By : Ankit Raj, Research Analyst, GSDN
For decades, the United States (US) military set the standard for fighting across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace at the same time. The 1991 Gulf War showed the world what networked precision warfare looked like, and Beijing watched closely. Thirty-five years later, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has turned that lesson into a distinctly Chinese way of war, and in several important respects it is now moving faster than Washington at integrating the domains of conflict into one system.
“Taking the lead” needs a caveat. China does not outmatch the US in every category. American submarines, combat experience and alliance networks remain formidable advantages. But on the narrower question of who is better organized, better equipped and better rehearsed for multi-domain operations, particularly in the Western Pacific, the momentum belongs to Beijing.
What multi-domain operations mean
Multi-domain operations (MDO) is the idea that modern conflict cannot be won inside a single domain. A missile’s strike on a runway is more effective if cyber operations have blinded the air defenses; satellites are feeding targeting data, and electronic warfare is jamming the enemy’s response. Each domain supports the others, and the real advantage comes from linking them faster than the opponent can react.
The US spent much of the last decade trying to build this. The Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept aims to connect sensors from every service into a single network. The US Army stood for Multi-Domain Task Forces, and exercises like Project Convergence tested how data could flow from drones and satellites to shooters in seconds. These are serious efforts, but they remain largely working in progress, slowed by service rivalries, incompatible systems, and long procurement cycles.
China arrived at the same destination from a different direction, and it has been willing to restructure its entire military to get there.
Doctrine built around systems, not platforms
PLA strategists rarely talk about defeating an enemy’s ships or aircraft one by one. They talk about “systems confrontation,” the idea that modern wars are contesting between entire operational systems, and the winner is whoever can paralyze the other side of system of command, sensing and logistics. Chinese writings describe “system destruction warfare,” which targets the connective tissue of an adversary’s force rather than its individual weapons.
That mindset explains a lot about what China has chosen to build. It has invested heavily in the things that connect and blind: satellites, cyber capabilities, electronic warfare, long-range missiles, and the command networks tying them together. The PLA uses the term “intelligentized warfare” for the next phase, in which artificial intelligence (AI) speeds up decisions and coordinates swarms of unmanned systems.
A military reorganized for joint fighting
The clearest evidence of China’s seriousness is structural. On December 31, 2015, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a sweeping overhaul that created the PLA Rocket Force and the Strategic Support Force, and in early 2016 the old military regions were replaced by five joint theater commands. The point was to break the army-dominated structure that had defined the PLA since its founding and force the services to fight as one team under a single commander in each region.
The Strategic Support Force bundled space, cyber, electronic warfare, and psychological operations into a single organization. On April 19, 2024, Beijing went further and dissolved it, replacing it with three separate arms: the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force, and the Information Support Force. Analysts read this as a refinement rather than a retreat, giving each of these critical functions its own leadership while keeping the information backbone of the force under direct central control.
Contrast this with the American situation. The US has a joint structure on paper through its combatant commands, but the services still buy their own equipment, build their own networks and protect their own budgets. The Pentagon’s own planners have acknowledged that connecting Air Force, Navy and Army systems is a chronic challenge. Beijing’s top-down political system, for all its other weaknesses, can impose organizational change in a way Washington’s cannot.
Space and cyber: the quiet contest
Space is where China’s progress is most visible and, for American planners, most worrying. According to US Space Force officials, China now operates well over a thousand satellites, with several hundred dedicated to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). Those satellites matter because they let the PLA find and track American carrier groups and bases across the Pacific, which is the first step in striking them.
China has also shown it is willing to test the edges of space warfare. It destroyed one of its own weather satellites with a missile on January 11, 2007, scattering debris across orbit. In 2021, reports emerged that it had tested a fractional orbital bombardment system, in which a hypersonic glider is released from a spacecraft in low orbit. Reporting the Financial Times on October 16, 2021, said the test circled the globe before gliding toward its target, and US officials called it a shock. Whatever its practical military value, it signaled a Chinese capacity for surprise that Washington had underestimated.
Cyberspace tells a similar story. On May 24, 2023, Microsoft and US and allied agencies publicly warned about a Chinese state-linked group dubbed Volt Typhoon, which had quietly positioned itself inside American critical infrastructure such as communications, energy and water systems. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later warned, in an advisory dated February 7, 2024, that the group was prepositioning for potential disruption during a crisis.
The pattern matters for multi-domain operations. Cyber access built in peacetime is a weapon that can be activated at the start of a conflict to slow American mobilization, confuse logistics and complicate decision-making at home. China has been building that option for years.
Missiles that hold the whole theater at risk
If the cyber and space domains are about seeing and blinding, the missile force is about striking. The PLA Rocket Force fields the largest and most diverse arsenal of conventional ballistic and cruise missiles in the world. The DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles are designed to threaten aircraft carriers and bases hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from China’s coast. The DF-17, with its hypersonic glide vehicle, is built to defeat missile defenses.
