The PLAAF’s Political and Organizational Culture as Constraints

A conventional academic consensus is that instituting change in military organizations is at best difficult. It is perhaps even more challenging to institute change in the PLA organization. In their 2007 study, Saunders and Quam look at tradeoffs in current PLAAF modernization efforts and future force structure including the allocation of roles and missions among services and branches, the balance between domestic and foreign procurement, the mix of low-tech­nology and high-technology systems, and the relative proportions of combat aircraft and support aircraft.44 But the PLA’s political cultural tradition, system­atic constraints, and the emergence of service cultures also influence the pace of modernization and the size of the air force.

Graham Allison and Phillip Zelikow note that organizational culture is a factor influencing leaders to favor maintenance of the status quo.45 China’s Party-army relationship, a relic from its founding, demands the PLAs absolute loyalty to the Party. The PLAAF is no exception to this. The current and future development of the air force is obligated to be framed within the ideological bounds of the military thinking of the Chinese leadership.

As mentioned, the PLAAF leadership has always maintained a pseudo­scientific attitude in characterizing their leadership’s sporadic instructions as profound military thought on airpower, and then using those instructions as guidance. “Being prepared for offensive and defensive operations” had been long debated by air force theorists since the late 1980s. It was not until 1999 that Jiang Zemin endorsed the expression. The PLAAF felt itself officially blessed and subsequently claimed the concept to justify the strategic goal of the air force and, furthermore, to characterize it as a vital piece of Jiang’s mili­tary thought on airpower.46

Chinese leaders are accustomed to devoting significant personal, auton­omous attention to defense projects. Their involvement influences the allo­cation of resources as well as air force procurement decisions. The PLAAF, reportedly, has been unenthusiastic about the J-8 as its air superiority fighter, and would prefer to suspend its procurement as the J-10 becomes available. But Jiang Zemin personally took charge of this focal-point project, calling the J-8 aircraft a credit to the China’s aviation industry.47 Since then, the air force has had little choice but to continue purchasing upgraded versions of J-8 fight­ers, though in limited numbers.

Currying favor with the leadership is a cultural phenomenon in any political system dominated by absolute authority and arbitrary decisions by key individuals. It represents not only air force subordination to the Party (strongly entrenched in Chinese military culture), but also demonstrates the political reliability and loyalty of the air force to individual senior Party leaders. In return, the PLAAF leadership could be confident that, when they brought requests to the Party leadership’s personal attention, they would receive favor­able approval. Nothing should upset the continuity of this entwining Party/ military bondage of mutual support.

Another well-known organizational constraint goes to the so-called “great land army” (^й¥) complex, which refers to army-centric thinking and leadership that have long dominated the Chinese military system.48 The four general departments—the General Staff Department, General Political Depart­ment, General Logistics Department, and General Armament Department— serve concurrently as the PLA’s joint staff, and as the headquarters for all ser­vices, namely the ground force, navy, air force, and Second Artillery force. These departments are still staffed primarily by army officers. Because there is no gen­eral headquarters for ground forces, the General Staff Department is assigned to perform the functions of ground force headquarters. Its overarching army bias has inevitably influenced all military aspects from force size, structure, and com­mand and control to logistics, equipment, R&D, and procurement.49

Nowadays, increasing numbers of personnel from other services are assigned to “joint” positions at headquarters department levels, as well as at military region headquarters levels. This change enables the expertise and knowledge of other services to be brought into the joint and higher headquar­ters command environment. Though such personnel wear the uniform of their own services, they are, in fact, no longer controlled within the personnel sys­tems of their own services. This separation keeps their representation of paro­chial service-specific interests in these headquarters departments at minimal level. Over the years, air force general officers have been appointed to deputy positions at the headquarters departments and to the commandership or polit­ical commissarship of the PLA Academy and National Defense University. A growing leadership role for other services within the PLA looks more symbolic than substantial as long as the existing organizational system continues.50

The organization of the Chinese air force along military regional lines, with an operational command in each military region, is another typical reflec­tion of the predominant ground force institutional system of the Chinese mili­tary.51 Military regional leadership organizations traditionally have been a com­mand organization for ground troops and education institutions, while playing a concurrent leadership role for the personnel of other services located within their regions. Only ground force officers have commanded military regions, and the commanders of other services can only serve as their deputies.52 Since there is no permanent joint organization at the military region level, when a joint command organization must be formed, air force officers can only assume assistant (hence subordinate) positions. Thus, even though China’s most likely conflict scenarios involve possible sea and air fights over Taiwan and in the East China and South China Seas, no navy and air force general officer has been yet assigned to command either the Nanjing or Guangzhou Military Region.

