While China has made remarkable strides toward developing the “three superiorities,” information, air, and maritime dominance, required for military parity with the United States, several critical capabilities remain conspicuously absent from the People’s Liberation Army.
These gaps include limited global range, lagging nuclear capabilities, weak joint-operations capacity, the absence of reliable allies, no warfighting experience, poor interservice integration, and the pressure of an accelerating political timeline.
Taken together, these gaps represent fundamental limitations that could determine the outcome of any major conflict in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
China’s most glaring deficiency lies in its inability to project sustained military power beyond its immediate periphery. Although China’s reach is growing and future U.S. military dominance will likely be challenged at greater distances from China’s coast, the PLA remains fundamentally constrained by geography and logistics.
Unlike the United States, which maintains a global network of bases, allies, and forward-deployed forces, China operates from a single continental base with limited overseas infrastructure. The PLA’s lone overseas base in Djibouti, while symbolically important, cannot support major combat operations far from Chinese shores. This forces China to rely on a largely untested logistics chain that becomes increasingly vulnerable as the distance from the mainland increases.
While China can credibly threaten Taiwan, deny access within the First Island Chain, and project limited power to the Second Island Chain, it cannot sustain large-scale military operations in the Indian Ocean, Pacific beyond Guam, or any other theater requiring extended supply lines.
The second issue is nuclear weapons. China’s nuclear modernization, although rapid, remains incomplete. The Pentagon estimates that China has only about 600 nuclear warheads today and is expected to have more than 1,000 operational warheads by 2030, most of them deployed on systems capable of striking the American homeland and maintained at higher readiness levels. However, this represents only the beginning of nuclear parity, not its achievement.
The United States currently maintains approximately 5,177 nuclear warheads, with 1,700 deployed strategic warheads and a sophisticated triad of delivery systems tested over decades.
Additionally, China’s nuclear command structure remains centralized and potentially vulnerable to decapitation strikes. Unlike the U.S. system, which is designed for distributed decision-making during conflict, China’s nuclear forces may not function effectively if senior leadership is eliminated. China’s expanding nuclear arsenal also includes many untested systems. The reliability of Chinese missiles, warheads, and command systems under actual combat conditions remains unknown, whereas U.S. systems have undergone extensive testing and operational deployment.
While China is developing road-mobile ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, its nuclear forces still lack the geographic distribution and concealment capabilities of U.S. strategic forces spread across multiple continents and oceans.
One of China’s most critical strategic weaknesses is its lack of allies. Beijing has only one formal mutual-defense treaty, the 1961 pact with North Korea, and even that relationship is strained. Its ties with Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and other authoritarian partners do not include binding defense obligations, and Russia’s “no limits partnership” with China explicitly excludes a military alliance. By contrast, the United States maintains the world’s strongest alliance network, including NATO in Europe and formal defense treaties with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and states across the Western Hemisphere under the Rio Treaty.
Even within China’s informal axis of Russia, Pakistan, and other aligned states, there is no proven joint operations capability. China and Russia have conducted more than 90 joint exercises since 2003, some involving amphibious assault or naval blockade simulations, and China and Pakistan conduct regular training, exchanges, and arms transfers. On paper, these activities project an image of unity. In practice, however, analysts consistently find that the cooperation falls far short of true interoperability.
A 2024 U.S. Army War College study concluded that China and Russia still lack the ability to conduct real joint operations, and there is no sign this will change. Despite two decades of exercises, Chinese and Russian troops have never fought side by side, executed a joint deployment, or integrated their command structures in wartime scenarios.
Most “joint” drills amount to geographic de-confliction rather than unified command, shared communications systems, or combined-arms doctrine. The China–Pakistan relationship shows similar limits: Beijing trains and arms Pakistani forces, but no evidence demonstrates a mature, battle-tested joint-operations framework.
The United States and its allies operate at a far higher level because they have spent decades, and in many cases more than a century, building deep military interoperability. NATO and America’s treaty partners share standardized communications protocols, compatible weapons systems, and common doctrine through formal mechanisms such as NATO Standardization Agreements.
English serves as the de facto operating language across most allied militaries, making planning, command, and training vastly easier. These shared systems, procedures, and communications frameworks give the U.S.-led alliance system a structural foundation for real coalition warfare.
That foundation has been reinforced by repeated combat experience. The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, and others have fought side by side in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 Kosovo campaign, the twenty-year war in Afghanistan under NATO’s Article 5 mandate, and the 2003 Iraq War.
They have also deployed together in countless smaller conflicts, counterterrorism missions, peacekeeping operations, and maritime patrols. This shared wartime history builds trust, habit, and an instinctive understanding of how to coordinate joint operations under pressure—real-world readiness no rival bloc can match.
China’s partnerships lack this institutional depth and combat experience. The China–Russia relationship, despite more frequent exercises and growing alignment, remains informal and largely symbolic. Joint drills rarely address the requirements of true interoperability—integrated communications, unified command-and-control structures, synchronized logistics, or standardized equipment.
Training typically occurs in parallel rather than as integrated combat formations, and China has never fought a modern war alongside Russia, Pakistan, Iran, or any other partner. Differences in language, doctrine, equipment, and command systems further limit integration. As a result, China and its partners have no proven joint-operations capability, no shared wartime history, and no alliance framework capable of matching the global reach and combat-tested cohesion of U.S. and allied forces.
Combat experience is another glaring deficiency. The PLA has not fought a major conflict since the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, which lasted less than a month, leaving an entire generation of officers without real wartime experience. While training and exercises have improved dramatically, they cannot fully replicate the chaos, friction, and unpredictability of actual combat.
The PLA also faces significant organizational and interoperability issues. Despite recent reforms, the creation of new cyber, space, and information forces has introduced additional integration challenges that will take years to resolve. China’s rapid acquisition of advanced technologies, from hypersonic weapons to AI-enabled systems, now outpaces its ability to integrate them effectively. The core challenge is not building individual platforms but creating seamless coordination between sensors, shooters, and decision-makers across all domains simultaneously.
The PLA’s emphasis on informatized and intelligent warfare demands unprecedented synchronization between space-based sensors, cyber operations, electronic warfare, kinetic strikes, and information operations. This integration problem becomes exponentially more difficult when facing a peer adversary with sophisticated jamming, cyber capabilities, and systems designed to disrupt Chinese command-and-control.
China’s most pressing problem is one the US does not have to face at all, a time frame. China has set ambitious milestones: 2027 for initial capability, 2035 for full modernization, and 2049 for “world-class” status.
While these goals remain achievable, they create pressure that could lead to premature action or insufficient development of critical capabilities. The 2027 target, marking the PLA’s centenary, represents building material capabilities for credible military options, not necessarily invasion timelines. However, the political symbolism attached to these dates creates pressure to demonstrate capabilities that may not be fully mature.
China’s strategic patience, while generally sound, faces internal pressures from nationalist expectations and external pressures from a changing strategic environment. The window for peaceful resolution of core interests like Taiwan may be narrowing, potentially forcing China to act before its military capabilities are fully developed.
These missing capabilities suggest that while China poses an increasingly credible threat within its immediate periphery, true global military parity remains years away. The United States retains significant advantages in power projection, nuclear sophistication, joint operations experience, and systems integration.
However, China’s methodical approach and strategic patience mean these gaps will likely narrow over time. While the PLA has made remarkable progress in developing individual capabilities, transforming them into integrated, combat-tested systems capable of challenging U.S. military dominance globally remains the ultimate test of Chinese military modernization.
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