This is the second episode in our two-part interview with Dr Toshi Yoshihara, the expert on the origin story of the LPA Navy, the early campaigns that it fought and how the lessons learnt have shaped current PLA doctrine. He is the author of Mao’s Army Goes to Sea. This episodes looks at two important campaigns in PLA Navy History – the Kinmen and Hainan Island Campaigns.
Why did the PLA fail in the 1949 Battle of Kinmen? A lack of understanding of littoral weather, poor planning, insufficient logistics support and shipping led to the Kinmen campaign failing. This is despite Kinmen Island being just 3 kilometres away. This, combined with some luck on the side of the Nationalist’s as well as ‘The Bear of Kinman”
What lessons did China learn from its failed amphibious assault on Kinmen? “Terrible consequences followed whenever the Third Field Army violated basic principles of warfare.” They appeared to be overconfident, suffering from Victory disease, and not putting in the required planning or gathering the required resources to successfully achieve the lodgement and then support it. A lack of naval and air support was also telling.
How did the PLA succeed in capturing Hainan Island in 1950? The Hainan Campaign was more difficult. Hainan Island is 35,191 square kilometres. The Fourth Field Army under Lin Biao planned much more comprehensively and ensured that enough maritime lift capability would be available. Much of this was local shipping from the fishing fleet. Tight cooperation was established with
How did PLA guerrilla forces help win the Battle of Hainan? We discuss the elements of People’s War that enabled decisive engagement of many of the troops in Hainan before the PLA had even begun their lodgement. The Hainan Independent Column worked to provide intelligence on both the local ROC troops and around the probable landing sites. They conducted harassment of Nationalist logistics, secured landing sites during the invasion and guided PLA troops inland. The effectiveness of the insurgent elements in pre-landing operations and during the actual assault has been an important lesson for PLA doctrine.
The early Littoral campaigns of the PLA provided a range of important lessons for the PLA, which have become part of PLA Littoral Doctrine.
Transcripts
What are the lessons from early PLA naval amphibious campaigns and how do those lessons influence current naval planning? We look at the lessons learned from early Chinese maritime operations. This is the Principles of War podcast. Professional military education for junior officers and senior NCOs. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 131 of the Principles of War podcast. Amphibious Ambitions and Island Defeat. How Kinmen and Hainan Shaped China’s Sea Power. Today is the second part of a two part series with Dr. Toshi Yoshihara. He is an expert in the history of the PLA Navy and he’s written the book Mao’s Army Goes to Sea. Last week we looked at the formation of the PLA Navy. This week we’re going to look at some of the important campaigns that they undertook. Toshi, do you want to start talking us through the Kinmen campaign?
Yeah. So the geographic location of Kinmen, so you know, Kinmen is basically a relatively small offshore island, you know, a couple of kilometres essentially off the coast of mainland China. You can literally see Jingmen. You know, you know, if you’re standing on mainland shores, you can see Kingmen from across the waters. And by the way, Jinmen is still in the hands of the Republic of China or Taiwan. And so the logic of invading Kingmen was that the communists would take Xiamen first, which is the island metropolis adjacent to Kingman, to Kingmen’s west, and then they would sequentially take Xiamen and then take Kingmen and then use Kingmen in many ways as a launch pad to conduct the cross strait invasion of Taiwan.
You know, King men’s importance is not the territory itself, but that would become the stepping stone towards the larger objective of finally ending the Chinese civil War and defeating Chiang Kai Shek on Taiwan. So the Kingmen campaign began in October of 1949 and was led by the 3rd Field Army. And it’s an important case study because it was a disastrous failure. Now you can’t understand the Kinmen campaign without looking at the Xiamen campaign that preceded it. So as I mentioned, it was a sequential plan. Take Xiamen, take Jingman and then go across the strait to take Taiwan. So in taking Xiamen, which was a successful campaign, the communists actually lost quite a bit of ships. Now you know, as I mentioned, the communist shipping were based on conscription of local boatmen, fishermen and so forth.
