How the world's largest military stacks up to the US armed forces

Business Insider ^ | August 5. 2016 | Alex Lockie

[iowamark]

A recent report from the US Congressional Research Service outlines China's 2.3 million-member armed forces and sheds light on misconceptions from Western military analysts.

Simply put, the report challenges the idea that Westerners can understand China's military and foreign-policy decisions without first understanding Chinese philosophy and culture of warfare.

Unlike the US, China has a media apparatus controlled by the state, so its military reports lack the transparency established by a free press.

China also has a fundamentally different understanding of aggression. For the Chinese, there is little difference between peacetime and wartime cyber espionage, and they have engaged in stealing military secrets from the US and others because they can.

The report, written by Ian E. Rinehart, a CRS analyst in Asian affairs, urges Congress and military leadership to examine a "Chinese way of war."

With a population of 1.3 billion to draw from, more than four times as much as the population of the US, China has over 2.3 million in active service, with an additional 1.1 million as reserves and military police. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) has actually shrunk from its estimated 1992 level of more than 3 million in active service.

The US military has about 1.4 million active service members, which represents a much lower total number of personnel, but a much higher percentage of the population engaged in the military.

Also important to consider is that China's last war was a short fight against Vietnam in 1979. The Chinese have not been in a sustained conflict since the Korean war that ended in 1953.

Though the US has larger and more modern forces, they would face huge difficulty in abandoning their posts worldwide to focus on China.

[RedStateRocker]

True.

I’m reading “Sun Tzu at Gettysburg” right now. Fascinating.

If we’d bothered to understand the oriental way of looking at war as well as they understood ours, Vietnam would have turned out quite differently.

I wrote an essay once arguing that General Giap was probably the most perfect disciple of von Clausewitz ever, and that this was no accident at all. It doesn’t matter who has the best military, it matters who wins, not at all the same thing. Reagan understood this, I believe, too- the recognition of our standard of living, freedoms and opportunity proved more powerful than all of the Warsaw pact and Chinese military units, espionage and propaganda in the end. War is an extension of politics, no more and no less.