New Delhi: Chinese President Xi Jinping instigated a significant restructuring of the People’s Liberation Army on April 19 by axing the Strategic Support Force and replacing it with a new Information Support Force.
While it’s unclear exactly why Xi enacted this major reshuffle, analysts suspect both military capability and political control contributed to his decision.
Joel Wuthnow, a Chinese military expert with the Washington-based National Defence University, believes Xi wanted greater oversight of support forces with the People’s Liberation Army.
“PLA observations of the war in Ukraine have made very clear that an effective structure for support forces, including in the logistics and information domains, is essential for modern war fighting. My sense is that the SSF [Strategic Support Force] proved to be an unnecessary management layer that obscured Xi’s visibility into what the PLA was doing in space, cyberspace and other information disciplines,” Wuthnow said.
China created the SSF on December 31, 2015. Its successor, the Information Support Force, will now handle network information systems and communications support, and possibly network defence.
The new organisation operates alongside two other newly announced military arms — the Cyberspace Force and the Aerospace Force — plus the pre existing Joint Logistics Support Force. This leaves the PLA with a structure of four arms and four services, the latter comprising the Army, Navy, Air Force and Rocket Force.
The four arms are directly subordinate to the Central Military Commission, which is the top political party organ that oversees China’s armed forces. This means the commission’s leaders can directly deal with individual support forces rather than having to go through the SSF headquarters.
The latest move came as a surprise to observers, said Brendan Mulvaney, the director of the US Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.
“Obviously it takes quite a bit of planning and groundwork to create a new force, much less disband another, but it appears the PLA kept these plans pretty well hidden from public view,” Mulvaney said.
Mulvaney said corruption might have played a part in Xi’s decision. However, the SSF has not experienced corruption scandals at the level of the Rocket Force, whose leadership was detained by the authorities last year.
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