So wooden hulled fishing boats that were non motorised, largely, you know, navigated by sail, powered by sail by wind power. And so when they tried to take Xiamen, these were not military grade vessels. So there were a lot of sinkings. And the horrors of taking Shaman, even though the campaign was successful, scared a bunch of the civilian boatmen who were involved in that campaign. And so when the communists turned to Kingmen and said, all right, we’re going to Kingman next, many of the civilians who were told that they were going to have to do it again got really scared, understandably so. And many of them actually fled the area, and, you know, many of them actually scuttled their own boats in order to prevent. To have to see the horrors of war again.
And so the Communists, even before they started the planning and the execution of the Kingman campaign, already had a major shortage of shipping. And in fact, what they ended up doing was conscripting boatmen from outside of the area. They had run out of ships from the local towns and the villages along the coast. They had to move further north and further south to find other civilians who could be conscripted to conduct the amphibious operation to take the troops across the waters to land them ashore. And so this major shortage of shipping and the use of other local boatmen who were unfamiliar with the local conditions, what created this sort of potent cocktail for failure? And really, the root of the failure of the campaign began with bad. With a shortage of shipping that led to bad strategy.
So the communist planners of the 3rd Field army decided that what they were going to do, given the fact that they only had so many ships, was that they were going to use whatever ships they had to bring one part of the invasion force onto Kingmen. The ships would then go back to the mainland to pick up the second wave of attacks. And so these boats were supposed to make essentially a round trip to make sure that they could put adequate numbers of troops ashore.
Of course, one of the main problems of that, of course, was that the first tranche of troops, the first echelon that was going to land on Agingmen, was going to be outnumbered and was likely not enough to hold the lodgment and then conduct breakthroughs through the lodgment to seize the island, meaning that the troops really had to wait for that second wave to come ashore to combine and concentrate forces to conduct the offensive. So that was sort of theory of tactical victory there. But the 3rd Field army also suffered from bad intelligence. And part of that was a persistent underestimation of enemy strength. And I think the reason for that partly was because the 3rd Field army had gone through a string of victories, right? They had just defeated the Nationalists on the mainland.
They had basically steamrolled them on, you know, some of these offshore island campaigns. So they simply assumed that the Nationalists would roll over again. And so they completely underestimated Nationalist will and strength. The Third Field army also suffered from significantly bad command and control. My book documents, for example, how one core organisation oversaw the units of another core organisation that it had zero familiarity with. You can imagine the lack of communications, a lack of understanding between two different core units groups. And then there was just simply bad execution. So when they had landed the troops ashore during the first wave of attacks, those troops basically unthinkingly charged ahead out of the lodgments without coordinating with each other.
And they were basically tactical units fighting in an uncoordinated fashion on their own, which meant, of course, that they were exposed to being picked off one at a time by the Nationalists. And speaking of the Nationalists, the Communists did not expect the powerful resistance that would reside on King men because Chiang Kai Shek had decided to basically stand his ground, hold the line at Kingmen, and sent a bunch of reinforcements on the island. They sent assets, including Sherman tanks that would prove to be tactically devastating for the Communists. And I think the most important part of the story is that nature intervened. And nature intervened in a way that exacerbated the lack of understanding of the local conditions by those fishermen that were recruited from outside of the region.
And so after the first wave had landed on the beaches, what happened was that the tides receded and the boats were trapped on these mud flats that went on for hundreds of metres. And so the boats were stuck and the boats now could not retrieve the second wave, which is essential to the plan. And so the attacks were conducted at night to maximise surprise. But because the boats were stuck and when day broke those trap boats became open targets for the Nationalists. They were basically fixed targets. Nationalists naval and air forces as well as shore based artillery basically systematically destroyed every single one of those boats stuck on the mud flats. So the troops on Jinglin were trapped and the second wave was not, of course, able to reinforce.
And I tell this sort of pretty horrific story of the troops who were on the mainland waiting to be ferried to Kingmen could only watch in complete helplessness as their comrades on Kingmen were being decimated. And so within days, the entire force that had first landed on Kingmen was destroyed. It was basically a division’s worth of troops, about 9,000 men were wiped out over several days. And this was a huge shock to the Communist high command, including Mao himself. And what that ended up doing was that it forced the PLA to abandon any pretence for taking Taiwan. And I think it also awakened them to the challenges of contested amphibious operations, woke them up to the realities, right, of just how complex and difficult amphibious operations were going to be.
