From Gulf to Iran: How China learns and transforms from America’s wars

America’s biggest rival, China, is watching the Iran War from the sidelines—at least, that’s what it seems.

Beijing is performing a delicate balancing act. Neither can it overtly support Tehran nor side with the Gulf nations targeted by the Islamic nation.

In 2024, China bought more than 90 per cent of Iran’s oil worth $32.5 billion.

In the same year, China beat the US, the UK and the EU to become the Gulf’s largest trading partner—trade with six countries in the region was valued at $257 billion.

If China isn’t helping Iran overtly/covertly, is it merely a mute spectator watching as American and Israeli advanced weaponry and AI-assisted targeting pummel the Iranian regime, which is surprisingly still standing and countering them with its ballistic missiles and cheap kamikaze drones?

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No. China is closely observing, studying and interpreting the American military’s manoeuvres and will innovate accordingly to counter the US in a potential war in the Indo-Pacific.

China did it more than 35 years ago.

First Gulf War Shocked China

China, like other Asian nations, believed in the land, air and sea warfare doctrine.

Mao Zedong’s People’s War banked on the population’s support, combating the enemy in a difficult terrain (mountains or forests), establishing revolutionary base areas and finally assuming control by capturing small and large cities.

In 1985, Deng Xiaoping changed the military doctrine by ordering the PLA to prepare for “local wars under modern conditions”, resulting in the first major troop reduction and speed, mobility and lethality. He transformed the PLA into a high-technology, networked force under a unified command with a focus on joint operations, increasing naval and air power and developing or procuring advanced weapons.

Operation Desert Storm, the phase two of the First Gulf War (1990-91), was a massive shock to China, jolting it from its military complacency.

The US military’s coordination between its Army, Air Force and Navy and allied nations, the ‘shock and awe’ techniques, precision bombing using laser-guided smart bombs, stealth bombers, cruise missiles, electronic warfare, and a modern command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) system pulverised the Iraqi military.

The operation was also the first space war. The USAF’s Navigation System Using Timing and Ranging constellation of 16 satellites provided 19 hours of GPS coverage, helping US troops navigate, communicate and guide their weapons across the hundreds of kilometres of desert.

The US also established the fifth domain of warfare, cyber war, by neutralising Iraqi air defence, radars and the command and control system to achieve air dominance.

PLA’s Radical Transformation in 30 Years

China was awestruck by America’s revolutionary warfighting tactics, realising that the PLA was unprepared to deal with.

In the next three decades, the PLA underwent a radical transformation and modernisation by incorporating the space and cyber domains in its warfighting strategy.

Jian Zemin led the charge.

In 1993, he changed the military doctrine to winning “Local Wars Under Modern, High-Tech Conditions”. Troops were downsized, and the PLAA, PLAAF and PLAN equipped with modern weapons.

Under the principle of ‘Three attacks, three defences’, the PLA switched to attacking the aggressor’s stealth aircraft, cruise missiles and helicopters, and defending against precision strikes, electronic warfare and reconnaissance.

In 1999, Jiang modified the doctrine to winning ‘Local Wars Under Modern Informatised Conditions’—a synergy between land, air, sea, space and electromagnetic domains.

In 2004, Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao, changed the military doctrine to winning ‘Local Wars Under Informatised Conditions’ with the development of C4ISR capabilities and the destruction of the enemy’s operational system by striking its combat networks and systems.

China viewed war not as a battle between units, arms, services or even specific weapon platforms, but a fight between the operational systems of adversaries.

Outer space, cyberspace, electromagnetic and even psychological domains became part of the PLA’s war space.

The PLA was instructed to master “system-of-systems operations”, which “focuses on joint units with integrated command networks enabling key node strikes against the combat networks and systems of an advanced adversary”.

Under Xi Jinping, the PLA underwent the biggest and most radical transformation.

He revised the military doctrine to win “Informatised Local Wars” in an “information-based systems-of-systems” war, where information is both the domain in which the war is fought and the central means to fight it.

Xi emphasised dominating the information, air and maritime domains with a special focus on information.