In 2000, Lieutenant General Liu Yazhou, former deputy political com­missar of the air force and currently political commissar of the PLAs National University, proposed Chinese military authorities consider reorganizing the PLAAF into functional air commands, separating the air force from the PLA military regional system, and thus making it a truly independent service. In order to make it a more offensively oriented air force, he further recommended the use of the U. S. Air Force’s “expeditionary force” model to organize air force units into air strike groups with a mix of fighters, bombers, and EW aircraft.53 Liu has been recognized as the “Douhet of China” because of his reputation as a daring thinker of airpower theory that goes against the PLAAF’s tradition, though a better analogy might be that he is a Chinese equivalent of Lieuten­ant General David A. Deptula or Colonel John A. Warden III. Not surprisingly, given the ground-centric traditionalism of the Chinese military system, Liu’s advocacy for eliminating the ground-centric military system has received lit­tle support from the PLA military establishment. Current evidence suggests that, in a joint operation or campaign, the air force will continue to play a sup­port role rather than an independent or leading role.54 Although the PLAAF currently enjoys the benefits of favorable military investment, as long as the

General Logistics Department continues to control military finances, PLAAF funding is unlikely to reach levels desired by air force officers.55

The rising importance of the navy, air force, and Second Artillery forces has facilitated the emergence of rival service cultures, which, in turn, have brought not only competition with the ground force tradition, but also rival­ries among the other services and branches. In particular, the PLAAF’s adop­tion of air and space integration as part of its development has instigated a struggle within the PLA over the control of space operations. China’s space assets are controlled by the General Armaments Department, while the Sec­ond Artillery possesses strategic missiles. The PLAAF has been contending that it should be in control of space operations because air and space constitute a single integrated medium. But the PLAAF has been unpersuasive in making this case, and so has lost recent debates about whether these capabilities should be placed under its control.56 It concurrently concentrates on building facilities and institutions to receive satellite services for communication, weather, navi­gation, and global positioning. Taking this tack, the PLAAF believes it will be able to make the transition from being a traditional air force to one enabled by space-based information (communications, positioning, navigation, timing, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capabilities.57

China’s present-day security interests—preventing Taiwan from seced­ing and supporting the country’s claims to islands in the East China Sea and South China Sea—have brought PLA naval aviation into competition with the PLAAF for the limited R&D and production capabilities of the Chinese defense industry. For example, the JH-7 fighter-bomber was initially made for PLAN aviation. The air force did not commit to this aircraft until the improved variant, the JH-7A—upgraded with two more powerful domestic-made tur­bofan engines and a new fire control system capable of launching precision strikes using antiradiation missiles and laser-guided bombs—became avail – able.58 Since 2004, its acquisition has been a priority for the PLAAF which has had to share its production with naval aviation, receiving one regiment every other year. As a result, the PLAAF’s replacement program to phase out its obsolete fleet of aging Q-5 attack aircraft—a J-6 (Chinese version of the MiG-19) derivative—will stretch beyond 2015. This PLAN-PLAAF competi­tion extends to other domestically manufactured aircraft, such as the J-10 and J-11B, produced by Chengdu and Shenyang aircraft factories, respectively.59 With the air force increasingly training over water, the competition in terms of division of responsibility and procurement will be intensified as maritime strike missions traditionally assigned to PLAN are increasingly prosecuted by the PLAAF, echoing similar institutional struggles between the U. S. Navy and the U. S. Army Air Corps in the 1930s.60