And in fact, the Kingman Campaign, this disaster remains a classic case study for PLA strategists. They continue to re litigate both the causes of the failure, but also things like what they could have done, right, to have made that a success. And I think it cast a long shadow over PLA thinking about a Taiwan invasion to this very day. And so know, some of the lessons I think, that the Chinese learned then and continues to be sort of relevant now is things like the need for mass, the need for adequate shipping, you know, the need for a lot of firepower, the need for intense preparations, the need to have the logistical network to support those frontline troops and the need to deliver overwhelming force.
And I think there are two broader lessons, right, that they took from the Kingman Campaign, which is don’t ever underestimate the enemy. I think that was probably the biggest sort of intellectual blind spot that led them to that failure and that they had to take amphibious operations with utmost seriousness because failure could be absolutely fatal.
After the defeat at Kinmen, Mao ordered the 4th army under Lin Bao to prepare for the next operation, which was the retaking of Hainan Island. How did the lessons learned from 3rd Field army at Jinmen come across the 4th Field Army? And how was the planning conducted for this much bigger operation?
Again, just to go back to the geography first, so, you know, Hainan is a large island feature. So, you know, I only have, you know, kind of an American die to this. It’s the size of Maryland. I don’t know how helpful that is to your audience, but it’s, you know, about 34,000 square kilometres, a fairly sizable island feature just off the coast of Guangdong Province to the south. And of course, it’s geographically important because it occupies a commanding position over the northern approaches of the South China Sea. And so if you can secure Hainan island, you’ve secured China’s southern flank in the maritime domain. Now, as you mentioned, this campaign was led by the 4th Field Army. And this was largely because of geographical areas of responsibility or operations between the various field armies.
So at the tail end of the Chinese Civil War, the third Field army conquered Zhejiang and Fujian and became responsible for the offshore theatre of operations that included Jingmen. The 4th Field army, in the meantime, conquered Guangdong Province to the south, and it thus fell to the fourth Field army to conduct the Hainan Campaign just south of Guangdong. So those field armies, I think importantly, would become the occupying garrison forces of those provinces and. And would become the foundation for the military regions that would persist till the recent reforms back in 2016. So let me now turn then to the Hainan campaign and the 4th Field Army. This was an entirely different experience. Compared to Kingmen, the defence planners of the 4th Field army engaged in meticulous preparations and planning.
And there was, in fact, I was able to come across evidence that there was direct institutional learning from the Third Field Army. So they actually had planners from the Third Field army who had experienced Kingmen to come down to the Fourth Field army to brief the leadership about the lessons that they had learned from the disaster. And so I think they took many of those lessons to heart. And what you saw by the 4th field army was a series of sound preparations that set the stage for success. So, first of all, they took their intelligence seriously. They tapped into their local contacts both on the mainland and on Hainan, to understand the disposition of the Nationalist adversary.
They engaged intensive training, particularly cross sea training, by getting troops who, you know, some of them who had never seen the ocean before, to get used to getting in boats and jumping off boats, crossing beaches and so forth. They also were very meticulous in gathering as many ships as they could to conduct the operation. They also engaged in what we would call today as an all of nation effort, which was the complete mobilisation of the local population to provide administrative and logistical support to the frontline units. And in the meantime, the 4th Field army actually deployed air defence artillery on the peninsula on which they were assembling those forces to essentially deny a Nationalist air superiority in the areas where they were assembling the ships and training for the troops.
And I think, you know, what was really interesting about that was, you know, that in many ways is sort of a precursor to what we now call anti access area denial, right, which is using shore based assets essentially to deny the enemy use of the air or air superiority. Now, there was also a really interesting element that was absent in the Kinmen campaign, and that was the presence of an indigenous insurgent group on Hainan who had been operating on Hainan for decades, called the Chungya Column. This insurgent group consisted of at least 15,000 guerrilla troops, and they occupied a large base area in the central parts of the island that was sort of inaccessible to the Nationalists, basically a safe haven.
