by James Crickton

The testing of a “nuclear-capable hypersonic missile” by China in August is part of the country’s plans to modernise, diversity and expand its nuclear forces over the next decade.

China is investing in, and expanding, the number of its land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear delivery platforms and constructing the infrastructure necessary to support this major expansion of its nuclear forces.

This is the sum and substance of the latest report to the US Congress by the ministry of defense titled, “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China”.

“China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise. Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target,” Financial Times reported on October 17.

The report says that in 2020, “the PLA Rocket Force began to field its first operational hypersonic weapons system, the DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) capable medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM)”.

China, according to the report, is developing new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that will significantly improve its nuclear-capable missile forces and will require increased nuclear warhead production, partially due to the incorporation of multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV) capabilities. The PRC has commenced building at least three solid-fueled ICBM silo fields, which will cumulatively contain hundreds of new ICBM silos.

The PLARF continues to grow its inventory of road-mobile DF-26 intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), which are capable of conducting both conventional and nuclear precision strikes against ground targets as well as conventional strikes against naval targets.

The report says: “The PRC is also supporting this expansion by increasing its capacity to produce and separate plutonium by constructing fast breeder reactors and reprocessing facilities. The accelerating pace of the China’s nuclear expansion may enable the country have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027. The PRC likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030.”

Significant is the report saying that China “has possibly already established a nascent “nuclear triad” with the development of a nuclear capable air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM) and improvement of its ground and sea-based nuclear capabilities”. China intends to increase the peacetime readiness of its nuclear forces by moving to a launch-on-warning (LOW) posture with an expanded silo-based force, it says.

The US-centric report says China’s strategy aims to “achieve ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ by 2049 to match or surpass US global influence and power, displace US alliances and security partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region, and revise the international order to be more advantageous to Beijing’s authoritarian system and national interests”.

The Americans appear convinced that Beijing seeks to “reshape the international order to better align with its authoritarian system and national interests”, as a vital component of its strategy to achieve the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

Claiming to chart the “maturation of the PLA and China’s evolving national power as it transitions to a new stage of the PRC’s national strategy”, the report recalls how in 2017 “General Secretary Xi Jinping laid out two PLA modernization goals during his speech to the 19th Party Congress: to ‘basically complete’ PLA modernization by 2035 and to transform the PLA into a ‘world class’ military by 2049”

The report says that throughout 2020, the PLA continued to pursue its ambitious modernization objectives: developing the capabilities to conduct joint long-range precision strikes across domains, increasingly sophisticated space, counterspace, and cyber capabilities, and accelerating the large-scale expansion of its nuclear forces. It is now involved in strategies like “intelligentized” warfare. If realized, the PLA’s 2027 modernization goals could provide Beijing with more credible military options in a “Taiwan contingency”.

The report sees China’s military modernization objectives as commensurate with, and part of, Beijing’s broader national development aspirations. The PRC’s economic, technological, political, social, and security development efforts are “mutually reinforcing and support Beijing’s strategy to shape international and regional environments that accept and facilitate Beijing’s interests”.

Prime among these objectives is Military Civil Fusion (MCF). The report says: “The MCF development strategy encompasses six interrelated efforts: (1) fusing China’s defense industrial base and its civilian technology and industrial base; (2) integrating and leveraging science and technology innovations across military and civilian sectors; (3) cultivating talent and blending military and civilian expertise and knowledge; (4) building military requirements into civilian infrastructure and leveraging civilian construction for military purposes; (5) leveraging civilian service and logistics capabilities for military purposes; and, (6) expanding and deepening China’s national defense mobilization system to include all relevant aspects of its society and economy for use in competition and war.”

The PLA Strategic Support Force (SSF) is a theatre command-level organization established to centralize the PLA’s strategic space, cyber, electronic, information, communications, and psychological warfare missions and capabilities. The SSF oversees two deputy theater command-level departments: the Space Systems Department responsible for military space operations, and the Network Systems Department responsible for information operations (IO), which includes technical reconnaissance, EW, cyber warfare, and psychological operations.

China is also developing “counterspace capabilities—including direct ascent, coorbital, electronic warfare, and directed energy capabilities—that can contest or deny an adversary’s access to and operations in the space domain during a crisis or conflict”.

The country’s focus is on improving the PLA’s combat readiness and the guidance issued by senior leaders is increasingly evident in the PLA’s training and exercises. “The PLA is training to ‘fight and win’ through increasingly realistic combat training that uses dedicated ‘blue force’ opponents and other elements to improve realism. Despite initial delays and cancellations in military training, exercises, research, and recruitment in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, impact to the overall readiness of the PLA remains minimal.”(POREG)