China’s 2015 Defence White Paper

Under Xi, China has released three Defence White Papers: 2013, 2015 and 2019.

What started as a rude shock for the PLA in the form of the Gulf War and triggered the transformation in 1993, laid the groundwork in the 2015 Defence White Paper.

“Outer space and cyberspace have become new commanding heights in strategic competition among all parties. The form of war is accelerating its evolution to informationisation.”

As major world powers are actively adjusting their national security strategies and defence policies, and speeding up their military transformation and force restructuring, they “pose new severe challenges to China’s military security”, the paper reads.

Therefore, the PLA “will constantly innovate strategic guidance and operational thoughts” and “pay close attention to the challenges in new security domains, and work hard to seize the strategic initiative in military competition”.

Effectively securing China’s overseas interests is one of the PLA’s main defence aims.

The paper highlights that preparation for military struggle (PMS) will focus on winning informationised local wars, highlighting maritime military struggle and maritime PMS.

“Integrated combat forces will be employed to prevail in system-vs-system operations featuring information dominance, precision strikes and joint operations.”

The document lays out strategies for the PLA’s four services.

The PLAA will elevate its capabilities for precise, multi-dimensional, trans-theatre, multi-functional and sustainable operations.

“In the process of building small, multi-functional and modular units, the PLAA will adapt itself to tasks in different regions, develop the capacity of its combat forces for different purposes, and construct a combat force structure for joint operations”.

The PLAN will combine “offshore waters defence” with “open seas protection” and enhance its capabilities for strategic deterrence and counterattack, maritime manoeuvres, joint operations at sea, comprehensive defence and comprehensive support.”

The PLAAF will shift its focus from territorial air defence to “both defence and offence and build an air space defence force structure that can meet the requirements of informationised operations”.

The PLA Second Artillery Force, which Xi renamed as PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) in 2016, will “strive to transform itself in the direction of informationisation”, and innovate weaponry and equipment and improve the force structure featuring a combination of both nuclear and conventional capabilities.

The force will strengthen its capabilities for strategic deterrence and nuclear counterattack, and medium- and long-range precision strikes.

Regarding the weaponisation of outer space, China will deal with security threats and challenges in that domain, and secure its space assets to serve its national economic and social development, and maintain outer space security.

Highlighting cyberspace, the paper mentions that China will expedite the development of a cyber force, and “enhance its capabilities of cyberspace situation awareness, cyber defence and support for the country’s endeavours in cyberspace”.

In a nutshell, the main emphasis is the “system vs system operations based on information systems”.

The PLA will work to use information systems to “integrate a wide range of operational forces, modules and elements into overall operational capacity, and gradually establish an integrated joint operational system in which all elements are seamlessly linked and various operational platforms perform independently and in coordination”.

In the same year, Xi reduced the number of troops by 300,000 to 2 million and established the cyber, space and electronic warfare service branch, PLA Strategic Support Force (PLASSF).

The PLASSF aimed to prevent stovepipes, which means intelligence sharing without context within a government branch but not with other branches.

In 2016, the number of PLA Theatre Commands was reduced from seven to five to “elevate its capabilities for precise, multi-dimensional, trans-theatre, multi-functional and sustainable operations”.

China’s 2019 Defence White Paper and AI

The 2019 Defence White Paper made China’s defence aims clearer by including opposing and containing “Taiwan independence” and safeguarding security interests in outer space, electromagnetic space and cyberspace.

In continuing to strengthen the military in the Chinese way, efforts will be made “to advance the integrated development of mechanisation and informationisation, speed up the development of intelligent military and create a modernised military force structure with Chinese characteristics”.

The main strategic goal for the development of China’s national defence and military in the new era is to achieve mechanisation by 2020 with significantly enhanced informationisation and greatly improved strategic capabilities.

Xi further changed the military doctrine to intelligentised warfare, wherein artificial intelligence (AI) plays a critical role in an integrated joint operation by the PLAA, PLAAF, PLAN, PLARF and space and cyber forces in a war over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

With a focus on the US in the Asia-Pacific and “Taiwan independence” separatist forces, the document mentioned that America is “engaging in technological and institutional innovation in pursuit of absolute military superiority” in the Asia-Pacific.

