integral part of the modern battlefield. They seem to be trying to train according to that, how realistic it is, especially because they haven't fought a war themselves, less clear. A third part to this is that the Chinese have a dedicated service, the PLA Strategic Support Force whose job is to train and equip and provide forces conversant in electronic warfare, network warfare, hacking, cyber, et cetera, as well as space warfare. And that has a command cell in each of the new theater commands. So the headquarters for planning the invasion of Taiwan has a bunch of folks whose job is to think about EW network warfare and how to integrate that into the war plant. It's not an add-on, it's not a annex.
(39:56):
So they have certainly been closely watching. By the way, they exercise with the Russians regularly before the Ukraine war. So my guess is they're also looking at the lessons they learned from working with the Russians and are probably editing some of that saying, yeah, let's not do that. They are almost certainly taking the Russian mistakes and incorporating it into their own training and say, let's not do that. And it's much more recent and it's against a real adversary. We haven't fought an enemy who has done real high intensity, high tempo operations in quite some time. The Chinese may actually be able to tap into better info than we do.
Ken Miller (40:37):
We could talk obviously hours on this, and I'm continuously amazed at how embedded Chinese operations are around the world, whether it's 5G, whether it's energy, telecommunications, economic op opportunities. It's just so much more complex in any adversary that we've faced in the past. There's more clear front line in every adversary that we've faced before, and that there is no really front line in this conflict.
Dean Cheng (41:08):
China is different from any adversary we've confronted before. One, they're not European. And you can argue, well, what about Imperial Japan? Imperial Japan deliberately modeled itself on European imperialism. It invaded China to establish a European style empire. But China is not Imperial Japan, China is doing things according to the Chinese with Chinese characteristics. And the other thing is because of the CCP part, it really is whole of society and we've never... The Soviets tried kind of, fortunately they didn't trade with anyone. The Chinese, they take a whole of society approach and then they integrate in, as you said, economics, academia, media, social media. It's different and way scarier. And finally, it's exploiting avenues that our system literally cannot do. I don't think anyone wants a state run media. I don't think anyone wants a state run economy. But what we still haven't figured out it yet is, okay, how do we counter that especially when they've also therefore integrated themselves into things like supply chains, political systems, all right, academia, et cetera?
Ken Miller (42:28):
Dean it was it great to talk with you here on From The Crow's Nest. I really appreciate you taking your time. That will conclude our episode today. But thank you for joining me.
Dean Cheng (42:36):
Thank you for having me.
Ken Miller (42:38):
That will conclude this episode of From The Crow's Nest. I want to thank my guest, Dean Cheng for joining me. Also, don't forget to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, so please take some time to let us know how we're doing. That's it for today, and again, you can follow me on Twitter @FTCNHost and watch out for more details on our livestream from AOC Europe. Thank you for listening.
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