The key goals of the CWI are to build scholarship on the People’s Republic of China and the People’s Liberation Army across MCU and directly support the JADO program. Scholarship includes education and research on the PLA to create a baseline and build substantial actionable knowledge for students and the broader community.

In terms of education, while there are elements of what one would think of as classic China classes, such as grand strategy or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), our real focus falls at the high tactical and operational level of the PLA. The impetus for this focus is best summed up by MCWAR Director, Col Andrew M. Kelley’s vision about how the CWI can improve the combat readiness of the Corps. In one of the initial meetings for the stand-up of the CWI, Col Kelley relayed a story about his personal experience in junior professional military education. It was the height of the Cold War, and most junior officers were steeped in Soviet operations and order of battle. There were even posters of the operational laydown of Soviet forces stuck to the back of bathroom stall doors across the Corps.³ Such rudimentary, but important, learning mechanisms helped U.S. Cold Warriors easily recount the makeup of a Soviet motorized rifle regiment formation as it is deployed.

While not the same era, nor the same competitor, Col Kelley envisions bringing a similar level of awareness and knowledge of the China threat across the Marine Corps and the broader force, not only just in the event of conflict, but to deeply understand how the PLA operates in competition as well. As MajGen Patrick Teague, then defense attaché to Beijing, once remarked during a “China Way of War” class, it took decades to build the talent base of Kremlinologists that provided the insight into Moscow during the Cold War, and that for a potential China threat, we are only beginning to build that deep talent pool.⁴ These ideas are the tenets of the CWI’s educational efforts to build cohorts of Marines (and other students across the U.S. Armed Services, and our allies and partners) mature in their understanding of the CCP’s thinking on grand strategy, and how the CCP employs the PLA across the spectrum of conflict to achieve its political objectives. And, yes, CWI has also created a poster available to Marines that includes a translated, templated laydown of a combined-arms brigade as drawn by PLA academics for training.⁵ The author leaves it up to Marines on where they choose to hang that poster.

At Marine Corps University, CWI China-focused education takes the form of specific classes and courses built into schools’ curricula, supporting professional enrichment lectures, and a designated China Scholars program. At Expeditionary Warfare School, customized lectures built into the core curriculum on the PLA’s strategy, operations, and tactics provide the backdrop of the threat for the Expeditionary Warfare School’s operations afloat exercise. In these lectures, the CWI provides an overview of Chinese grand strategy and the PLA to frame the problem, and follow-on lectures include a deep dive on PLA operations vis-à-vis Taiwan and the operational and tactical level of PLA warfighting. At Command and Staff College, the CWI provides an intensive elective on Chinese grand strategy and the PLA. The elective is structured according to Chinese definitions of Comprehensive National Power, which is a key metric for great-power competition. The first half of the elective examines each aspect of Comprehensive National Power in detail from the viewpoint of the CCP. During the second half of the elective, students study a handbook on PLA operations and the tactical details of different PLA campaigns, including the landing campaign. The Command and Staff College course culminates in a role reversal exercise, meant to expand the students’ critical thinking. In this exercise, students adopt the lens of a mid-grade CCP or PLA leader and provide strategic or operational actionable recommendations to higher-echelon leadership. The exercise forces students to break the blue lensing of their analysis of the PLA.

At MCWAR, the educational focus of the CWI is on building an understanding of the strategic culture of China and how specifically the military component of comprehensive national power is being strategically modernized. Students analyze CCP decision making, PLA military developments, advanced technology in the PLA, military thinking, and PLA operations. A global competition and conflict wargame augments the lectures and seminars as part of the MCWAR Joint Warfighting curriculum. The games stress-test the U.S. strategy against thinking adversaries as laid out by the National Security Strategy. In these wargames, both the director and deputy director of the CWI serve as advisors for student teams playing as China. For MCWAR students, the mix of education and practical exercises helps to prepare them for their future leadership roles in geographic combatant commands and for how to address China in competition or in conflict.