During a recent conference on the People’s Liberation Army, I heard the same question posed to attendees and paper writers: “How would China react to U.S. force posture change X, Y, or Z?” or “How would the Chinese military respond to U.S. strikes in certain locations?” Having participated in dozens of unclassified wargames at the RAND Corporation and elsewhere, I hear a similar refrain when playing the “red team.”
This is a reasonable and legitimate question. Policymakers and war planners should understand likely Chinese responses in studying and preparing for possible contingencies between China and the United States.
To make well-grounded assessments of “red,” one should be deeply indoctrinated in Chinese methods of war rooted in doctrinal texts of the People’s Liberation Army. And those sources, at least at the unclassified level, are drying up. The authoritative primary and secondary source documents published by reputable academic institutions affiliated with the Chinese military are dwindling or becoming outdated in the face of the People’s Liberation Army organizational reforms. This creates a “blind spot” for academics and “blue” force planners attempting to simulate how China would react to a fast-evolving battlefield environment.
This phenomenon is exacerbated by rapidly developing new technologies of war, to include the employment of autonomous systems, AI, and hypersonics. This compels today’s war planners to “rethink how fighting happens today and, crucially, how they should prepare for war going forward.”
The Chinese armed forces are actively studying and training for these trends and will inevitably develop and deploy new weapons and tactics for use on the battlefield, possibly against the United States. Yet how these systems feed into Chinese military strategy and campaign planning is largely unknown due to the paucity of authoritative sources that address these developments.
The result is a community that is increasingly speculating or inferring Chinese military strategy from woefully outdated doctrinal texts, despite valiant efforts to stitch together incomplete pictures from a paucity of sources. Recent journal articles and newspapers associated with the Chinese armed forces, such as People’s Liberation Army Daily, either lack specificity on wartime use of such technologies or are laden with political jargon that’s unhelpful for blue planners.
This leads to the current challenge facing Chinese military watchers: deducing how the People’s Liberation Army will bridge the divide between military strategy and campaign-level and tactical-level operations based on outdated texts. The result is Western analysts should resort to using partial sources on particular issues to interpret the People’s Liberation Army’s collective, authoritative guidance on the key principles of strategy and operational warfighting. This is a demanding task with a high degree of difficulty, and reasonable Western analysts can come to different conclusions. Less capable analysts are likely to mirror-image or get it wrong.
To be clear at the outset, as will be discussed in this article, much of the blame for restricting access of Chinese military doctrinal materials lies squarely with the People’s Liberation Army, not the United States. And new doctrinal texts published by the Chinese military might not necessarily alleviate the acute security dilemma between the United States and China. But my central contention is that access to new sources would, at the very least, allow America and the broader community to understand how the People’s Liberation Army is contemplating future warfare from authoritative sources, providing clarity on China’s military war aims and signaling.
One prescription to alleviate the issue is to restore the Open Source Enterprise — formally called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service — back into the public domain. This article proposes empowering existing U.S. government platforms with the capability and experience to support a reconstituted Foreign Broadcast Information Service — such as the Library of Congress — to revive taxpayer-funded open-source intelligence-gathering of translations of foreign military and political news, articles, and textbooks, in particular related to the People’s Liberation Army.
Tighter Restrictions Mean Less Access
The Chinese military recently implemented strict controls on the publication and dissemination of news and information, greatly curtailing what had been readily available sources for Western observers. On Feb. 8, 2025, the Cyberspace Administration of China released a set of measures to control online information related to the sharing of People’s Liberation Army news. The “Measures for Managing the Dissemination of Military Information on the Internet” imposed new restrictions on information shared online, as well as on the entities that are allowed to publish it.
The regulations ostensibly aimed at addressing “the spread of false military information” and “the leakage of military secrets” on the Chinese internet, according to a question-and-answer portion released by the Chinese government. In particular, they banned the “producing, copying, publishing and disseminating” of military secrets, national defense technology and industry secrets, or other undisclosed information. The regulations also target individual social media users and “online military information service providers.” According to CNN, the banned list covers the development and testing of weapons systems, military drills, and deployment, as well as the organizational structures, tasks, and combat capabilities of military units that have not been officially disclosed by the People’s Liberation Army.
The effects are still being assessed, but early indications suggest a chill throughout the system of Chinese military-related information sharing from Chinese sources, making us all worse off.
