The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

through their learning from the U.S. military that the
PLA is making itself more professional in carrying out
the DMTs and MOOTWs.
While many in the PLA are embracing DMT and
MOOTW as “soft applications of hard power” (硬实力
的软运用), 33 some are concerned that the efforts devoted
to DMT and MOOTW will divert the PLA’s attention
from pursuing its core mission and capabilities.
Their concerns have clearly reached the top echelon
of the discourse. Indeed, Chinese President Hu Jintao
came out on several important occasions to clarify
these matters:
The PLA must keep preparation for war as the leading
force for defense modernization. The central focus is on
strengthening core military capability (核心军事能力),
the cutting-edge capability that will allow a military to
win wars in a competitive military arena. With respect
to the PLA, this capability means the ability to win local
wars under conditions of informatization. This is the
fundamental criterion to measure whether a military is
strong or not. The ability to handle non-war military
operation should be a byproduct of the core military
capability. 34
Although the PLA appears to hold the balance between
its core mission and MOOTW, it nevertheless
has to reconcile a number of other contradictions such
as the PLA’s expanding commitments and limited resources,
mechanization and informatization, competing
interests of different services and the tension between
the “echelons” (the levels of officers as depicted
in the analytical scheme), the contradiction between
the PLA’s ongoing robust program of modernization
and Beijing’s continuing campaign to persuade the
rest of the world that China does not pose a military
threat to anyone, and the “incompatibles” in the PLA’s
capabilities and the demands of its new mission.
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