On 19 April 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Central Military Commission (CMC) announced the end of the PLA’s Strategic Support Force (SSF), a move which resulted in the creation of a new Information Support Force (ISF, 信息支援部队) and the alteration of the reporting relationships of two of its departments. The SSF’s Aerospace Systems and Network Systems departments appear to have been re-designated as the Aerospace Force (ASF, 军事航天部队) and Cyberspace Force (CSF, 网络空间部队), respectively, and all three bodies will now report directly to the PLA’s CMC. While there has not yet been any additional official explanation regarding the rationale and timing of this restructuring, the move clearly suggests a level of dissatisfaction within the CMC with the performance of the SSF. Whether this dissatisfaction was operational or political in nature, or perhaps a combination of both, remains unclear.
A boost for information support…
Following the dissolution of the SSF, the PLA now counts ‘four services (军种) and four arms (兵种)’. The four services include the army, navy, air force and rocket force, while the four arms comprise the Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force, Information Support Force and the Joint Logistics Support Force (JLSF). Importantly, the ASF and CSF aren’t support forces in the same way the ISF is. Both the ASF and CSF control capabilities in each of their domains and as such play a different role to the ISF’s support function for the rest of the military. By creating the ISF, President Xi Jinping likely thinks that the ‘information support’ function requires greater prominence generally, and at the inter-service and inter-theatre levels in particular.
The ISF has been established with the same deputy-theatre-command leader grade as the ASF and CSF, and as such, all three are positioned below both the services and the theatre commands in the PLA hierarchy. All three forces, like their SSF predecessor, will report directly to the CMC, though it is unclear how they will each interact with theatre commands and individual services.
The order in which the new arms were announced in the official press release suggests that the ASF and CSF rank as more senior forces than the ISF, and that their previous roles and composition could remain unchanged. The CSF will continue to conduct defensive and offensive information operations, including ‘reinforcing national cyber border defense, promptly detecting and countering network intrusions and maintaining national cyber sovereignty and information security.’ Similarly, the ASF will continue to command the PLA’s space forces. The press release indicated that details about their roles and command would be forthcoming.
The information currently available indicates that the ISF will be responsible for the construction and implementation of joint information support to ‘build a network information system that fulfils the requirements of modern warfare’. The development of information support capabilities is not a new challenge and has been a key goal for the PLA in efforts to achieve Xi’s ambition of building an ‘informatised’ military as a stepping stone to building an ‘intelligentised military’. The ISF is likely to be based around the SSF’s former Information and Communication Base (信息通信基地). Originally established in 2010 as the Information Assurance Base (信息保障基地) under the PLA’s General Staff Department, the Information and Communication Base, also known as 61001部队, has been regularly involved in exercising and managing the PLA’s information network infrastructure. It was transferred to the SSF upon the latter’s activation, but kept distinct from the Aerospace Systems and Network Systems departments.
…but building an informatised military remains a work in progress
President Xi created the Strategic Support Force in 2015 as part of his efforts to modernise the PLA and strengthen the force’s integrated joint operational warfighting ability. The SSF was dedicated to cyber, information and space capabilities, and was created by combining disparate existing components across the PLA in order to create synergies between various capabilities and roles related to the information domain. The formation of the SSF was viewed as a sign of the importance that Xi and the PLA placed on progress in these areas, and its dissolution possibly points to a failure to deliver.
The focus on building joint information-support capabilities indicated by the establishment of the ISF speaks to the continued challenges that the PLA likely still faces in achieving its goal of building an informatised military – one in which services and theatre commands seamlessly collect and share data. Xi had initially called for the PLA to make ‘major progress’ toward informatisation by the end of 2020 and ‘basically achieve mechanisation’. However, by mid-2019, the authors of China’s defence white paper cautiously stated that, despite having made good progress in reforms to date, the PLA had ‘yet to complete the task of mechanization’ and was ‘in urgent need of improving its informationization’. The requirement for the ISF to build and operationalise joint information-support capabilities suggests that this continues to be a work in progress.
Political considerations may also have led to the organisational change. By removing layers of bureaucracy between the CMC and the ASF, CSF and ISF, Xi could gain greater oversight of the forces’ activities, suggesting he may have been dissatisfied with the level of oversight he previously had. As the information and space domains (and related capability development) intersect with areas of political sensitivity and China’s foreign affairs, a desire to gain greater control may have been part of the reason for the restructure.
As is common in PLA announcements, the statement on the establishment of the ISF called for ‘absolute loyalty, purity and reliability of the military’. Some commentators have pointed to possible corruption within the SSF. The former SSF commander General Ju Qiansheng and the former SSF Deputy Commander Lieutenant General Shang Hong (responsible for the former SSF Aerospace Systems Department) have largely disappeared from public view; Ju was last seen in February 2024. Xi has appointed Lieutenant General Bi Yi as ISF commander and General Li Wei as ISF political commissar. Both previously served in the SSF: Bi was parachuted into the SSF as deputy commander in mid-2023, while General Li served as the SSF’s senior political commissar. However, without further open-source information, it is difficult to say whether General Ju’s and General Shang’s disappearances were indeed related to corruption within the PLA, and if so, whether this factored into Xi’s decision-making regarding the SSF’s future. That aside, in the current grade and rank structure within the PLA, General Li’s new position represents an unusual demotion of a Political Commissar from a theatre-command-leader grade to a deputy-theatre-command-leader grade. As a result, the Political Commissar is more senior than his operational counterpart. It is unclear what caused this departure from standard procedure.
The reorganisation of the SSF offers an interesting window onto the current progress of PLA modernisation and reform. However, the PLA’s long history of experimentation suggests that this should neither be viewed as a result of a complete failure of PLA reform, nor of political infighting within the PLA. The change is also not likely to result in significant disruption to PLA activity, though it may take time to fully understand the operational and command structures of the three forces. How the new structure will contribute to the achievement of informatisation will be an important indicator of how ready the PLA is for its next significant ambition: building an intelligentised fighting force.