Level-Setting What is Available, and Why it Matters
Online information restrictions are not the only problem. The People’s Liberation Army is not updating or making available major doctrinal texts that scholars of the People’s Liberation Army have used in the past as key ingredients for analyzing Chinese military thinking.
To understand the depth of the problem, one must first catalog what sources are available and why they are important as a baseline for Chinese military studies. These are broken down into four categories: strategy; campaigns; service-level tactics and encyclopedias; and non-textbook materials, composed of academic journals, newspapers, official announcements, and “grey literature” such as social media.
Science of Military Strategy
On Chinese military strategy, the Science of Military Strategy (zhanlue xue) remains the benchmark. Written by active-duty Chinese military theory specialists, it serves as the theoretical framework for studying war, national defense, and military planning, covering theory, strategy deterrence, and force development in both the conventional and nuclear domains.
Science of Military Strategy is not only the authoritative reference guide for China military watchers seeking to understand Chinese thinking at the strategic level of warfare, but it also remains a core textbook taught to Chinese military officers within China’s professional military education institutions and a reference for operational commanders. In that sense, it remains one of the only available sources for Western scholars and officials interested in Chinese military strategy. (This is not to discount the plethora of other textbooks published by Academy of Military Sciences Press, National Defense University Press, or National University of Defense Technology Press, which are less authoritative but nonetheless helpful).
Over the last four decades, China’s two premier military institutes — the Academy of Military Sciences and National Defense University — have produced six editions of Science of Military Strategy. I will not cover the history of these editions here (for a helpful primer, see Joel Wuthnow’s piece). For the purposes of this paper, however, the 2013 Academy of Military Sciences edition is the most authoritative version available due to the detail of strategic thought and the authors involved. But as of this writing, it is over 13 years old.
Moreover, while adding new sections on China’s security environment and new technologies, the 2020 National Defense University version mostly recycles the same thinking from previous versions. Importantly, it was issued prior to recent global conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, and Venezuela, and thus does not capture new thinking on modern warfare or how the Chinese armed forces might therefore fight differently as a result.
A new version of Science of Military Strategy that addresses the 2016 Chinese military reforms and new developments in warfare has been expected to be published for years. But during a track two dialogue I attended recently, my People’s Liberation Army interlocutors suggested that no new additions are forthcoming from either the Academy of Military Sciences or the National Defense University.
The Science of Campaigns
To understand how the Chinese military will conduct actual combat operations, there remains only one authoritative textbook published by the People’s Liberation Army, called the Science of Campaigns (zhanyi xue).
Written in 2006 by the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defense University, Science of Campaigns represents the core text for operational-level warfare. Edited by one of the Chinese military’s preeminent operational strategists, Zhang Yuliang, it covers key campaigns (joint firepower strike, island landing, blockade, etc.), operational planning, and joint operations concepts. Science of Campaigns is the best window Western analysts have into how the People’s Liberation Army actually fights campaigns, from the operational to the tactical levels.
But Science of Campaigns was written over two decades ago and does not account for how warfare is fought in the 21st century. For example, it was written before the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to transform to “informationized” and “intelligentized” warfare, nor does it account for the advent of AI and autonomous systems. It also does not reflect new thinking about joint operations or the People’s Liberation Army’s 2016 reorganization into joint theater commands.
One answer may be a new set of joint guidelines published by the Central Military Commission on Nov. 13, 2020. The justification for the document, called “Guidelines on Joint Operations of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (Trial)” is to “account for the form of modern warfare,” to include the “accelerated development of precision, intelligence, stealth, and unmanned weaponry, making joint operations a basic form of warfare.”
Unfortunately, the People’s Liberation Army has yet to make available the full text of these guidelines. Thus, while Western observers have provided helpful contextual analysis, the community is ultimately left extrapolating what People’s Liberation Army strategists may currently be thinking about the current conduct of warfare.
Service-level Operational Art, Tactics, and Encyclopedias
Third is the service and specialty campaign and operational texts, which some might refer to as “operational art.” Examples include the Science of Joint Operations; Science of Informationized Warfare; and service-specific campaign texts, such as the Science of Second Artillery Campaigns. These texts highlight the People’s Liberation Army’s evolution toward “intelligentized” and system-of-systems warfare and provide operational concepts, especially for joint operations. Here, too, most were written in the mid-1990s and early 2000s and fail to consider major organizational reforms within the Chinese armed forces. The Science of Second Artillery Campaigns, for example, was written in 2004, before the reforms of 2015, when the Second Artillery Corps was elevated to a full military service and renamed as the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. Western scholars have analyzed these texts and provided helpful corollaries for the United States’ doctrine and campaign analysis.
