[Originally two Twitter threads.]

Hopefully we’ll learn more about the PLA reorganization as more information trickles out about the new arrangements. Some scattered hot takes:

1. My instinct is that this reorganization was not triggered by any one thing, but reflects the fact that the PLA has struggled for many years to decide how to organize certain critical functions that span multiple domains. This includes cyber operations, other types of intelligence support, and overseeing development of C4ISR architectures. These are inherently tricky questions without clear right or wrong answers.

2. It’s probably not about corruption. I assume if the PLA looked hard enough it would have found significant corruption in the SSF, and maybe some will come to light, but that wouldn’t have triggered this broad organizational restructuring, which mostly affects command relationships and not discipline oversight.

3. Many of us are focused on implications for PLA cyber and other types of intelligence collection, but it may be more accurate/helpful to interpret this as the latest chapter in the PLA’s long pursuit of “informatization” and the right organizational models to achieve it. Arguably that is more focused on sharing information between PLA units than obtaining intelligence from outside of it. Cyber operations were probably not the main driver of this reorganization, even though it’ll have important implications for cyber.

4. Along these lines, I found it very helpful to re-read Elsa Kania’s and John Costello’s article on informatization. The GSD Communications Department became the Informatization Department, then it splintered across several organizations, and now it has maybe been partly reconstituted in this new Information Support Force? That’s a lot of churn! When I read Xi’s speech from yesterday, to me a lot of what he is talking about is about broader “informatization” rather than intelligence support (even though they’re related).

5. I don’t know what the new hierarchical relationships are for the cyberspace force and space systems department/force. The grades of their commanding officers will be important to determining their bureaucratic relationships. If I were the PLA I would probably put the cyberspace force back within the Joint Staff Department, but they didn’t ask me!

Anyhow, these are all hot takes subject to change, etc etc. One last hot take: this is another indication that Xi does not anticipate fighting a large-scale war in the near-term. There are other, stronger indications of this, but it’s still a useful datapoint.

My biggest question about the Cyberspace Force is: who is managing/overseeing it on the Central Military Commission? And more broadly: doesn’t the CMC have a span of control problem?

There have been several excellent analyses of the latest PLA reorganization that point out that the CSF and other new branches are presumably directly subordinate to the CMC, and that theoretically this allows “the CMC” to control them more directly. But who in the CMC? The Joint Logistics Support Force worked in tandem with a whole CMC Joint Logistics Department. But these new “forces” don’t have one for one overseers or counterparts in the CMC bureaucracy.

So in practical terms, what leader and staff on the CMC is going to actually provide them with detailed direction?

More broadly, my hunch is that Xi and the PLA have overcorrected from the pre-reform CMC system, and that there are too many constituent and directly subordinate CMC units. I can understand the political logic of wanting to fragment authority within the PLA to ensure that nothing like the old General Political Department can re-emerge. And the risk of excessive fragmentation is probably loss of organizational coherence rather than loss of control, which Xi may view as acceptable. But to me this “triple matrix” structure, as Joe McReynolds and John Costello described it in their excellent article, and the flattening of the CMC seem like an overcorrection.