What the Communists did then in this clever planning was to conduct a smuggling campaign where they basically put troops on boats and then ferried them down the west or east coast of Hainan island, where the defences were scarce, and then put those troops ashore secretly. And then those troops would link up with the Chongya column. The Chongya Column would then bring these advanced PLA units to their safe haven. And over the course of months, they were able to assemble nearly a division worth of advanced PLA troops on Hainan Island. And so the goal was essentially to use those advanced PLA troops and the Chongnya Column to harass and tie down Nationalist forces from the rear, especially when the direct amphibious assault took place.
And so when the amphibious attack took place, the Communists were able to land about 25,000 troops in the first wave, the Chongya column and the advanced PLA units were in fact able to pin down the Nationalists from the rear. That enabled the frontline units that had landed, that had formed lodgments, to conduct breakthrough operations and battles of encirclement and annihilation. And in quick succession, the Nationalist resistance collapsed and enabled the Communists to rapidly seize the rest of the island. Now, I think there is one story that Communist historians are reluctant to retell, and that is that the Nationalists, though, despite this spectacular failure, managed to withdraw the 50,000 men from the island back to Taiwan. And, of course, having those 50,000 men helped to reinforce the defence of Taiwan.
And so while the Nationalists, you know, suffered a humiliating defeat, they were also able to save a significant component of the force for the defence of Taiwan.
To what degree did China’s involvement in the Korean War put a halt to the invasion of Taiwan?
Yeah, so I document in my book about just how important the Korean War was. So from a geopolitical standpoint, right. The hot war during the Cold War began in Asia and sort of solidified the US Cold War strategy globally, both in Europe and in Asia. It made possible, you know, NSE 68. Right. Which really sort of codifies America’s containment strategy against Soviet and Chinese Communism. And as a result of the North Korean invasion, it very much drew in the United States. President Truman decided to interpose the 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait, and that more or less ended any hopes of the Communists to invade Taiwan. So that’s one element of it. So geopolitics certainly played a huge role in stopping the. The Communists in their tracks in terms of their plans for Taiwan. But there are also important institutional effects.
So with the American intervention on the Korean peninsula and Ma’s decision to intervene to stop the northward advance of the Americans, it was decided that the Communists needed to confront a key capability of the US military and that was air superiority. And so the communist leadership recognised that they needed to divert their resources as much as possible to developing air power to contest American air superiority. And so what I document in the book is the spillover effect on that, which is that, you know, Shao Jing Guang had this, you know, major conference in 1950 to develop a significant naval force, the that would ultimately be constructed to conduct the invasion of Taiwan.
But the top leadership basically came to him, you know, once Ma decided to intervene in Korea, to tell him that you have to put all of your naval development plans on hold because we need to divert our resources in building air power. And so that more or less also then the outbreak of the Korean War then also took away the resources that were necessary to continue to Sha Jing Guang’s ambitious plans to build up the navy, which of course had a direct impact on China’s ability to even consider seriously any sort of invasion plan against Taiwan. But I think what’s also interesting institutionally was the Korean War also in some ways sowed the seed of interservice rivalry because that war essentially biassed the resources towards the air force against the navy.
And that in part explains, I think, part of the inter service distrust between the two services. It in part informed, I think, the Chinese navy’s decision to develop its own naval aviation branch because it simply could it because the naval leadership decided that it simply could not trust the air force to provide air cover to Chinese surface combatants. So in many ways the Korean War had a bunch of these sort of knock on effects from the geopolitical to the institutional that directly impacted Beijing’s calculus about the invasion of Taiwan in those early campaigns.
What role did deception play? And does that still pervade the naval thinking and naval doctrine in the plan today?