Rounding out this category are encyclopedias and dictionaries, which include key summaries and definitions of Chinese military terms used in training and reference guides within various services and branches of the People’s Liberation Army. These represent the “terms of art” and are useful to cross-reference terminology of the People’s Liberation Army with Western military analogs.
In general, however, almost all these texts were written before the 2015 reforms and reflect a bygone era within China’s military. And most only provide very broad and abstract renderings of People’s Liberation Army operations that rarely delve into specific scenarios.
Academic Journals, Newspapers, Ministry of National Defense Announcements, Social Media, and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers
The fourth category, which contains academic journals, newspapers, Ministry of National Defense statements, and “grey literature” — including a proliferation of Western and Chinese social media users offering open-source intelligence analysis — offer timely and relevant analysis on Chinese military strategy, doctrine, and training. These sources help to augment the aforementioned dated doctrinal texts by providing clues as to what doctrine is working within the People’s Liberation Army, but are no substitute for them.
A few authoritative academic journals illuminate thinking on Chinese military strategy as well as niche topics, such as science and technology journals and periodicals on tactical military thinking. Two journals in particular, published by the Academy of Military Sciences, are arguably the most authoritative: China Military Science (zhongguo junshi kexue) and Military Art (junshi xueshu). But China Military Science, for example, appears to have stopped making the journal available for public use, removing a critical source of Chinese military strategic thought for Western China watchers. Other less authoritative journals, such as National Defense (guo fang), published by the People’s Liberation Army military academic press, and People’s Liberation Army Pictorial (jiefangjun huabao), the People’s Liberation Army’s longest-running official illustrated magazine of the Chinese military, feature commentary and pictures from active and retired Chinese military officers on current military strategy.
Chinese military newspapers used to be another source of granular information on individual military services. The People’s Liberation Army’s flagship newspaper, People’s Liberation Army Daily (jiefang junbao), offers daily analysis and reporting on training, politics, diplomacy, and strategy. It remains one of the best openly available sources to track People’s Liberation Army activities and thinking on military affairs. But several years ago, the Chinese military removed access to the Air Force’s newspaper Air Force News (kongjun bao) and the Navy’s newspaper People’s Navy (renmin haijun).
Thus, the bigger issue remains: while some of the articles mentioned above offer a valuable window into People’s Liberation Army training and strategy, most are either out-of-date or do not provide specifics on how the Chinese military envisions fighting high-tech wars; are replete with Chinese Communist Party jargon and “political work” activities; or as in the case of defense industrial journals, are so overly-technical that only mathematicians or engineers can decipher or they demand a keen eye to interpret the signals from the noise. Others are difficult or impossible to access for Western analysts or require expensive subscriptions through third-party vendors.
There are new forms of information provided by China’s Ministry of National Defense website and official and personal social media accounts on platforms such as X in the United States and Weibo in China, which do help the community. The Ministry of National Defense website offers periodic press conferences, information about the Chinese military’s organizational structure, and, from time to time, official documents on national defense, such as China’s most recent defense white paper, which was published over seven years ago.
A plethora of social media accounts from Chinese users following the People’s Liberation Army offer some of the best real-time analysis of Chinese military capabilities and emerging technology. The theater commands, for example, have dedicated accounts on Weibo and often post news and information related to major exercises and drills, for example. These social media accounts increasingly offer some of the only timely open-source intelligence analysis of new military capabilities, testing, and Chinese military exercises unavailable from official Chinese government sources. These accounts can provide the basis for useful analysis of People’s Liberation Army research by Western analysts.
Finally, U.S. military service-affiliated research institutes continue to augment gaps in current People’s Liberation Army sources through research and conferences. These include the National Defense University’s Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs, the Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, the Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute, the Marine Corps University’s China Military Studies Review, and the Army War College’s China Landpower Studies Center; many of whom not only host annual People’s Liberation Army conferences but produce research and translations of Chinese military doctrinal texts. There are also federally funded research and development centers, such as the RAND Corporation and the Center for Naval Analysis, who continue to provide rigorous research using original Chinese sources on the People’s Liberation Army for U.S. government clients. Increasingly, however, the publications produced by these entities are not made available for public consumption.
