John Culver joined the Brookings Institution as a nonresident senior fellow on February 28, 2025, following a distinguished career in government. Culver was a senior analyst and manager on China, with a particular focus on its military. He served as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2018. He was a founding member of the CIA’s Senior Analytic Service, was in the Senior Intelligence Service, and was a recipient of the CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal and the William L. Langer Award for extraordinary achievement in the CIA’s analytic mission.
**Jonathan A. Czin:**Tell us about your path to becoming a professional China watcher focused on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
John Culver:
My path was largely accidental, or the result of cosmic forces depending on your belief system. I had no academic training on China, but I had some family history—my maternal grandparents met and married in Peking in 1922. He was a U.S. Marine, and she was teaching school at the American Legation there. They started their family in China and brought home a lot of photos, stories, and some antiquities.
My first job after graduating college in 1980 was for a small defense consulting firm, and my work there gave me deep insights into the U.S. military, especially the U.S. Army, including its organizational structure and logistics system down to the nuts and bolts.
In 1985, I answered an ad in the Washington Post from the CIA. It turned out to be a Directorate of Operations (DO) recruiting program for case officers, aka spies. When we mutually agreed after six months that I could not sell sand on a beach, they passed my file to the Directorate of Intelligence (today’s Directorate of Analysis). After waiting months following background security screening, I got a call directing me to report to headquarters for an interview. No mention of who or for what area I would be interviewing. At the interview, I was asked questions about my background, only one of which touched on China. I was then asked when I could report for duty. I said, “In two weeks,” and asked, “What would I be doing?” Only then was I informed that I’d be analyzing Chinese ground forces.
In hindsight, I was incredibly lucky. First, to be working on China at that time, when the Soviet Union was the CIA’s near-consuming focus, while China was a U.S. strategic partner. If I’d been hired into SOVA, as our USSR division was known, I’d have been analyzing bridging units in some Central Asian military district. Instead, I was asked to analyze the world’s largest ground forces (some 3.5 million strong then) largely on my own. Second, my first direct manager was Dennis Wilder, one of the best China military analysts, editors, and supervisors that the CIA has ever had. I had a steep learning curve and long hours, and I loved every minute of it.
Jonathan A. Czin:
As somebody who has watched the PLA for decades, what is your assessment of the challenge that the PLA’s modernization poses to the United States?
John Culver:
Our main challenge is that the PLA since circa 1996 has transformed itself into a highly lethal adversary in terms of precision theater strike capabilities, with persistent global surveillance capabilities.
U.S. planning for potential conflicts with China—over Taiwan, or potentially on the Korean Peninsula or maritime disputes with neighbors—used to be simple. Show up with aircraft carrier strike groups or air superiority from bases in theater and China would have no real capability to challenge us. We had a “win button” just by showing up, versus the large but antiquated PLA. When President Bill Clinton directed two aircraft carrier battle groups to respond to menacing PLA exercises opposite Taiwan in 1996, we advised that the administration should announce the carrier deployments publicly because China had no means to track aircraft carriers until they were almost within line of sight.
Today and in the future, China tracks U.S. forces with high fidelity globally, every single day. It has the means, via world-class surveillance and tracking and the world’s largest and most advanced ballistic and cruise missile forces, to target any U.S. military asset out to Guam, and beyond. We cannot count on any force based on carrier groups or on land in Okinawa, Japan, the Philippines, or South Korea to be viable for generating striking force against China or Chinese forces encroaching on Taiwan.
The other great challenge for outside analysts is that the force that China has built looks highly capable on paper, but they haven’t been to war in a very long time and their ability to conduct complex, large-scale integrated joint operations is unproven. It remains unclear whether even Xi Jinping is confident that the PLA can provide him with real military operations for a decisive victory, and this issue is one of the key debates for U.S. and regional analysis.
Jonathan A. Czin:
How would you assess the U.S. policy response? Do you think the policy response has been adequate? What do you think the key gaps or deficiencies have been?
John Culver:
The U.S. policy response to China’s growing military capabilities—and assertiveness toward Taiwan and its neighbors—was overly subdued from about 2010 until it went into hyperdrive around 2018. In defense of policymakers, both Republicans and Democrats, China has not been conducting a crash preparation for war. Since the late 1990s, when Chinese military budgets started to increase at double-digit rates, this has been a peacetime military modernization fueled by China’s burgeoning economy, not a wartime mobilization. So, pick your metaphor—slowly boiling frogs, whatever—but so long as the United States was bogged down in Middle Eastern/Central Asian forever wars, and the Taiwan situation seemed stable, there was little compelling drumbeat to shift major forces and procurement.
Today, the policy process has overcompensated in terms of adversarial framing, rhetoric, etc., while underperforming in terms of addressing the military balance. The U.S. drive for “deterrence” in the case of a potential war over Taiwan sometimes seems based on an assumption that Xi will order the PLA to invade as soon as it is fully capable. That probably means that we could do things that could start the war we’re trying to deter, such as deploying U.S. forces to Taiwan, providing it with offensive weapons such as long-range strike missiles, or ending decades of U.S. strategic ambiguity and declaring that the U.S. military would defend Taiwan in the event of an attack.
**Jonathan A. Czin:**What do you think the PLA’s greatest advantages over the United States are? In what areas has the PLA made the most progress?
John Culver:
The PLA’s greatest advantage is geography since prospective wars involving the United States would be in China’s front yard, within range of land-based airpower, air defenses, and large numbers of precision-attack weapons. This matters more in the vast Pacific region than anywhere else. The United States would have to mobilize a massive force flow and logistics enterprise on the other side of the Pacific, possibly while all U.S. regional bases and naval concentrations are under attack. This could turn the tables on our regional alliance relationships where U.S. basing and operations make them prime targets rather than shielding allies from attack. The United States goes from being the regional security guarantor to being the insecurity guarantor.