Yeah. So I document in the book in the various naval battles and amphibious operations an emphasis on surprise and deception. And I think this is partly because it is a part of the communist playbook. So Mao Zedong certainly emphasised surprise and deception as a method for defeating the superior nationalist and the superior imperial Japanese navy during the war of resistance. So part of it is a PLA tradition. Another part of it of course was that you use surprise and deception to make up for your qualitatively and material inferiority, because you can use surprise and deception to sort of level the playing field to gain battlefield initiative that will then give you subsequent advantages. So surprise and deceptions definitely played a role in those early campaigns for understandable Reasons.
Now, in terms of how it carries over, I do see still in Chinese naval doctrine an emphasis on surprise and deception. Initially, I think it was partly because China still assumed that it was going to be fighting from a position of relative inferiority, particularly vis a vis the U.S. navy. But I also think that it had to do with Chinese strategists understanding of the character of modern naval warfare, particularly their emphasis on waging missile war. Right. So they were going to, in future 21st century naval combat, you know, the Chinese anticipate using massive salvos of long range precision strike missiles to defeat the adversary. One way to level the playing field is to deliver the first blow, right?
So it’s the Soviet doctrine of the battle of the first salvo, right, which is this idea that the side that gets to throw the first punch, that can land that first punch and gains a significant advantage on the battlefield because you seize the initiative and you also do significant damage to the enemy early on. So it seems to me that it’s partly a PLA tradition, but it’s also the requirements, the necessities of waging modern naval war with missiles that will continue to reinforce this idea that surprise and deception will pay dividends on the battlefield.
Given that there was very little equipment in the early days. You’ve talked a lot about the heavy reliance on using civilian ships for their littoral operations. How has this developed within the Chinese navy today?
You know, as I mentioned early on, this great comfort with civil military fusion, I think traces its origins to the founding of the Chinese Navy. Both out of necessity, right, because they had no choice but to employ civilian assets because they didn’t have the military assets to do so. But also a deeply embedded tradition that goes all the way back to Mao Zedong’s concept of people’s war, right. Which is this. To defeat the superior adversary, you need to be able to mobilise all of society, all of nation, all elements of national power to fight against the adversary. And that meant mobilising the civilian population.
So I think it was a combination of necessity and operational warfighting tradition embedded in the PLA that combined, I think, to make it possible for the early Chinese naval leaders to be open minded to incorporating and integrating civilian assets. And I think in many ways what seems new to Western observers in particular, right, when we’re talking about grey zone tactics, salami slicing, China’s aggressive use of its coast guard and its maritime militia. Those may seem new to us as Western observers, but they’re absolutely not new to the Chinese. Right. If you Read this history. This is how they got their start. A willingness to use civilian assets for strategic and military purposes.
And so I think there’s much more continuity in terms of how the PLA talks about civil military fusion or how they talk about combining both hard military power with paramilitary capabilities like the Coast Guard and the maritime militia to achieve China’s territorial ambitions. But it also relates very much to various options for taking Taiwan. Right. So we are now seeing a lot of interesting literature in the west about how China will likely use commercial transports, the use of roros in order to transport military equipment in an invasion scenario against Taiwan. Right. So this great deal of comfort in using civilian assets for military purposes continues to this very day.
And in my view, this willingness to use civilian assets traces its origins to the founding of the Chinese Navy, and also certainly, of course, goes all the way back to the PLA traditions that were honed throughout the Chinese Civil war from the 1920s, 30s through the 1940s.
In the book, you mention the political commissars. What role do they play within the navy? And does that complicate decision making in C2?
What I found, I think to my surprise in doing this origin story, was that the political commissar played a much more different role than my preconception of them. What I document in the book was that the political commissars, particularly at the tactical unit level, were actually deeply involved in war fighting. One of the great statistics that I think talks to this point is casualty rates. And when you look at the casualty rates of those involved in amphibious operations, PLA political commissars suffered horrendous casualty rates at rates that were really surprising to me. And this again goes back to PLA’s own traditions and its own way of warfare.