More Mirror-Imaging and Guesswork
Pick your idiom — “looking through a keyhole” or “drinking through a straw” — but the cumulative result of new data restrictions and outdated sources is that Western scholars and operators writing, researching, and analyzing Chinese military affairs in an open-source setting are at a distinct disadvantage. The irony is that Chinese military studies have never been in more demand. The Department of Defense has described China as America’s “pacing threat,” and consulting firms dedicated to studying the Chinese “way of war” have proliferated.
The net effect is deleterious not only to the field of Chinese military studies but to the broader requirement of maintaining the tenuous balance of military deterrence between Beijing and Washington. The U.S. government benefits from open-source analysis of Chinese military strategy and doctrine as key inputs that feed into U.S. deterrence activities. Even within the intelligence community, where analysts have access to a range of sources, open-source publications by and about the People’s Liberation Army provide a critical foundation for analysis. To the extent that information on the People’s Liberation Army is constrained, the U.S. government will continue to make worst-case assumptions about Chinese intentions and likely courses of action, which may not always match reality. When one adds the reduction in official military-to-military dialogue and increasing constraints on unofficial research travel to China and interactions with the People’s Liberation Army, the problem only gets worse. The result, I worry, is that “red” planners will resort to mirror-imaging how China would respond to contingencies in the Indo-Pacific based on how America would respond in “red’s” shoes, instead of using more recent Chinese military doctrine to inform “blue” understanding of China.
This puts both China and the United States in dangerous territory, whereby the void in understanding each other’s military doctrine leads to flawed assumptions and baselines about the other’s intentions. This brings to mind the central thesis of Robert Jervis’s canonical Perception and Misperception in International Politics, which argues that states respond to their perceptions of reality rather than objective conditions, and that misperceptions can contribute to deterrence failures, escalation, and war.
To be clear, I am not suggesting the gap in doctrinal texts and open-source analysis will solve misunderstandings of China. Classified intelligence on China in America remains strong and does help fill shortcomings in open-source intelligence. The audiences best positioned to evaluate this claim are cleared analysts and policymakers who have access to information that indeed mitigates the problem. However, having lived in that world at RAND and at the Department of Defense, there is a danger of privileging classified information over unclassified sources, which can at times act as “blinders” for analyzing how China thinks about war and escalation. This can lead to flawed assessments of Chinese intent.
Open-source analysis continues to play a pivotal role in academia, public policy, and allied-nation analytical communities on the People’s Liberation Army that feeds the classified pipeline. Finally, I am not implying that People’s Liberation Army doctrinal texts can accurately predict Chinese military behavior in the future. They are guideposts, not predictors, of behavior. As any decent analyst will tell you, assessments of future behavior are an inexact science based on levels of confidence in which history, signals, rhetoric, and actions form a basis for future-oriented inquiries. My contention, however, is that what China says in its own words matters, especially when it comes to the historical record of past Chinese military action.
Impact of Flawed Assessments
A downside of outdated sources and restrictions on information is it can lead to gaps in knowledge about how the Chinese military may react to U.S. deterrence activities in the Indo-Pacific. In some cases, this can lead to flawed policies and assessments of China. This crops up in wargames as well as in real-world scenarios.
When playing “red” during several wargames, I have been surprised by actions taken by my “red team” colleagues attempting to channel how China’s military may react to “blue” actions. In many cases, my colleagues would advocate highly escalatory actions early in a conflict, such as targeting Japanese or Philippine civilian populations, or even launching pre-emptive nuclear strikes against American targets. Such actions contradict the historical record of Chinese military deterrent actions, as well as the doctrinal texts mentioned above that lay out a much more calculated, defensive approach to escalation. While Chinese actions are heavily dependent on a plethora of factors not to be listed here, the point is, I have sometimes been left perplexed by my “red team” members’ actions that reflect a mirror-imaging logic of how “red” might act in “blue’s” shoes, rather than a faithful representation of “red” itself, informed by doctrinal and historical texts.
While most real-world examples are classified, there is a select number of case studies that would suggest the U.S. intelligence community was caught off guard by Chinese military actions. In October 2021, the Financial Times reported that China had tested a nuclear-capable Fractional Orbital Bombardment System. The tests surprised intelligence officials with the sophistication of the technology and by the fact that the missile successfully circled the globe before hitting its target. By entering orbit and lingering in space before de-orbiting, the system is designed to evade traditional U.S. missile defense shields, allowing the weapon to approach from unconventional trajectories at high speeds — severely compressing the warning time for adversaries.