The PLA also has an advantage in China being the industrial hub of the world, reversing the key U.S. superiority in every war we’ve fought since 1917. One major Chinese shipyard has significantly more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined; overall, China has more than 200 times our shipbuilding capacity. It makes more high-quality steel and aluminum than the rest of the world combined and has near-monopolies in refining and producing most strategic minerals.
The PLA’s other advantages today and looking forward to 2035 are relative parity in sea power and air power—in terms of technology and excepting undersea warfare—and regional precision strike. It will soon be a nuclear peer and a peer or better in some aspects of space and cyber offensive capabilities. It has better air-to-air, anti-ship, and theater-strike missiles and is closing fast in other areas. In terms of lethality, the PLA has built an impressive force that can contend for air dominance and information dominance. It has no experience with modern combat against a peer navy or air force, but then neither does the United States.
**Jonathan A. Czin:**What do you think the PLA’s greatest vulnerabilities are?
John Culver:
As noted, a lack of large-scale combat experience (since 1979) but more fundamentally an unknown and largely undemonstrated capacity to conduct joint operations. Doctrinally, the PLA undertook a wrenching reorganization starting in 2015 specifically to ensure integrated joint service operations, which it views as a requirement for 21st-century warfare, especially warfare versus a peer adversary.
Following the U.S. Goldwater-Nichols template of the late 1980s and 1990s, the PLA adopted five joint theater commands, analogous to U.S. combatant commands. It redefined service headquarters for the army, navy, air force, and rocket forces as force providers, not operational commands, and began building a joint warfare culture in the PLA’s officer corps. Ten years later, it’s still hard to see that the experiment has borne fruit, which should be unsurprising given our own experience. In many respects, the PLA’s hardware successes, while impressive, are comparatively straightforward compared to the software side of human organizations. Speaking of which, the PLA remains very firmly the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party, not the military of the Chinese state, and that ideological orientation presents its own challenges, including the persistence of a dual command system that divides some responsibilities between warfighting command staff and political officers.
The PLA still has a few technological shortcomings, especially in undersea warfare and high-performance aircraft engines, which it still imports from Russia, but it is expending significant resources in those areas, and given its successes over the past decade in many military-technical domains, I would not rest too comfortably on those weaknesses persisting.
Jonathan A. Czin:
The PLA of course gets a lot more attention nowadays than in previous years. What do outside observers get right about the PLA? What do you think they miss or get wrong?
**John Culver:**There’s an inherent bias among many Western analysts to imprint the Cold War onto the present, especially the assumption that material readiness for combat is the main driver of China’s willingness to go to war, over Taiwan, for example. This drumbeat in Western media is useful to drive ever-increasing defense procurement requests but overlooks strong indicators that Xi does not trust the PLA and would not bet his regime on its ability to deter or defeat the United States in a war. For Xi, Taiwan remains a crisis to be avoided, not an opportunity he wants to seize.
The main problem the United States confronts is that complaining isn’t a strategy, especially in light of glaring procurement and recruiting dysfunction in all services. I worry that rather than spending more money—say $1.5 trillion or $2 trillion per year—or addressing procurement shortfalls through alliance partnerships and industrial policy, the United States is going to invest in magic beans based on AI and drones that will further strain a creaking system.
Things that work in a constrained land battle space will likely fail due to the tyranny of distance in the Western Pacific. If your future battlefield success hinges on intangibles like “elan,” “fighting spirit,” “situational dominance,” or other hoo-hah, it means that the arithmetic of warfare isn’t in your favor and you’re counting on magic weapons to provide a “win button.” Modern warfare between peer powers will mostly be decided by brutal arithmetic—sortie generation, battle damage assessments, munitions magazine depth, logistic throughput, and industrial capacity to rapidly reconstitute combat losses and munitions expenditures.
Jonathan A. Czin:
How does one become an expert on the PLA? What would your advice be to a young person who wants to become an expert on the PLA?
John Culver:
Given the massive cuts in the U.S. government, the path open to me and others in the past is becoming a smaller needle to thread. I’d recommend starting with books by people like Joel Wuthnow, Fiona Cunningham, and Adm. Mike McDevitt on the PLA itself, and also some great recent books by Ryan Hass, Rush Doshi, and others on strategy.
Here’s a tip on what to avoid—books that quote Sun Tzu early and often (because the PLA doesn’t talk about Sun Tzu as any kind of basis for strategy or tactics). Avoid books with “dragon,” “great wall,” or “marathon” in the title—sadly, if a book on China is a best seller, it’s not written for or by experts. Read critically and apply a tough standard to what you read in terms of sources, and whether the work is designed to advance an agenda rather than explore and explain. Look for Chinese source citations, not just those of Western works. Does the work have explanatory and predictive power? Does it provide theories to be tested based on falsifiable models, or dogma that is immutable to facts? Does the author make clear what they don’t know?
I’d encourage young persons interested in becoming experts on the PLA to learn some Chinese—even basic pronunciation of the anglicized Pinyin words would be a good start. Sadly, I’d not encourage people to visit or live in China; not only is the information environment highly constricted, especially on military topics, but it would make future employment in the U.S. government or cleared academia or think tanks almost impossible. Travel to Taiwan instead, either for language training or just cultural exploration (although Taiwan isn’t like the mainland in key respects). Follow experts on social media and cull mercilessly if what they say doesn’t add up. Read the few authoritative U.S. government reports on the PLA—up until now, the annual Defense Department report to Congress on the PLA has been a good resource. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessments for Congress have had great insights into what the U.S. Intelligence Community thinks about a key topic, at least up until now.
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