When it comes to the use of political commissars is a deeply embedded belief within the PLA that the way that you generate loyalty, the way that you generate esprit de corps, the way that you generate unity of effort, the way that you generate a fighting spirit is through example. And so our image of the political commissar in the west typically is political commissars sort of leading from the rear, right, shouting slogans, writing politically correct messages to get the troops to be loyal to the party. Some of that is certainly true. But there’s a big component of the PLA that believes that the way that you can generate fighting power is for the political commissars to act alongside their subordinates and their colleagues. And so they become integral to the operational warfighting aspects of any campaign.
And that’s why you see many of them suffering significant casualties. In the case of the Kingman campaign, for example, the Communists resist almost literally to the last man. And that was in part motivated by the willingness to sacrifice among the political commissars. They were willing to, through example, right. Get the troops to make huge sacrifices. So I think, you know, part of what helped me to better understand the political commissar system was to look at how they actually operated on the battlefield. And I think what it also revealed to me in studying the political commissar system, especially during this period, was a kind of analytic blind spot or analytic bias on the part of Western observers, right.
Which is, I think we tend to have a stereotype of the political commissar as simply someone who sort of toes the party line, leads from the rear. And that because it’s a dual command system or dual command structure, that it creates all sorts of duplication of effort or inefficiencies that is at odds with what you might call the Western way of war. And I think it also shows analytic bias, which is that we tend to project our assumptions about the political commissar system based on our understanding of the Soviet Union. So we’re projecting the Soviet Union’s practises onto the pla. And so in studying this early history, I think helped me to kind of overcome some of those, to realise, but then to overcome some of those analytic biases.
And I think if you read the Chinese literature and the Chinese history on the political commissar system, certainly there’s a, you know, hagiographical element to it, right? But I think there is a lot of truth to this idea that they can credit a lot of their operational and tactical successes to the political commissar system itself.
I think another way of thinking about this is instead of if we fast forward to the 21st century, I think what’s important to, for analysts, I think, in the west is to, instead of thinking about the political commissar system as an impediment, as a fundamental impediment to operational efficacy, is to actually think about how the PLA would make the political commissar system work in a 21st century context, and I think again, they have a lot of history, including this history that I document, that suggests that the political commissar system were in fact, and the political commissars were in fact essential to their operational success.
So the PLA navy, it’s evolved from a brown water navy to have a much greater ambitions today. How do you think the foundation story, the lessons learned from those early campaigns, how do you think that translates to how they’re going to operate today?
Yeah, so I think there are several ways of thinking about the relevance or perhaps the lack thereof of this origin story to the future of the Chinese Navy. And as you’ve indicated, you know, the Chinese Navy now looks nothing like the Chinese Navy of even 10, 15 years ago. Right. I mean, frankly, most of the Navy, the modern navy that we see today, didn’t even exist 10, 15 years ago. I mean, that’s how quickly the Chinese Navy has developed and it is clearly developing the force structure for blue water missions, for expeditionary operations, for power projection beyond the first island chain, beyond the western Pacific. Right. So what we’re seeing in terms of the four structure is an increasingly balanced navy, right?
Starting with the carriers, the cruisers, the frigates, various high end air defence destroyers, a growing class of combat logistics ships, and also a modest but growing class of amphibious assault ships. And so what you are seeing is essentially the beginnings of a balanced fleet capable of conducting expeditionary operations. And it is I think arguably the second most capable expeditionary fleet, second only to the United States. And so this looks nothing like the origin story that I tell, right? The hodgepodge fleet, the need to rely on civilian shipping, most of them were sailing boats essentially that were non motorised and so forth. So how does this origin story tell us anything about the presentation and the future? I think that’s kind of the question that you’re asking, you know, and I think there are a couple of ways of approaching this.
I think the first is to think about the origin story and its persistent sort of institutional legacies as a baseline. Right. So the question there is what does that baseline do as an institutional impediment to China’s quest for becoming a blue water navy? Right. Or you know, to put it another way, how far does the Chinese Navy need to depart from this institutional baseline in order to become what the west would consider a true blue water navy? Right. And so you could see it as a baseline and potentially as an institutional obstacle to the Chinese Navy’s longer term goals and ambitions? I think that’s certainly one way of looking at it.
