The U.S. capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has inspired discussion about the implications for China and Taiwan. Will Beijing feel intimidated, or emboldened, by the American Special Forces’ brazen display of force in Caracas? Would a successful decapitation strike on Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) and his deputies lead to the strategic outcome that Beijing desires, or would it only strengthen Taiwan’s resolve?
I wanted to know the answer to a different question: Is making a run at Taiwan’s leadership really the sort of operation that China’s military would try, and if they did, could they pull it off? On Friday, I called up two of the world’s leading experts on the Chinese military to find out. Joshua Arostegui and Dennis Blasko are both former U.S. military intelligence analysts who have published extensively on Chinese special forces, as well as the structure and evolution of the Chinese military as a whole.
Here’s what I found.
Centralized Command
In the aftermath of Desert One, the failed mission to rescue American hostages in Tehran in 1980, the U.S. military knew that it needed to change. Special operations required flawless coordination between multiple domains — land, air, sea, space, information — which meant different branches of the military needed to share equipment and get along. They weren’t doing so well, said Blasko, who joined the Pentagon soon after Desert One. “We tried Army people on the back of Navy helicopters with Marine pilots, supported by Air Force C130s,” he said.
For members of Blasko’s generation, the Iranian hostage rescue debacle was a formative experience, and it led to the complete overhaul of the U.S. Special Forces command structure. Since 1987, the U.S. military has brought all of its special units under one command. The Navy SEALs still come out of the Navy, and the Green Berets still hail from the Army, but they answer to the same leadership. Special units like Delta Force, who led the raid in Caracas, have their own helicopters, too. “These guys, their whole point in life is to do these daring missions, these bold missions,” said Arostegui. “That’s all they do, and they’re really good at it.”
The Chinese special forces don’t have their own helicopters. They also don’t have their own central command structure. When they want to use aircraft for training, they have to borrow them from one of the branches for a while, then give them back. Each unit belongs to one branch of the military, and that’s the branch that they answer to. Arostegui said that in their current formulation, Chinese special forces can conduct special missions that shift the battlefield environment in China’s favor. But the sort of virtuosic display of cross-domain coordination that the U.S. carried out in Venezuela? Not so much. “When it comes to a deep penetration snatch and grab within a capital city to grab a president, that is not what they’re equipped for,” he said. “Their whole job has always been traditionally to support conventional forces.”
Risk Aversion
Analysts have long said that the hierarchical culture of the People’s Liberation Army doesn’t allow for the sort of creative thinking necessary for excelling at special operations. I asked Arostegui whether the criticism still holds weight for today’s PLA. “If you would have asked me this five years ago, I would have said yes,” he said, but now he thinks “they are opening up a bit more.” Arostegui said that there is room for risk-taking and challenging orthodoxy at the lower level, where officers don’t yet have political influence to protect. But at the higher levels of command, where party oversight is much closer at hand, that sense of initiative tends to fall away.
In my conversation with Blasko, I put the question more bluntly: Is there something in the American culture of rugged individualism that makes the U.S. more suited to excel at special forces than a country like China? He said it wasn’t a bad theory:
When you’re using nuclear bombs or firing artillery, there are specific steps you take. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, you take them in that order… you want that anal retentive in these certain jobs. However, that type of personality does not apply to the … Special Forces officer. That is not the kind of mindset that you want in the Special Forces. [The] Special Operations operator, he might have to go from one to four to two to eight to accomplish a mission … So there is a different type of mindset … The whole psychological profile of selecting your SF personnel is quite different than selecting your conventional military officers … So I don’t know exactly what that psychological profile for the PLA would be.
Arostegui said that the culture of risk-taking in the U.S. military stretches all the way to the top. After the raid in Caracas, Trump told The New York Times that he was worried while watching it that it would turn into another Desert One. The mission was a resounding success, but it appears to have relied on razor thin margins of execution. In the short term, U.S. adventurism can be disastrous. But Arostegui says that in the long term, willingness to fail has been key to transforming the U.S. Special Forces into the juggernaut that they are today.
The question remains now, is the PLA a risk averse organization? How about the PRC in general? Are they risk averse? Is the CCP risk averse to this type of thing? Are they willing to take risks to accomplish these kinds of missions? It’s tough to say, because when you look at the good old Leninist Party system, you don’t want to take too many risks because of how fragile it can be if it fails, right? That’s the big one.
So, would China be willing to risk failure in a decapitation raid in Taiwan? “If you have not conducted any kind of major operation in decades,” Arostegui said, “this would be a very difficult first time one for a CCP leader to say, yeah, you know what? Let’s do this.”
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