Mentioning the increasing use of AI, quantum information, big data, cloud computing and the Internet of Things by other powers, the paper reads that war is “evolving in form towards informationised warfare, and intelligent warfare is on the horizon” due to the rapid development in high-tech military technologies based on information technology.

China’s military doctrine was to increasingly use AI in military conflicts, which will literally become the sixth dimension of warfare.

AI-enabled weapons, with humans in the background, will fight the war with such systems taking command and control and making decisions.

In February 2023, an AI-operated Chinese drone beat a human-operated UAV in a dogfight with its superior cutting-edge, close-range fighting in 90 seconds.

Taking advantage of the distance factor in a war with the US over Taiwan, China will use AI, which substantially speeds up decisions, to disrupt its command and control and launch hypersonic missiles and drones at American aircraft carriers. AI is also expected to boost China’s cognitive warfare by using deepfakes to generate fake news, images and videos and misinformation and disinformation.

China is also looking into using AI to help in the guidance, detection and identification of targets by missiles. Beijing has already developed AI-enabled lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs). Drones like Wing Loong 1, 2 and ID, Hongdu GJ-11 and Caihong 4 (CH-4) can conduct both surveillance and attack.

In its annual report to Congress in 2023 titled ‘Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China’, the US Department of Defence said: “In 2022, the PLA continued discussing a new ‘core operational concept’ called ‘Multi-Domain Precision Warfare’, which aims to “leverage a C4ISR network that incorporates advances in big data and artificial intelligence to rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the US operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities”.

According to the report, China is a global leader in AI technology and aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030. “China has designated AI as one of its priorities, national-level S&T development areas and assesses that advances in AI and autonomy are central to intelligentised warfare, the PRC’s concept of future warfare.”

In 2024, Chinese scientists created an AI commander that mirrors a human commander in large-scale computer war games.

Confined to a lab at the Joint Operations College of the National Defence University, Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, the commander is a brilliant strategist who identifies new threats, crafts plans and makes optimal decisions based on the overall situation when battles falter or results fall short. It also learns and adapts from victories and defeats.

While the US Army’s AI only serves as a “commander’s virtual staff”, the Chinese AI commander will fill in for its human counterparts if they can’t participate in a big virtual battle or exercise command authority.

In the same year, Xi disbanded the PLASSF in the second-most elaborate restructuring. He formed the Information Support Force (PLAISF), the Aerospace Force and the Cyberspace Force. The PLAISF is also responsible for electronic and psychological warfare.

China’s Huge Leap in Outer Space

China is prepared for a war with the US not only on Earth but also in outer space.

It’s a form of asymmetric warfare fought to cripple or destroy the enemy’s command, control, and intelligence capabilities, interrupt military communications and paralyse the launch or detection of missiles.

China has taken orbital combat to an entirely new level—satellite dogfighting, or rendezvous and proximity operations.

Usually, satellite dogfighting includes spying and snapping other satellites, monitoring their signals and data and intercepting their communications to Earth.

In February 2022, an American spacecraft, USA 270, was involved in a dogfight with two experimental Chinese satellites, Shiyan 12-01 and Shiyan 12-02, just above the geostationary orbit. Shiyan 12-02 outmanoeuvred the US satellite.

America’s rivals aim to deny, disrupt, degrade and destroy US space capabilities, according to General Michael Guetlein, the then-Vice-Chief of US Space Force, said in March 2025.

Guetlein, without naming China, said that three Shiyan-24C experimental satellites and two Chinese experimental space objects, the Shijian-6 05A/B, practised dogfighting in low Earth orbit in 2024.

“They are practising tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another,” he said.

“There used to be a capability gap between our near peers and us, mainly driven by the technological advancement of the United States. That capability gap used to be massive. That capability gap is significantly narrowing.”

PLA’s satellite dogfighting isn’t restricted to traditional uses. Besides missiles and ground-based lasers that can target satellites, China’s satellites can grab other satellites.