There are other cases, especially regarding the scale and speed of China’s nuclear weapons breakout in recent years. The current buildup has created significant debate over whether China has shifted its nuclear strategy to include using nuclear weapons preemptively or for nuclear coercion. This breakout has caused significant consternation about how and under what circumstances China might use nuclear weapons against the United States, for example, and how America should respond.
I am not suggesting that a lack of access to authoritative Chinese military sources would have necessarily changed the failure of the United States to foresee such actions or policy changes in advance. But access to newer sources, or a deeper mining of existing sources, might have given America and the People’s Liberation Army-watching community a firmer basis for understanding why China chose to undertake such actions in the first place.
Bring Back the Foreign Broadcast Information Service
It is virtually impossible to control what the People’s Liberation Army chooses to publish in open sources. No amount of persuading or cajoling from Western analysts can convince the Chinese military to do things they believe undermine their national security interests, even if both sides agree that more transparency is better than less.
But there are things the U.S. government can do now to help the problem on the access side. Most prominently, it is time to bring the Open Source Enterprise, formally called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, back into the public domain.
The Foreign Broadcast Information Service served for decades as the U.S. government’s principal open-source intelligence organization under the Central Intelligence Agency, specializing in monitoring, translation, and dissemination of foreign media and publicly available information to support policymakers and the broader intelligence community. Operating through a global network of radio and multimedia stations, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service played a critical role in providing translations of foreign newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, television transcripts, official speeches, and other openly available foreign media content.
During the Cold War, many of these daily and regional reports were distributed to government agencies, but they were also made available through the National Technical Information Service and could be purchased or accessed by researchers, journalists, and academic institutions. Major research libraries often maintained subscriptions or archives of Foreign Broadcast Information Service daily reports. For China specialists in particular, Foreign Broadcast Information Service translations became an indispensable source because they provided near-real-time English translations of Chinese official media, speeches, and military writings — some of which were only available in hard copies and were difficult for non-U.S. government personnel to obtain.
Throughout its history, one of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service’s greatest strengths was that it leveraged analysis from external contributors from universities, think tanks, and retired military officers to interpret and offer context to Chinese translations. Drawing from a distributed network of experts conducting independent research created a “force multiplier” for American national security analysis.
After the September 11 attacks and the broader post-9/11 restructuring of the U.S. intelligence community, however, the emphasis of open-source intelligence shifted from public dissemination toward operational intelligence support. When the Foreign Broadcast Information Service became the Open Source Center in November 2005, the organization’s mission expanded beyond translation and media monitoring into integrated intelligence analysis for classified government consumers. As a result, however, much of the public and institutional access for scholars and think-tankers was restricted, and many universities lost access to contemporaneous reporting streams.
Final closure of public access to the Open Source Center occurred between 2013 and 2016. In 2013, the Central Intelligence Agency terminated the World News Connection, the primary service that carried Foreign Broadcast Information Service translations to universities, libraries, and research organizations. Then, in 2016, the Open Source Center was redesignated as the Open Source Enterprise and integrated into the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Digital Innovation, becoming largely inaccessible for non-U.S. government employees. This has remained to this day.
The institutional rationale for catering to classified consumers made sense at the time: the United States was reeling from decades of intelligence mistakes associated with the “Global War on Terror,” and the solution was to close access loopholes from non-U.S. government personnel. Other justifications at that time included high operating costs and commercially available alternatives.
But closing access also deprived the open-source intelligence-gathering constituency of a crucial source of translations of foreign military and political news, articles, and textbooks, ultimately hurting the community in the process.
That is why it is time to advocate for the Open Source Enterprise to become a “public good” once again. There are various ways of doing this now. A starting point would be to migrate the Open Source Enterprise out of Central Intelligence Agency governance entirely, thereby alleviating the national security concerns of public access. The Library of Congress is arguably the most attractive option because its mission is already centered on collecting, preserving, translating, and disseminating information for public use. It has several additional inherent advantages: a reputation for political neutrality; existing relationships with universities, researchers, and libraries; and experience managing large-scale digital archives for the public while maintaining restricted access to sensitive materials.
A “National Foreign Information Repository” housed at the Library of Congress would resemble the old Foreign Broadcast Information Service dissemination model while avoiding Central Intelligence Agency branding. Access would be vetted and approved for a specific group of consumers: public universities, non-profit organizations, and established think tanks with a need for such services. This new channel would restore the original intent of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, offset current information restrictions by the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese government, and advance academic information sharing on broader issue areas of Chinese foreign policy, military studies, and deterrence.
