Excited to share this @WarOnTheRocks piece I've been contemplating and working on for a while now: "The Blind Spots in Chinese Military Studies." My contention is the authoritative textbooks and sources published by the PLA are dwindling or becoming outdated in the face of organizational reforms and data restrictions. The result is a community that is increasingly speculating or inferring Chinese military strategy from woefully outdated doctrinal texts, despite valiant efforts to stitch together incomplete pictures from a paucity of sources. This leads to the current challenge facing PLA watchers: deducing how the PLA will bridge the divide between military strategy and campaign-level and tactical-level operations based on outdated texts. Western analysts resort to using partial sources on particular issues to interpret the PLA's collective, authoritative guidance on the key principles of strategy and operational warfighting. This is a demanding task with a high degree of difficulty, and reasonable Western analysts can come to different conclusions. Less capable analysts are likely to mirror-image or get it wrong. I advocate restoring the Open Source Enterprise — formally called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service — back into the public domain. This can be done by empowering existing U.S. government platforms with the capability and experience to support a reconstituted FBIS — such as the Library of Congress — to revive taxpayer-funded open-source intelligence-gathering of translations of foreign military and political news, articles, and textbooks, in particular related to the PLA. This of course will not fundamentally solve the problem, but it will help. Thanks to David M. Finkelstein, @jwuthnow, Lonnie Henley, Dennis Blasko, Phil Saunders, Ken Allen, Chad Sbragia, Joshua Arostegui, and @NathanMBM for their helpful comments on previous drafts.

The PLA Daily’s military forum began examining the concept of “battlefield execution” (战场执行) in 2025, describing it as the ability to translate higher-level commander’s intent into operational plans and battlefield action. In my latest China Brief Notes @ChinaBriefJT article for the Jamestown Foundation @JamestownTweets, I analyze this emerging trend and its connection to the PLA’s 2027 military modernization goals. Executive Summary: （1） Recent PLA Daily discussion of “battlefield execution,” which concerns the capability of front-line commanders to implement higher-level operational intent, suggests senior officers are concerned about balancing the autonomy of commanders with political control over the military. （2） Articles on “battlefield execution” show that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) still recognizes deficiencies in its joint operations capability. Its release of several logistics-related measures and regulations this year indicate it views logistics as a core component of sustained battlefield execution capability. （3） Battlefield execution likely relates to the 2027 centennial goal for military building, namely the development of a certain level of joint operations capability.