The Price of Power.

• Author: Bitzinger, Richard A.

Ayear into the global pandemic, China's Two Sessions declared that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government was increasing the country's official defense budget by 6.8 percent in addition to declaring a gross domestic product (GDP) target of plus 6 percent for 2021. At a time of increasing Sino-U.S. tensions, it was reported that China's top generals also called for greater military spending in order to confront the "Thucydides Trap" with the United States.

As usual, most of the media attention was focused on the increase in the official defense budget--now approaching $209 billion--compared to last year's rise of 6.6 percent. Given these continued increases in military expenditure, many have inferred that Beijing is becoming more and more inclined to utilize force (or threaten the use of force) to realize its national ambitions.

What is missing in these unsettling inferences that "war is on the horizon" is the larger context. Recent trends in Chinese military expenditures, along with the CCP'S other contemporary pronouncements on national defense, make it clear that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) sees the present period more as a strategic window whereby it can reorganize and resrmcture its forces.

China has been engaged in an aggressive, multi-decade effort to modernize its armed forces and upgrade its capabilities. On paper at least, the PLA expects to achieve mechanization and make "major progress" toward "informatization" by the early 2020s, achieve "complete military modernization" by 2035, and become a "world-class" military by 2049.

In documenting how the PLA has arrived at this stage, one first needs to be cognizant of the many long years it had taken the PLA to pursue a "double construction" approach of mechanization and "informatization" to concurrently upgrade and digitize itself. This "two-track" approach had called for both the near-term "upgrading of existing equipment combined with the selective introduction of new generations of conventional weapons," together with a longerterm transformation of the PLA along the lines of the information technologies-led "revolution in military affairs." Critical to China's emerging military capabilities is the PLA'S emphasis on "fighting and winning in-formationized wars," defined as the process of "using information to conduct joint military operations across the domains of land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum during a conflict." "In-formationization" particularly emphasizes improved capacities for command, control, communications, computing, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C41SR). In that regard, the PLA

...sees networked, technologically advanced C41 systems as essential to provide reliable, secure communications to fixed and mobile command posts--thereby enabling rapid, effective, multi-echelon decision-making. These systems were designed to distribute data including intelligence, battlefield information, logistical information, and weather reports via redundant, resilient communications networks to improve commanders' situational awareness...[making] near-real-time ISR data available to field commanders. But even as the PLA labors to adopt "informationized warfare," it is already planning for the next phase of its modernization, which it has termed "intelligentized warfare." This would entail the militarization of the so-called fourth industrial revolution--artificial intelligence, big data, man-machine interfacing, autonomous unmanned systems, 5G networking, and the like--in order to...