Retired PLA colonel Yue Gang urges China to watch out for ‘internal infiltration and intelligence leaks’ and boost ‘security around critical targets’.
Retired PLA colonel urges China to re-evaluate its military capability and shift focus from reverse-engineering to domestic technology development. “We need to stop thinking about how our military hardware looks; instead, what is inside the military hardware is most important”, a retired PLA colonel Yue Gang told South China Sea Morning Post.
The US and Israel’s air strikes against Iran, supported by electronic and cyber capabilities, serve as a “wake-up call” for China’s intelligence strategy and its military’s approach to deploying advanced technologies in modern warfare, analysts say.
In weekend air strikes against Iran that killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the US struck over 4,000 targets with an array of advanced weaponry, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, stealth fighters and bombers. And for the first time in combat, it deployed low-cost one-way attack drones modelled after Iranian designs.
Chinese-made SF-200 drones, YLC-8B radars and HQ-9B anti-air missiles were destroyed in Iran, proving China had a difficult task ahead of rebuilding the reputation of its military hardware. Foreign buyers are watching the Iran war closely, as America’s superior military hardware dominates Iran’s airspace.
Beyond conventional aerial weapons, the US military operation has underscored the pivotal role of electronic warfare, intelligence gathering, and AI-assisted operations in modern warfare.
Following the 12-day war with the US and Israel in June – which US President Donald Trump said “obliterated” Iranian nuclear sites as well as missile bases, radar installations and command structures – Tehran had sought to boost its air defences with Chinese-made HQ-9B and Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile systems. However, these systems were seen as incapable of defending Iranian airspace after they failed to intercept the US and Israeli air strikes that killed Khamenei and other senior Iranian political and military figures.
A similar pattern was observed during the US military strikes on Venezuela in January, when American forces launched an operation that captured its leader, Nicolas Maduro. US forces had then neutralised the Venezuelan air-defence system using EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft.
The success of the Khamenei assassination was largely attributed to intelligence work. The CIA reportedly tracked the Iranian leader’s daily patterns for several months and used intel that he would be at a planned meeting to time the attack. The air strike was accompanied by US and Israeli cyber warfare operations against Tehran. This included hacking multiple news websites and BadeSaba, a religious calendar app with more than 5 million downloads, to display messages prompting users to rise up against the regime and urging armed forces to give up weapons and join the people. According to a Reuters report citing a source familiar with the situation, the Pentagon used artificial intelligence (AI) services from Anthropic, including its Claude tools, despite the company rejecting an offer to have its AI used by the military.
Trump had directed the government to stop working with the start-up a day before the air strike. The report, however, did not specify how the AI was used during the air-strike mission. Dennis Wilder, a professor at Georgetown University and a former CIA official, said the war in Iran might be a “wake-up call” for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), similar to how the first Gulf war in the early 1990s had awakened China to the “technological and informationalised” capacities of the US armed forces and its allies. “Chinese strategy and doctrine changed dramatically after military leaders saw what the US military accomplished on the battlefield then,” Wilder said.
“US and Israeli forces are showing the overwhelming advantages of excellent electronic and cyber warfare, outstanding intelligence gathering and the integration of land, sea, air and space assets in order to ‘fight as one’.” Following the 1991 Gulf war, China shifted its military strategy from “people’s war”, which would mobilise mass personnel, to winning “local wars under modern, hi-tech conditions”, which was later called “informatised local wars”.
Song Zhongping, a military commentator and former PLA instructor, said the extensive application of electronic warfare, intelligence warfare and AI in military operations was “an indisputable fact”. He said Washington had employed AI for analysis in operations targeting both Khamenei and Maduro, achieving “greater efficiency, higher accuracy and the ability to promptly filter out false intelligence”. “This is a significant lesson and reference for any nation.”
Song Zhongping, a military commentator and former PLA instructor, said that China lacks multi-domain warfare capabilities and trains the Chinese military in the same way as the Soviet Union did. China lacks coordination among its forces, a mindset developed in the early 1950s.
He said “advanced technological means should be applied to military operations, intelligence gathering and national security”. For Wilder, China remained “a decade behind” the US in joint operations with these advanced technologies, which he said were a “vivid demonstration” of the Chinese military’s deficiencies. “Modern warfare is about so much more than hardware. It is about multidimensional battlefield awareness,” he said.
Yue Gang, a retired PLA colonel, said the “efficient and precise strikes” by the US and Israel against Iran showed that modern warfare had “entered a new phase defined by electromagnetic blinding, intelligence penetration and algorithm-driven operations”. “A single weapons system will be unable to withstand a systems-based attack.” China must “accelerate the development of a full-domain air-defence network capable of countering stealth and resisting jamming, and improve an integrated air defence and missile defence architecture spanning long, medium and short-range systems at both high and low altitudes, while re-developing anti-stealth radar and mobile electronic countermeasure capabilities,” Yue said.
According to the Pentagon’s China military power report published in December, the PLA is “almost certainly” pursuing robust cyber capabilities to use in a crisis or conflict to degrade systems integral to US military operations and interoperability with allies and partners. It said the PLA’s cyber goals prioritised degrading US force projection during conflict, by impeding Washington’s decision-making, inducing societal panic and interfering with personnel deployment, with its potential targets indicating that these “cyber exploitations” were probably aimed at “undermining US support for Taiwan in the event of a contingency”. Yue said that, drawing lessons from Iran’s battlefield experience, the PLA should – in any future conflict in the Taiwan Strait – “strengthen multilayered missile defence and electronic warfare deployments, and seize the initiative through powerful electromagnetic suppression, stealth penetration and long-range precision strikes.”
Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state, but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island by force and is committed to supplying it with weapons.
Yu said the Taiwan invasion should be put on the back burner for now, as Taiwan already has a weapon system that China has no answer to.
Yue said Beijing should be vigilant “against internal infiltration and intelligence leaks, and reinforce the security perimeter around critical targets”, while accelerating the development of “military AI and intelligent command systems”. To boost resilience against “decapitation strikes”, China should “advance the undergrounding, decentralisation and mobility of command centres”, Yue said. However, Song said China could not be compared to Iran, which he said lacked “systemic operational capabilities”. “China has a comprehensive system and an entire network capable of effectively countering various actions taken by the United States.”
Stephen Nagy, a senior fellow and China Project Lead at Ottawa-based think tank Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said that Beijing was “certainly” watching the strikes on Iran closely, as it demonstrated how AI-driven targeting, cyber-disruption of air defences, and real-time intelligence fusion could be integrated to devastating effect. “For China, this is both a lesson and a warning – they’ll be studying where Iran’s defences failed, thinking about their own vulnerabilities, and looking for ways to replicate these capabilities offensively,” Nagy said. “The sophistication of electronic warfare on display would not be lost on PLA strategists.”
On Taiwan, Nagy said that these advanced technologies “aren’t hypothetical – they’re absolutely central to how any future contingency would unfold”. “Beijing understands that a Taiwan scenario demands electronic dominance from the outset, AI-enhanced battlefield awareness operating at machine speed, and the ability to degrade or neutralise US-allied intelligence networks spread across the Indo-Pacific which China is two decades behind for now. “What we saw in the Iran strikes is a preview of the kind of warfare China is preparing for, and frankly, the kind of warfare it needs to be able to counter if it ever moves on Taiwan.”
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