The U.S. military’s extensive combat experience over more than two decades gives American service members a decisive advantage over China’s People’s Liberation Army, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric Smith, said recently.
“Our last combat was captured on somebody’s iPhone 14,” Smith said on Saturday during a panel discussion at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California. “The Chinese’ last combat was captured on oil and canvas, and they should not forget that.”
Smith added that the U.S. military has extensive experience operating as a joint force and has developed a culture of interoperability, while China has not “had to deal with that in decades.”
“It is easy to bluster, but it’s another thing when you actually have to go toe-to-toe and go in harm’s way,” Smith said. “And we have a lengthy history of going in harm’s way in Iraq, in Afghanistan. So, I would not undersell the value that our combat experience brings to this fight.”
Despite Smith’s comments about “oil and canvas,” China’s last war was against Vietnam in 1979, but border clashes between the two countries continued until they reached a formal peace agreement in 1991.
In a statement to Task & Purpose, Smith said that U.S. troops have been battle-hardened over the past decades, and that has taught them lessons that will be invaluable in future conflicts.
“We have a generation of Marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and guardians for the Space Force who have experienced the fog of war firsthand,” Smith said. “While the character of future conflicts may differ, the nature of war never changes. The uncertainty, chaos, and violence of war cannot be replicated in a simulator. Our experience in the cauldron of combat will give us an advantage in any future fight.”
“Those who have experienced combat are now training, leading, and mentoring the next generation, ensuring they will be ready,” Smith continued. “You simply cannot replace that.”
Even so, China’s military has come a long way
The People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 after communists won the country’s civil war. The following year, China intervened in the Korean War, sending troops against U.S. and allied forces. During the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in November and December 1950, a single Marine division held off 12 Chinese divisions.
Even though United Nations forces prevented North Korean and Chinese communists from overrunning South Korea, China’s intervention prevented the United States and its allies from achieving an outright victory.
Afterward, China fought an undeclared border war with the Soviet Union in 1969, and then it fought Vietnam 10 years later in an attempt to get Vietnamese forces to withdraw from Cambodia. Even though China’s invasion of Vietnam is considered a failure in the West, China claims it as a victory.
Since then, the People’s Liberation Army has become a much more formidable fighting force, and U.S. government officials widely consider China to be America’s top potential adversary. The People’s Liberation Army also has the world’s largest active military force with about 2.2 million active-duty troops, according to the Defense Department’s 2023 report on Chinese military power. China also has about 1.2 million reservists and 660,000 paramilitary forces for a total force of about 4 million.
Meanwhile, China’s navy is the largest in the world, boasting more than 370 vessels. The U.S. Navy, by comparison, has fewer than 300 ships and submarines, and that number is expected to drop as older vessels are decommissioned.
China’s rocket force also has an arsenal of about 3,150 missiles, including about 500 land-based Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles, or IRBMS, which can strike targets on and beyond Guam both on land and at sea.
Over the past year, the Houthis have proven that ballistic missiles can be used against ships. In a war against China, U.S. aircraft carriers could be at risk from Chinese IRBMS, Task & Purpose previously reported.
A political military
While the People’s Liberation Army would be hampered by its lack of combat experience in a war against the United States, it is possible that the Chinese would be able to learn from their initial mistakes, said Timothy Heath, a senior international defense researcher with the RAND Corporation
“Even Russia’s military, despite immense corruption, incompetence, and poor leadership, has improved its performance over the course of its war with Ukraine,” Heath told Task & Purpose. “For China, it will be essential for the [People’s Liberation Army] to have practices and rules for drawing lessons from combat experiences for it to learn and improve.”
While combat inexperience would be an issue for the People’s Liberation Army, there are other more serious factors that would hamper its performance in a war against the United States, Heath said. For example, corruption in the Chinese military could mean that poorly qualified commanders may have gained their leadership positions through graft and nepotism instead of demonstrating their competence.
The People’s Liberation Army also does not have many commanders and staff who understand joint operations, and its centralized control along with the domination of the army over all Chinese military forces limits its ability to operate effectively as a joint force, Heath said.
A major limiting factor is that the People’s Liberation Army is a political military, meaning that it is focused on keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power, Heath said. In other words, its top priority is political control rather than combat readiness.
“The PLA must spend up to 40% of its training time in political indoctrination, for example,” Heath said. “And the system of commissars and party committees as well as a culture of overly centralized, top-down direction all would likely reduce the military’s flexibility, ability to adapt, and local initiative.”
Not all combat experience is the same
War is an inherently uncontrolled environment. Managing that chaos requires experienced leaders, from the small-unit level to the most senior ranks. Combat experience can reveal shortcomings in a way that training exercises may not, said Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C.
However, not all military operations are the same, so it would be a mistake to put too much value in combat experience in one particular theater of war, Pettyjohn told Task & Purpose.
“American forces have been operating continuously since the 1991 Gulf War, but they have been employed against less capable adversaries and typically in small-scale contingencies,” Pettyjohn said. “Because they have not been engaged in high-intensity conflict against a peer, this operational experience does not include key missions like suppression of enemy air defenses or protecting rear areas, such as logistics hubs and headquarters.”
The U.S. defense industrial base right now does not have the ability to produce enough complex weapons systems that the American military would need for a war against China, Pettyjohn said.
“We need to bolster the existing [defense industrial base] in key areas (e.g. shipbuilding, aircraft, munitions) but also build a new industry that manufactures simpler one-use systems (munitions and drones) that could be rapidly surged in the event of a war.”
The United States would run out of key munitions quickly in a war against China, the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, D.C., concluded last year following a series of war games that simulated a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026.
In the war games, the United States expended all its anti-long-range ship missiles within a week, and other precision missiles ran out in a matter of weeks, said retired Marine Col. Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at CSIS. He noted that the U.S. military’s efforts to purchase more munitions won’t start delivering new missiles in bulk until the late 2020s.
If the United States and China went to war, it would drain the stockpile of U.S. missiles and other ordnance, which has already been depleted by military assistance to Ukraine and Israel and ongoing operations against the Houthis in Yemen. Navy Adm. Samual Paparo, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, recently said the U.S. military needs to replenish its stockpile of munitions.
“I was already dissatisfied with the magazine depth,” Paparo said last month at the Brookings Institute think tank in Washington, D.C. “I’m a little more dissatisfied with the magazine depth.”
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