This is not some pie-in-the-sky proposal. Indeed, analysts and congressional committees have long advocated for bolstering open-source intelligence, including through congressional intervention. This includes recommendations from retired Central Intelligence Agency employees with experience handling open-source intelligence programs. Others have proposed novel ways to establish new open-source approaches that would meet the needs of an evolving threat environment from countries like Russia and China.
Counterarguments and Constraints: Machine Translation, Copyright, and Licensing
There are, of course, downside risks to this option.
First, there may be a reluctance on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency to willingly relinquish control over the Open Source Enterprise. Second, the public translation service that was acquired from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service was discontinued in part due to budget constraints, the availability of commercial alternatives, and longstanding copyright and licensing challenges associated with republishing translated foreign content. Finally, AI and machine translation have significantly lowered the barriers to accessing foreign language information. Any proposal to revive a public dissemination function should therefore address how such a system would be funded and administered, how publication rights would be secured, and why a new institutional home — such as the Library of Congress — would be able to withstand the same fiscal and bureaucratic pressures that led to the program’s demise.
The answer for the first concern is easy: Congress would have to step in to pass a bill to restructure the Foreign Broadcast Information Service from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Library of Congress. This could be passed through a new Intelligence Authorization Act, or as part of a larger National Defense Authorization Act. There are, of course, ever-present risks from government shutdowns or partisan standoffs over funding — the remedy of which is beyond the confines of this article.
Second, the argument that commercial providers can replace the Foreign Broadcast Information Service assumes that all relevant users can afford access and that commercial firms have incentives to collect the same material. In practice, many universities, smaller think tanks, journalists, independent researchers, and foreign partners lack subscriptions to expensive databases. Moreover, commercial providers prioritize profitable markets rather than strategically important but niche materials, such as obscure journals published by the People’s Liberation Army, provincial defense publications, or military academic writings. A Library of Congress-based Foreign Broadcast Information Service would provide equitable access to authoritative source material that commercial firms may overlook or restrict behind paywalls.
Third, copyright concerns are real, but they are not fundamentally different from challenges already managed by libraries, archives, and government information repositories. A revived Foreign Broadcast Information Service would not necessarily need to republish entire foreign publications. It could instead provide translated excerpts, metadata, summaries, and limited-distribution research products under existing fair-use frameworks or negotiated licensing agreements. The Library of Congress already possesses extensive expertise in rights management and international information-sharing arrangements. Furthermore, many of the most strategically valuable materials, such as government speeches, military regulations, official announcements, and state media publications, are often less constrained by commercial copyright considerations than private publications.
Finally, AI cannot fully replace the functions historically performed by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and its successor, the Open Source Enterprise. While AI is increasingly capable of translating Chinese military writings, translation is only one component of the analytic process. The more difficult challenge is contextualizing relevant sources from a vast and increasingly restricted information environment. Chinese military journals, doctrinal writings, speeches, and online content often contain specialized terminology, institutional references, and political language that require human interpretation beyond what automated tools can reliably provide. Human analysts remain essential for assessing the significance of authors, institutions, and publications, distinguishing authoritative doctrinal guidance from speculative commentary, and ensuring consistency in the translation of key military concepts. Such functions are particularly important as China, Russia, and other authoritarian states impose tighter restrictions on access to military-related information.
Perhaps most importantly, a revitalized Foreign Broadcast Information Service would provide a public good that AI alone cannot replicate: a shared foundation of knowledge for the broader national security community. By making authoritative translations and source materials available to researchers, universities, think tanks, journalists, and allied partners, a public dissemination function would improve analytical rigor, enable independent verification of claims, and reduce the risk of misperception. At a time when understanding foreign military thinking is increasingly important for deterrence and crisis management, restoring the Foreign Broadcast Information Service’s public-facing role would represent a relatively low-cost investment in strengthening the United States’ long-term analytical capacity and strategic decision-making.
Lyle Morris is senior fellow on foreign policy and national security at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. He curates and writes the bi-weekly PLA Watch newsletter on Chinese military activities, strategy, and doctrine.
The author would like to thank David Finkelstein, Joel Wuthnow, Lonnie Henley, Dennis Blasko, Phil Saunders, Ken Allen, Chad Sbragia, Joshua Arostegui, and Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga for their helpful comments on previous drafts.
Image: ChatGPT