I think another way of looking at it, and I think I’m much more sympathetic to sort of this particular viewpoint is to say this is part of the Chinese Navy’s institutional DNA and that it will carry this DNA to one extent or another and that this will likely influence the way the Chinese Navy conceives of power projection. So it’s not that this origin story can be seen as an obstacle, as a barrier, but it’s simply showing shapes the way the Chinese leadership conceives of sea power, naval power and power projection operations far from the homeland. So instead of saying that this is an impediment or that this might, you know, in the extreme lead to failure in the Chinese naval project is to say that this origin story will create a kind of a different form of naval power. Right.
That it will express them in different ways in ways that Western analysts are typically unaccustomed to. So one example that I like to give is there is this deeply embedded preference to rely on land assets to control events at sea. So that, you know, if you go back to the current four structure, China’s reliance on land based anti ship ballistic missiles, for example. Right. China’s reliance on shore based aircraft to directly influence events at sea, it’s called in PLA lexicon, using the land to control the sea. Right. And this idea actually, as I document in the book, goes all the way back to the early 1950s when Commander Xiao Jin Guang said something very similar. Right. His metaphor was that the Chinese mainland was like a giant aircraft carrier from which China could project power to influence events at sea.
And that in turn led to a four structure development focused on shore based firepower, that’s shore based aircraft, shore based artillery, submarines and fast attack craft that hugged the Chinese coast. And so you can imagine in the future, you know, how that might be translated in future operational concepts. So for example, China made actually sort of transplant that idea of using the land to control the sea in extra theatre operations. So you can imagine in future basing arrangements, China, it might have the proclivity to deploy land based assets, land based anti access area denial assets on overseas bases that would then provide a kind of an A2AD bubble, A2AD cover over naval forces deployed overseas, for example. Right. Is that the best way to project power? Maybe not.
But that might be the way that the Chinese navy, that Chinese military leadership conceives of power projection. Right? So there is no wrong or right answer in my view. I think it’s just that we should expect that if you buy my hypothesis that this origin story is really important, then we should expect that the Chinese navy will behave and think about power projections in way that’s quite different from the west and that it behoves us as observers to anticipate what those differences might be.
I think in the book it really comes through the huge Capability for military innovation in a situation of adversity because of the fact that they’re in combat and making do with very little. So a lot of innovation there, a lot of ingenuity to be able to build that combat capability that they needed to conduct amphibious operations, which is the. One of the most difficult military operations to undertake.
You know, I think that gets into a really important point that you raise, which is it’s not just about capability and hardware and force structure. Right. It’s this, you know, exactly to your point, which is that what the origin story tells me is an ethos. An ethos, a strongly embedded belief through its combat history that it has faced very difficult circumstances. Right. As you describe, extraordinary adversity, extraordinary scarcity, extraordinary weakness. And yet the plan and the PLA itself was still able to achieve some significant operational successes. And so I think, you know, what this suggests is that the Chinese Navy and the PLA in general would be willing to take on some big risks and face big odds. Right. If it felt like it needed to fight.
And so I guess another lesson for us, for, you know, Western observers, is that it’s not just the material factor, but it’s the moral factor. Right. It’s the institutional ethos that will likely influence the PLA’s calculations about its chances if were ever to have to fight the United States or other players in the Indo Pacific.
Yeah, I think your book does a really good job of bringing out all of the way that they thought through those processes. So, yes, thank you very much for your time today and your wisdom, because it is an amazing story and it’s definitely something that we need to be thinking about when we’re looking at future operations.
Thank you.
Excellent. Thank you very much. Toshi has done a great job of telling that origin story and really bringing out the lessons around the adversity in which the PLA Navy was born and how that adversity built a culture of military innovation, a culture that pervades the DNA of the PLA Navy today. If you’re interested in learning more, definitely check out some of Toshi’s books. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea. Red Star over the Pacific, that’s now in its second edition. There’s lots of learnings in both of those great books. The Principles of War podcast is brought to you by James Ealing. The show notes for the Principles of War podcast are available at www.theprinciplesofwar.com for maps, photos, and other information that didn’t make it into the podcast. Follow us on Facebook or Tweet us at surprisePodcast.
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