According to US Space Force Chief General Chance Saltzman, China’s counterspace operations include satellites that can physically pull (grab) other satellites out of orbit.

China is investing in all six categories of counterspace weapons: ground-based jammers, kinetic weapons and directed energy weapons, and their space-based versions. The US is only focused on ground-based counterspace weapons.

China’s Military Superiority in Indo-Pacific

After the Gulf War, the focus of China’s military modernisation was the Indo-Pacific, where a potential war with the US would be fought over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

One of the earliest war games planned by the RAND Corporation in the early 2000s to find out the winner in a US-China war over Taiwan, 10 years later, revealed that Beijing would use what the Pentagon refers to as A2/AD (anti-access, area denial) to prevent an Iraq-like American military build-up.

RAND concluded this after studying classified US intelligence on China’s military plans and weapons programmes, which also showed how it had minutely studied the two Gulf Wars and transformed accordingly.

David Ochmanek, a senior RAND analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defence for force development, remarked that the US was defeated by China in every Taiwan war game because “in that scenario, time is a precious commodity and it plays to China’s strength in terms of proximity and capabilities”.

Another “eye-opening” Pentagon war game based on 2030 showed in 2020 that the US would not be able to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion and suffer “capital losses” with the PLA targeting Guam. US defence sources told The Times that every US base in the Indo-Pacific is at risk of a Chinese attack.

The PLA will rely on its space and airborne surveillance and reconnaissance, gigantic arsenal of precision-guided longest-range missiles, submarines, militarised man-made islands in the South China Sea, PLAAF and PLAN—which is the largest in the world—to attack the American bases in Guam and Diego Garcia, ports and aircraft carriers in the region.

In 2018 and 2020, two other war games showed the same results with China targeting Guam and the US losing.

“After the 2018 war game, I distinctly remember one of our gurus of war gaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again because we know what is going to happen,” Lieutenant General S Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, USAF, told Yahoo News in an interview in March 2021.

In the September 2020 war game, less than a year after the Covid-19 outbreak, China used biological weapons to attack US bases and warships in the Indo-Pacific and invaded Taiwan under cover of a military exercise like the Russian build-up ahead of the Ukraine invasion.

The simulation ended with Chinese missiles hitting US bases and warships in the region and an aerial blitzkrieg and amphibious onslaught on Taiwan.

China’s response will be a devastating pre-emptive attack in the first few days of a war with the US over Taiwan. “Many Chinese observers suggest that missile strikes on [US] air bases would be part of the opening salvos of a war,” RAND said in 2019.

China will unleash a volley of missiles—the most varied stockpile of 2,000 land-based, cruise and anti-ship weapons in the world—on Guam and Diego Garcia.

China would adopt a Pearl Harbour-like bombing strategy, Hinote told the Air Force Magazine.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the PLA had a minimum of 425 missile launchers capable of hitting the US bases. Not only Diego Garcia but the whole of the US is within the striking range of China’s longest-range nuclear ICBM DF-5C, which carries 10 MIRVs and has a range of 20,000 km.

Chinese ballistic missiles were designed to target US bases in the region to gain dominance in a war’s initial stages.

On 17 April 2020, the US ended its 2004 Continuous Bomber Presence programme on Guam as the DF-26 IRBM, or the “Guam Killer”, could hit the parked B-52, B1 and B2 strategic bombers.

The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in its November 2016 report: “Foremost among China’s military assets capable of reaching Guam, the DF-26 IRBM represents the culmination of decades of advancement to China’s conventional ballistic missile forces.”

In its report titled ‘Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020’, the US department of defence said that the DF-26 is “capable of conducting precision strikes in the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea from mainland China”.

Besides, the PLAAF’s H-6K bomber can also target Guam with its Changjian-20 cruise missiles.

China can also strike US aircraft carriers with its MRBM DF-21D and the DF-26B, or the ‘carrier killers’, built specifically to destroy America’s floating airbases.

Over the years, China realised that ballistic and cruise missiles are critical to deter or deny an immediate victory to the enemy.

Iran is holding on against the vastly superior US and Israel militaries only because of its missiles and drones.

