Military Intelligence at a Crossroads

On November 26, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced sweeping structural reforms to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The announcement finally made good on Xi’s promises of military reform beginning with the creation of a military reform leading small group and the work report of the Third Plenum in November 2013. Unmentioned in all of this is the fate of the PLA’s intelligence apparatus, which sits within departments being dismantled or reorganized, such as the old General Staff and General Political departments as well as the now-defunct military regions. Military intelligence is at a crossroads, and Beijing’s choices today will reverberate throughout Chinese policymaking and military decision-making systems.

The intelligence apparatus of the PLA provides support to three distinct sets of decision-makers: civilian policymakers, military decision-makers from the strategic to the tactical, and researchers in the defense industrial establishment. Supporting these groups requires zero-sum tradeoffs among building collection channels, analyzing and exploiting information collected, and building expertise and proficiency in the intelligence services.