People’s Liberation Army: Army Campaign Doctrine in Transition (Kevin McCauley) (January 2023)

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • The PLA develops generic offensive, defensive, and special conditions campaign models
    to support planning and training for operational scenarios it believes are relevant to
    potential conflicts. These generic campaigns provide planning factors, force organization,
    and operational methods for combat.

  • The choice of campaigns reveals that Taiwan and Indian conflict scenarios are the key
    scenarios for which the PLA is planning and training.

  • Some of the campaigns do not appear to represent operational situations the PLA is likely
    to face in the near to mid-term.

  • PLA doctrinal change is evolutionary, and in the past slow. The available PLA sources on
    Army doctrine appear to show incremental change to date due to developing technologies
    such as artificial intelligence or research on operational methods exhibited in recent foreign
    conflicts such as the United States military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.