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

missile destroyers, land-attack cruise missiles, Jin and
Shang Class nuclear subs, or the anti-satellite weapons
systems (ASAT) and anti-ship ballistic missiles
(ASBM). On balance, however, while the reforms to
date have led to significant progress, they do not constitute
a paradigm shift away from the industry’s traditionally
closed and largely monopolized operating
philosophy. Does China’s current military industrial
complex possess the means to meet the far more demanding
requirements of equipping the PLA for the
future? Or does it require a fundamental reorientation
that allows it to integrate with the national economy
and create the synergies to help innovate for future
high-tech and informationalized warfare? China has
concluded that deeper reform is needed.
MARRYING TECHNOLOGY AND INDUSTRY
While civil-military integration has become a
catchword for the overall guiding strategy going forward,
specific implementation or directives on how
to achieve it are far less clear. Few of the current efforts
fall squarely into a CMI framework. Some of the
vagueness is a result of the vast scale of the objectives.
A number of current reforms are a continuation of
past efforts; others are new initiatives with a visible
CMI label; but most fall somewhere in between. All,
however, should be considered as long-term goals to
combine military and civilian economies for national
defense construction. The reorganization of the management
of defense and civilian industry is instructive
here.
The creative destruction of bureaucracies are often
as much about a power struggle amongst interest
groups as they are about rationalizing and stream-
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