From the Sands of Helmand to the Shores of Tainan

金門調酒 - Kinmen Cocktails #3

You’ll hear a variation of this line uttered in every discussion of the Sino-American rivalry within the US military - “The PLA has no real combat experience, so they don’t know what they’re doing. We have plenty of combat experience.” Such pride before the fall.

The Case

The PLA fought a grinding and inconclusive ground campaign in northern Vietnam, with major division-level offensive operations spanning 1979 to 1988, with a formal end in 1991.

Reflecting CCP propaganda, the Wikipedia page on the Sino-Vietnamese war is full of inaccuracies foisted upon the American public through CCP influence operations on the internet.

The last major conventional operation of the PLA ended in 1988. This aligns more closely chronologically with the last major conventional operations of the US military in the 1991 Gulf War and the brief month-long campaign against Iraq in 2003. The difference now seems not so great when defined as experience in conventional operations.

Even if combat experience is expanded to the unconventional, we should ask if a disjointed counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, which ended in failure, even counts as applicable experience. While the situation in Iraq is better, no clear victory was won there either. It is unclear what “experience” US military personnel are referring to.

The conditions of unconventional and conventional wars are quite different. In history books, the conflicts that precede large conventional wars are analyzed for their similarities to future wars, not their differences.

The 1904 Russo-Japanese War and the 1899 Second Boer War taught great powers about the changing roles of trench works, artillery, barbed wire, cavalry, observation balloons, and machine guns.

While the Germans, British, and French incorporated many of these lessons learned, they were not distilled into doctrine solidly enough to allow for creative offensive operations until late in WWI, when more learning occurred at a high cost in time and blood.

There is very little in the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns relatable to a future war in the Pacific. The roles of air defense, logistics, sea power, drones, missiles, and infantry will be quite different.

For argument’s sake, even if Global War on Terror (GWOT) experience does carry over, there is very little of it left in the rank and file. Squads, platoons, and companies lack this experience, which is increasingly concentrated in battalion command and higher. Today’s battalion command teams fought as junior officers and enlisted during the GWOT, and within five years this experience will continue to retire and transition up to the brigade level and higher.

This is not to mention that the Air Force and the Navy fought no major battles during the GWOT, and warfighting experience in these domains is absent throughout the US military and PLA.

We would still contend that the US maintains experience-based advantages. This includes the American cadre of senior generals and admirals who have decades of deep global operational experience working with allies and partners - something the PLA lacks.

The longstanding institutional mechanisms of the Department of War have been tested for much longer than the PLA. The DOW needs reform and adjustment, but the Department has plenty of experience in change.

The American people have a deep relationship with the American military, which is designed to defend and advance the interests of the nation. This is very different from the PLA, which is a cloistered party army.

But to contend that the US military has a combat experience advantage relevant to a large-scale conflict in the Pacific is bunk.