The massive gap between Chinese and American missile arsenals prompted US President Donald Trump to pull out of the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia in 2019. The pact had banned nuclear and non-nuclear missiles with ranges of 500-5,500 km in 1987.

While the treaty bound the US, China accelerated the production of missiles with frightening ranges keeping in mind any future challenge posed by American aircraft carriers in the Indo-Pacific.

There is a considerable gap even between Chinese and US missiles that weren’t in the Treaty’s range restriction. Beijing has two supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, YJ-12 (400 km) and YJ-18 (540 km), compared to the US Harpoon, which has a maximum range of only about 240 km.

China Closely Studying Iran War

A recent CNN report mentioned that US intelligence suggests that China could provide Iran with financial help, spare parts and missile components. So far, there’s been no evidence of China moving in that direction.

However, two recent incidents show that China closely monitored the US military build-up before the war and continues to observe the volatile developments. Whether Iran is using the Chinese satellite imagery to target US military assets isn’t clear.

First, Shanghai-headquartered MizarVision, a private AI entity specialising in generating geospatial intelligence, tracked US military assets a few days before the war and posted them on social media, including X and Weibo.

Satellite images with precise identification and location of warplanes, AWACS planes and transport jets in US bases and those of allies, Carrier Strike Groups (CSGs) on the move, missile air defence batteries and troop configurations were posted online.

Photos of Patriot air defence batteries at the Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, F-22 Raptors at Israel’s Ovda airbase, E-3 AWACS jets and Bombardier E-11s at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan airbase and the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln CSGs were in the public domain.

MizarVision also posted photos of Diego Garcia with F-16 Fighting Falcons, Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers, C-17 Globemaster IIIs and a C-5 Galaxy.

Iran attacked several US military assets, like Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base and the AN/TPY-2 radar system used by the US THAAD missile defence system in Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, whose pictures were posted.

Despite having no satellites, MizarVision uses AI to scan and analyse available commercial imagery. Vantor, Planet Labs and Airbus Defence & Space sell satellite imagery.

The timing of the image dump isn’t a coincidence. The possibility of MizarVision releasing such images at the direction of Chinese authorities is quite high.

A possible source of the images could be Chang Guang Satellite Technology’s indigenous Jilin-1 constellation.

If Jilin-1 is indeed watching US military operations, the goal is much larger than merely providing intelligence to Iran.

China is gaining valuable insight into US warfighting by observing and studying the movements of aircraft and CSGs, missile trajectories, missile defence, strike patterns and logistics that could be useful in a potential conflict with the US in the Indo-Pacific.

By studying and analysing data collected by 24x7 surveillance of American operations, like when the US responds to an Iranian missile or drone attack and when warplanes are dispatched, the PLA can reconstruct patterns.

Besides, China’s Yaogan group of military reconnaissance satellites have optical imaging and electronic intelligence capabilities.

Second, analysts have said that Iran is striking targets more accurately compared to the 12-day war with Israel last June likely due to China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system.

BeiDou, launched in July 2020, is China’s answer to America’s GPS.

While the GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the EU’s Galileo system each have 24 satellites, BeiDou has 45, according to Al Jazeera’s AJ Labs data team.

Theo Nencini, a specialist in China-Iran relations and a research fellow at the ChinaMed Project, a research platform, told Al Jazeera that Iran reportedly signed an MoU in 2015 to integrate BeiDou‑2 into its military infrastructure, “particularly to improve missile guidance with signals far more accurate than those provided by the civilian GPS”.

The war is another learning lesson for China.

The multi-domain conflict, especially the use of AI tools of Palantir (Maven), Anthropic (Claude) and Anduril (Latice) to target Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his top aides, has immense significance for China, which will map the details directly onto an Indo-Pacific war with the US.

According to Carice Witte, founder and executive director of the SIGNAL Group, China is “studying US and Israeli capabilities, but the tech isn’t their top concern”.

“What matters most to them are the strategic implications, and how to counter them in the long term,” she told The Jerusalem Post.

(The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. He tweets as @FightTheBigots. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)