Integrated Air and Space Defensive Missions

For decades, providing air defense—in particular, territorial air defense—has been one of the PLAAF’s two defining missions. This chapter and many other analyses have placed considerable stress on such emerging PLAAF missions as deterrence or offensive strikes. But it is worth bearing in mind that some of the PLA’s most authoritative published studies and docu­ments still emphasize the PLAAF’s air and space defense mission as one of the most important and pervasive that it will be asked to undertake in any future war. The PLAAF’s ability to repulse enemy air and space strikes, mitigate their political, economic, and military damage, and launch crippling counterattacks against enemy offensive capabilities will be crucial to China’s success in achiev­ing its campaign and strategic goals, and, indeed, to China’s national secu­rity as a whole. The 2006 edition of The Science of Campaigns contends that the stakes of success or failure in defending against enemy air raid campaigns may include “crucial issues such as our country’s territorial integrity, respect for our sovereignty, or the very security of the nation.”47 Likewise, when Chi­na’s 2008 National Defense White Paper describes the duties the air force must undertake as a “strategic service” of the PLA, it does so primarily in terms that emphasize its defensive mission: “[The air force] is responsible for such tasks as safeguarding the country’s territorial air space and territorial sovereignty, and maintaining a stable air defense posture nationwide.”48

The PLAAF’s defensive mission is comprised of three main parts or dimensions that have, for the most part, remained the same for decades. These are: protective or “defensive” (fanghu, ШЯ) activities and operations; intercep­tion or “resistance” operations (kangji, КФ); and “counterattack” operations (fanji, йф). The Study of Air Force Campaigns refers to all three of these tasks that the air force would undertake as part of its air defense mission:

Organize air defense campaigns with varying sets of arrangements and of different scales based on the objectives and scope of the enemy’s air attack; intercept the enemy’s attack planes and other aerial attack forces; launching sudden attacks against enemy planes and other weapons while they are still at their airfields and launch bases; and carrying out tight defense of our own airfields, bases, etc., in order to destroy the enemies’ aerial attack plans and schemes.49

The PLAAF’s “integrated” defensive mission is also very likely its most complex mission organizationally because of the sheer breadth of tasks involved and the numerous units that must collaborate effectively with the air force—including the other PLA services and national and local government and civilian organizations. PLAAF analysts note that China’s “integrated” air – and space-defense system must incorporate aerial, space-based, and ground – based (including maritime) forces to undertake protection and defense, inter­ception, and counterattack operations. The system is also expected to protect numerous political, economic, military, media, and other targets that would be essential to sustain the Communist Party’s capability to rule the country and the PLA’s warmaking capability and freedom of operation (including key com­mand, control, information, defensive, and other systems).50

PLA air – and spacepower analysts are often very frank about the enormous challenge they believe Chinese defenses will face from multiple, large-scale air attacks by an unnamed enemy that possesses a considerable advantage in mili­tary power and technology. NDU scholar Yuan Jingwei, for example, makes little effort to disguise that he is talking about the United States and the North Atlan­tic Treaty Organization when he argues that aerial surprise attacks have become the method of first-choice in modern informatized warfare, and were decisive to the outcome of the Gulf War and the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Yuan foresees China facing “severe air and space intimidation” in a future war, and argues that “air and space defense combat will be one of the primary forms of future air and space integrated combat”51 The Science of Campaigns is even more blunt: “In future anti-air raid campaigns, our principal combat adversary will be a powerful enemy who possesses superiority in high technology”52