This forms the backbone of what Western analysts call anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), a layered system meant to make it extremely costly for American forces to operate near China. The Pentagon’s China Military Power Report, released on December 18, 2024, noted continued growth in the PLA’s missile inventories and in China’s nuclear stockpile, which the department assessed had passed 600 operational warheads by mid-2024.
What makes this a multi-domain advantage, rather than just a big arsenal, is integration. Satellites find the target; cyber and electronic warfare degrade the defense, and missiles deliver the blow. The PLA has spent years rehearsing exactly this chain.
An industrial base that can outbuild everyone
Multi-domain operations are not only about concepts. They depend on having enough ships, aircraft, drones and munitions to sustain a fight, and here China’s industrial scale is a strategic asset. The Pentagon’s 2024 report counted the PLA Navy at roughly 370 ships and submarines, already the world’s largest by number, and the gap in shipbuilding capacity is enormous. US naval intelligence briefings have reportedly estimated that China’s shipyards have a capacity many times greater than America’s, a gap that would matter enormously in a prolonged conflict where losses must be replaced.
China’s policy of military-civil fusion deepens this advantage by pulling commercial technology firms, universities and shipyards directly into defense production. American defense officials have openly worried that US industry cannot ramp up munitions production fast enough to sustain a high-intensity war.
AI and unmanned systems
The September 3, 2025, military parade in Beijing, held to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, offered a glimpse of where this is heading. Alongside familiar missiles and aircraft, China displayed a range of large unmanned underwater vehicles, uncrewed aerial systems and what it described as collaborative combat drones designed to fly alongside crewed fighters. Whether or not every system on display is combat-ready; the message was that Beijing sees autonomy and AI as central to future multi-domain fighting.
The US is pursuing similar capabilities, including its own collaborative combat aircraft program, and in some areas of AI research American firms remain ahead. But China’s willingness to field, test and iterate quickly, combined with a state-directed push to integrate AI into military planning, gives it a different kind of momentum.
Practice makes integration
Concepts only matter if forces can execute them. The PLA has used large-scale drills around Taiwan as a rehearsal stage for joint, multi-domain operations. After then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei on August 2, 2022, China launched its largest exercises in the area to date, firing ballistic missiles over the island and simulating a blockade. Further drills followed: Joint Sword-2024A on May 23, 2024, Joint Sword-2024B on October 14, 2024, and Strait Thunder-2025A on April 1, 2025.
These exercises combine naval, air, missile, cyber, and information operations under joint command. They also serve a political purpose, normalizing a Chinese military presence around Taiwan and probing how the US and its partners respond. The more the PLA practices this, the smoother its coordination becomes, and the more its leaders gain confidence that the system works. China’s training can focus overwhelmingly on a single scenario in its own neighborhood, which is an advantage in preparation even if it is a limitation in global reach.
Where the United States still holds the edge
It would be a mistake to write the obituary of American military power. The US retains clear advantages that matter in any serious assessment.
The American submarine force remains quieter and more capable than China’s, and undersea warfare is one domain where Washington is clearly ahead. The US also has decades of real combat experience, including operations that tested joint coordination under pressure, while PLA has not fought a major war since 1979, and its officers have never commanded complex joint operations in actual combat. That is a real and unquantifiable weakness.
Alliances matter too. Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines and others give the US basing, intelligence and combined strength that China cannot match with partners of its own. Also, PLA’s own system has vulnerabilities: heavy dependence on centralized control may make it brittle, and recent purges of senior officers, including within the Rocket Force, raise questions about leadership stability and readiness.
So the more accurate claim is not that China is universally ahead, but that it is ahead in integrating its force for specific regional fights, and that this is the fight Washington worries about most.
What this means going forward
China’s advantage rests on three things: doctrine that treats warfare as a contest of systems, a military restructured to carry that doctrine out, and an industrial base capable of producing the hardware at scale. Each of these is difficult for the US to match quickly, because American strengths in technology are often undercut by slow acquisition, service rivalries and a shrinking, stretched defense industry.
The good news for Washington is that these problems are fixable in principle. Faster procurement, genuine data-sharing across the services, a rebuilt munitions and shipbuilding base, and deeper integration with allies could all narrow the gap. Several of these efforts are already underway. The question is whether they move quickly enough.
The lesson of the past decade is that multi-domain operations are less about any one gadget and more about organization, speed and rehearsal. China figured out early that the side which links its sensors, networks and weapons most smoothly, and which can break the other side’s links first, gets to set the terms of a conflict. The US invented much of the technology behind that idea. For now, it is China that has done more to turn it into an operating reality.
