Showcasing new branches signals China’s push to reshape combat strategy by integrating advanced tech for joint operations, analysts say China’s grand military parade highlighting new space, cyber and information warfare branches underscored the country’s push to weave advanced technologies into its combat strategy, according to analysts.

In a show of military strength and modernisation, Wednesday’s parade in Beijing marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II unveiled the People’s Liberation Army’s most advanced weaponry and its latest command structure reforms.

The spectacle featured formations not just from the PLA’s traditional branches – the Army, Navy, Air Force, Joint Logistics Support Force and Rocket Force – but also three newly established arms: the Information Support Force, the Military Aerospace Force and the Cyberspace Force.

Formations by the new branches were also accompanied by the latest equipment for cyberspace warfare, electronic countermeasures and information support.

Observers said the debut of the new PLA branches signalled Beijing’s drive to reshape its combat doctrine by integrating advanced technologies into cross-force joint operations.

Timothy Heath, a senior international defence researcher at the US-based think tank Rand Corporation, said the new branches and related weapons showed that the PLA had “become a force capable of operating in all domains”.

“It is also working to improve its ability to integrate capabilities from all services, which can further enhance its lethality and effectiveness,” Heath said.

“As the PLA develops its services in multiple domains, the command structure will likely adapt by including commanders from diverse service backgrounds, and by requiring commanders to spend time learning about the capabilities of other services.”

Mark Cozad, a senior international defence researcher at Rand Corporation and professor at the Rand School of Public Policy, said that the PLA wanted to demonstrate “more than just hardware” during the parade, such as its combat and joint formations, and “new-type operational forces”.

“For that reason during the parade some units were grouped according to joint function. A key reason for this approach was to demonstrate that the PLA has made progress in the area of joint operations, particularly in terms of these new types of forces they have discussed routinely over the past decade and a half,” Cozad said.

However, he was less sanguine on the reality behind the optics.

“That said, I don’t think the parade demonstrates progress in this area despite the message the PLA intended to send by highlighting these groupings. There still remain significant questions regarding how much progress the PLA has in fact made in its efforts to integrate these new advanced capabilities into its new concepts of operations.”

Beijing first held a World War II Victory Parade in 2015, to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender. Days later, the PLA launched a massive structural overhaul, with the Strategic Support Force (SSF) set up on the last day of the year.

The bold initiative saw all space, cyber, electronic and information warfare capabilities – previously dispersed among units under the former general staff department and general armaments department – become consolidated under a single unified command, alongside the Ground, Navy, Air and Rocket forces.

The following year, the PLA’s logistics units across the country were consolidated into the Joint Logistics Support Force (JLSF).

According to Yue Gang, a retired PLA colonel and military commentator, the driving force behind the overhaul was the new technology revolution and the arrival of the information age, which had greatly changed the shape and form of war. The PLA’s combat style, equipment, as well as its system organisation, all needed to adapt to the new trends.

“The structure and organisation of military forces are critical. They serve as a basic blueprint for development,” he said. “The rise of AI, unmanned platforms, and integrated combat architectures is forcibly reshaping military organisation, strategy, and tactics.”

In April last year, however, the PLA disbanded the SSF and separated its functional units into independent service branches – the Information Support Force, Military Aerospace Force and Cyberspace Force. All three report directly to the Central Military Commission, the supreme command for China’s armed forces, headed by President Xi Jinping.

The three new forces, along with the JLSF, have all been elevated to deputy-theatre level and were granted their respective service flags on August 1.

Noting that the SSF in its original form was short-lived, Yue said: “There was not enough experience in the area initially and it was soon found to be too broad and difficult to manage in practice.”

He explained that as the technologies in each area become more complex and specialised, putting the highly disparate functions under one command might spread resources too thin, hurting focus, depth and specialisation.

It was recognised that space, cyber, and information operations were distinct, highly specialised warfighting domains that required their own dedicated leadership, doctrine, and resources, and “timely adjustments were made consequently”.

“Becoming independent branches allows them to deepen expertise, improve operational efficiency, and respond to rapid technological advancements. And being under direct leadership of the Central Military Commission enables them to be better built, developed and used,” Yue said.

Beijing’s military doctrine has undergone several transformations over the past century.

For much of the 20th century, the PLA was guided by founder Mao Zedong’s doctrine of a “people’s war”, which prioritised army-centric mobilisation of the masses and relied on a large, lightly equipped infantry force to overwhelm a technologically superior enemy through guerrilla tactics and protracted conflict.

This strategy was later revised to highlight the mechanisation of the PLA in the 1980s, after the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979. The aim was to transform the PLA from a mass army into a more professional, combined-arms fighting force, with the introduction of modern armoured vehicles, artillery, and air defence systems.

Why are China’s Tiananmen Square military parades so important?

The showcasing of the three new branches, which run on advanced technologies and intelligence, indicates that the PLA is seeking to evolve not only through individual weapons platforms but also by integrating all military capabilities – such as space-based surveillance, cyber operations and artificial intelligence – into a unified, cohesive combat system.

This restructuring, particularly the establishment of the Military Aerospace Force, drew lessons from global military trends, such as the creation of the US Space Force in 2019, which itself was partly driven by China’s growing space and counterspace capabilities and the institutionalisation of the erstwhile SSF.

“China and the US are apparently military competitors or even potential adversaries. So, each side is closely watching the other’s military moves,” Yue said.

According to Heath, the US and Chinese space forces share many similarities, including their status as independent military services –the only two such branches in the world.

“In terms of capabilities, both include launch as well as space control centres. They both include missions to support military operations from space and fight as necessary in space,” he said.

“The PLA’s information support force aims to integrate cyber and space with conventional capabilities and plays a critical role in enabling joint operations.”

Cozad said that although the PLA was developing an array of world-class capabilities, major questions remained about how those forces would fit into and contribute to joint operations concepts.

“The advantage that US Space Force has in this area is multiple decades of experience in joint operations and learning from those experiences which the PLA does not have,” he said.

Source: SCMP, 7 Sep 2025… by Seong Hyeon ChoiandLiu Zhen