What Happened
Beijing Studies Conflict to Inform Modernization Efforts
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is drawing lessons from the conflict in Iran to inform its modernization efforts, with a focus on intelligentized and systems-oriented warfare. Chinese military researchers are analyzing the war to measure their concepts against battlefield reality, and their findings suggest that the PLA is on the right track with its development of a military capable of challenging other large militaries. The conflict has reinforced the PLA’s emphasis on distributed command, network disruption, and cost efficiency, according to Breaking Defense.