Larry Wortzel
The PLA and Mission Command: Is the Party Control System Too Rigid for its Adaptation by China?
Larry Wortzel (left) in Taipei with Wendell Minnick. Author photograph. Circa 2020.
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6 April 2024 (Saturday)
Larry Wortzel
2023 Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - Larry Wortzel has just produced a must-read paper on China’s People’s Liberation Army via the control mechanism of the Chinese Communist Party.
Entitled The PLA and Mission Command: Is the Party Control System Too Rigid for its Adaptation by China? (March 2024), Land Warfare Paper 159 published by The Association of the United States Army (AUSA).
As a retired U.S. Army Colonel, Wortzel is a legend with genuine spooky credentials.
From 1988 to 1990, Wortzel was an Assistant Army Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, and witnessed and reported on the chaos leading up to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the army crackdown. In 1995, he returned to the U.S. Embassy as the Army Attaché.
During the entire buildup to the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, though not near Tiananmen Square, Wortzel positioned himself near a PLA airfield that was the staging area for elements of the 54th Group Army and the 15th Airborne Army.
When those forces began to move toward the center of the city, Wortzel and a colleague got between the columns and marched along with them toward the city center, breaking off near the U.S. Embassy to report and regroup.
Wortzel was the epiphany of crazy brave.
Wortzel is only one of three U.S. military officers known to have jumped with China’s Airborne Corps. The three U.S. Army officers: Bernard Loeffke, Army Attaché, made a jump with the PLA Airborne in the early 1980s. Then John Leide, Army Attaché, and Wortzel, as Assistant Army Attaché, made a jump with the 15th Airborne Army in early 1989 in Kaifeng and were awarded PLA Airborne Wings (the U.S. Army would not let them wear the wings on their uniforms).
After a 32-year military career in the Asia-Pacific, Wortzel retired in 1999. His next appointment would drive China crazy.
In 2001, as if God himself wanted to punish Beijing, Wortzel was made a Commissioner of the new U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission of the United States Congress. His term only expired at the end of 2020; covering 19-years that infuriatied Chinese officials.
Wortzel was the perfect warrior-scholar to face off against China.
A graduate of the U.S. Army War College, he earned his BA from Columbus College, Georgia, and his MA and PhD from the University of Hawaii. His last military position was the Director of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. He is currently a Senior Fellow in Asian Security at the American Foreign Policy Council.
BRIEFING ON PAPER:
CONCLUSION
The top-down system of CCP leadership is built on the party’s firm control of the military. Ultimately, the PLA has the mission of keeping the party in power. The party warns soldiers not to deviate from party guidelines. There is no call to innovate and forge ahead with creative, new ideas except in some limited areas. Xi Jinping often discusses creativity and innovation, but his focus is on weapon development or scientific experimentation. At a meeting of political commissars at the PLA’s “All Army Party Building Meeting” in 2013, Xi Jinping himself directed the PLA to “unswervingly support the party and its spirit, [and] ensure the party and the people are under the command of the Central Military Commission.”
In the same speech, Xi told political commissars that the PLA must increase its technological and scientific level. There was no urging by Xi to understand the commander’s intent and use creativity and initiative to accomplish military missions.
In a speech to an expanded meeting of the CCP CMC, Xi Jinping emphasized that the entire PLA must maintain a “firm and correct political direction, focusing on the role of the political commissar system. This type of meeting often includes senior theater commanders and their political commissars.
The fact that the China Military Science journal even carried the article by the four authors discussed in this paper means that at least some in the PLA and its senior ranks think that the stranglehold on the PLA held by the dual command structure of the political commissar system might need reconsideration if the PLA is to become a modern military force and keep up with changes on the 21st-century battlefield. Certainly, the Soviet military learned that lesson.
Xi Jinping’s vision for the future of the PLA seems different, however. The PLA is to be driven by data and information technology and conduct integrated, joint operations that take advantage of automation and artificial intelligence to assist with decisionmaking and weapon control. This means that senior leaders, commanders, PCs, soldiers and NCOs do not need to have the flexibility to interpret the commander’s intent. Instead, they must increasingly follow centrally directed orders and depend on automated decision-making to orchestrate operations. This will undoubtedly impose new challenges on the PLA, particularly as these automated decision systems are vulnerable to enemy intervention and electromagnetic or cyberattack. Xi Jinping wants leaders who use information technology to orchestrate military operations. Real initiative and innovation by individuals and teams seems to be acceptable to Xi only when it is scientific and weapon research, not military operations.
There should be little doubt that the internal contradictions between using automation and remaining under the control of the political commissar system will create conflict in the PLA—between the party system and a group of officers who see another path, one that involves mission command and interpreting the commander’s intent.