What You Can't See Might Kill You

DefenseTech has a great piece on Chinese military modernization that dovetails with a lot of recent PLA studies research by James Mulvenon and others. Just because China is building towards a MTR-style recon-strike complex doesn't mean that it will hit anything without the "recon" part of it:

What’s missing is the reconnaissance piece. Smart weapons require a smart reconnaissance and targeting network otherwise they’re useless. The overlays on the map above are misleading in that we do not know whether China can accurately target those areas that fall within various missile envelopes. So far anyway, the U.S. is the only country to have built a truly global reconnaissance strike complex. Cold War exigencies and nearly limitless defense spending enabled the U.S. to build both the reconnaissance and the strike components, something other nations were unable to do.

China's challenge, even in the limited context of its Western Pacific playpen, is to develop a system of systems that can track and target the US and other assets within the region. We know, from translations of Chinese operational art, that they aspire to do so but aspiration is very far from reality--especially within the context of joint operations and C2. China has, however, made some truly impressive leaps in doctrine and capabilities since the 1970s, when they found themselves underperforming in a "local war" gone wrong against the Vietnamese.

Their leaders are very cognizant of the fact that they need to catch up to now 40-year old family of technologies that originated with the PGM/recon-strike revolution of the late 70s and culminated in the kind of capabilities that enabled a small group of special forces soldiers to devastate an Iraqi mechanized company in 2003. This is not Sun Tzu-esque trickery (although the Chinese military literature sometimes places a bit of an emphasis on it) but basic common sense.

However, the old strains of Maoist thinking about protracted war and "luring the enemy into the deep," as Ka Po Ng noted in a 2005 Chinese doctrinal review, still have a conceptual hold on some Chinese military thinkers. This might also retard their adaptation to modern conventional operational doctrine and technology.