The Department of Defense released an annual report outlining the challenges facing the U.S. military and assessing changes in China’s military and security strategy, DOD News reported Tuesday.
The 2022 China Military Power Report details the East Asian country’s efforts to expand its national power to transform the international system; increase military coercion in the Indo-Pacific region; strengthen its space, nuclear and counterspace capabilities; and intensify its diplomatic, political, economic and military pressure against Taiwan.
“It’s important to understand the contours of [Peoples’ Liberation Army] modernization to include their thinking about what the PLA’s way of war would look like, to kind of survey their current activities and modernizing capabilities and to assess their future military modernization goals,” a senior defense official told reporters prior to the report’s release Tuesday.
“As an outcome of the 20th Party Congress [in October], Beijing is focusing on intensifying and accelerating the PLA’s modernization goals over the next five years, including strengthening what they refer to as its system of strategic deterrence,” the official said.
According to the report, PLA started discussing the “multi-domain precision warfare” as an operational concept meant to use its command, control, communications, computers, intelligence and reconnaissance network to detect vulnerabilities in the operational systems of its adversaries.
The document also noted that China has 400 operational nuclear warheads and could deploy about 1,500 warheads by 2035 if the pace of the country’s nuclear expansion efforts continues.
