General Employment Concepts and Principles

Official Chinese military publications define airpower as the overall term for aviation forces belonging to air forces, navies, air defense forces (such as the Russian Protivo Vozdushnaya Oborona [Anti-Air Defense], or PVO), ground forces, and special operations forces.63 In joint operations, airpower is said to be used for high-speed, deep strikes against key targets and to be used first and throughout campaigns to seize control of the skies in support of broader cam­paign objectives. Airpower also is used defensively to protect the ability of an air force to conduct air operations, especially air bases, air defense positions, and radar sites, as well as to protect ground and naval operations.64

PLA publications assert that the struggle for dominance of the battlefield will increasingly consist of an integrated struggle for air, space, information, electromagnetic, and network superiority. Acquiring air superiority is consid­ered a prerequisite in a variety of operations involving all services. By obtaining air superiority, one can restrict enemy air, air defense, and ground force opera­tional movements while ensuring that one’s own ground and navy forces have effective cover from the air to carry out their operations.65 Like the USAF, how­ever, the PLA does not assert that achieving absolute air superiority in all stages of combat and across all battlefields or theaters is necessary. Instead, it aims to achieve enough air superiority to achieve its campaign or tactical objectives.66

Presumably because of reservations about its ability to defeat a qualita­tively superior opponent such as the United States in the air, the PLA places primary emphasis on achieving air superiority by attacking the enemy on the ground and water: enemy forces, equipment, bases, and launch pads used for air raids. Especially at the beginning of a war, the PLA will endeavor to attack enemy air bases, ballistic missile bases, aircraft carriers, and warships equipped with land-attack cruise missiles before enemy aircraft can take off or missile strikes can be launched.67 Another means of achieving air superiority will be to carry out air and land attacks to destroy and suppress ground-based air defense systems and air defense command systems.68 Finally, defensive operations will be an important component of air superiority throughout a campaign.69

In future warfare, space superiority is expected to be crucial for control­ling the ground, naval, and air battlefields. To gain space superiority, offensive and defensive weapons systems will be deployed on the ground, air, sea, and space. Space control operations are said to include space information warfare, space blockade warfare, space orbit attack warfare, space-defense warfare, and space-to-land attacks.70

In struggles for information superiority, the goal will be to control information on the battlefield, allowing the battlefield to be transparent to one’s own side but opaque to the enemy. Methods for achieving information superiority include achieving electromagnetic superiority through electronic interference; achieving network superiority through network attacks; using firepower to destroy the enemy’s information systems; and achieving “psy­chological control.”71

While acquiring electromagnetic superiority is described as a subset of acquiring information superiority, it is treated as a distinct type of operation in PLA publications.72 Methods for obtaining electromagnetic superiority are said to include electronic attack and electronic defense. In electronic attack, “soft kill” measures include electronic interference and electronic deception. “Hard kill” measures include antiradiation destruction, electronic-weapon attack, firepower destruction, and attacks against the enemy’s electronic instal­lations and systems. Electronic defense is simply defending against enemy elec­tronic and firepower attacks.73 The primary targets of EW are said to include command, control, communications, and intelligence systems.74

PLAAF publications describe three major types of air combat opera­tion: air-to-air combat, air-to-surface combat, and surface-to-air combat.75 Air-to-air and surface-to-air operations are areas of traditional emphasis for the PLAAF, but the PLAAF seems to be moving away from focusing on air – to-air operations and toward emphasizing operations to gain air superiority by attacking enemy airfields and controlling the enemy on the ground before resorting to fighting the enemy in the air.76 Air-to-surface operations are con­sidered more effective, less costly, and less reactive than air-to-air operations.77