WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette

Jordan Schneider (0:00)

WarTalk special guest, Jerry Brown, recently two weeks out of government after a career in the State Department and various corners of the intelligence community, primarily covering the Chinese military. Joining us today, Tony Stark, Justin, as well as Bryan. Jerry, welcome out.

Tony Stark (0:22)

So for the past five years, Jerry, I think the number one thing we've talked about is the discourse around 2027 versus the reality. I know you have done a lot of work about trying to get the right middle truth about what 2027 means for both the PLA and for what the US has to do. Why are people wrong when they talk about 2027?

Gerald C. Brown (0:46)

Well, yeah, this is just the whole can of worms right off the bat. I love it. No, 2027, everyone kind of got down a few weird rabbit holes, right? Very quickly it became this is the invasion date. And that's never really what was said. There are a few like, you know, you have like the Davidson window and all that. And people were like, hey, like, I see areas where, you know, like the threat is increased, like, you know, coupled with like, where are US readiness to that? But then people take this as like a statement of PLA intentions. And that's just not correct, right? So I think CIA Director Burns put out some things on 2027 date. The ODNI report put out some things basically like, hey, look, this is a capability state. This is, you know, the PLA is trying to do a series of things, and they want to have this option at this time, but not necessarily the intent to go. It's not a go date, right? But honestly, there's a lot of details out there on what the PLA is doing for 2027

That's poorly understood.

I think honestly, first off, so like pretty much going into 2020, right? The PLA usually operates in series of, or at least for the last, you know, several years now of like three year goals, right? And going into 2020, they had the 2020 goal, 2035 and 2049, right? 2020 was mechanization. That was the big thing, right? Going into this, we were usually when they go over and they hit these things, so they hit 2020 like, right, we've mechanized, we figured out what everyone else did in World War II. Congratulations, right? Then they go over and adjust things going forward from there, right? So they went over as part of these 2035 goals, set up a series of accelerations of like certain key aspects of this, right? So at the 2020, they established the 2027 goals, which was to take a large variety of things that they saw as the most kind of important elements of 2035 and move them up, right? What these kind of came out was what they called the three major strategic capabilities, right? Sanda, Jianglu, and Nongli. And this is three things, right? Strategic counterbalance, strategic decisive victory, and strategic deterrence and control.

Strategic decisive victory is probably where most of this Taiwan stuff, and they haven't a ton of information out, but over the last several years, especially more and more sources have come out of how they're discussing this, what they're thinking about with some of these things, right? The strategic decisive victory is just being able to win the conflicts that they're focused on. This is within the shift in military strategic guidelines, which happened for this context, 2019 There was another shift a few years later. But military strategic guidelines like the top line guidance from Xi Jinping, like, hey, how the military needs to think and react to the new security environment, right?

And this kind of would like a continued focus on Taiwan. It's a major strategic direction, but also countering the US. You know, they saw the US threat becoming more and more of a concern. So here's the decisive victory, being able to prevail in the conflicts that you see yourself fighting, which is Taiwan, right? They want to be able to have victory there at an acceptable cost. Strategic counterbalance, and this is largely where a lot of nuclear elements, which I'm sure we'll talk about a lot. This is always my kind of primary area, right? Strategic counterbalance is broader than nuclear, but nuclear is a key component of it, right? It's basically keeping the US at arms length. You want to go over and deter US intervention within the conflicts that you're trying to fight, and that's a wide range of strategic capabilities, of which nuclear is one, but also things like space, cyber, conventional missile operations. This has also been a core goal of the PLA Rocket Force since they were established on December 31, 2015