“In gen­eral, a more com­plex force pre­vails over a less com­plex force.“
Arthur Cerbrowski, Director, Office of Force
Transformation, Department of Defense
The first time I read this, I didn’t like it, per­haps because of the old Army adage KISS. Then I thought that Admiral Cerbrowski prob­a­bly had a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of com­plex in mind. What he might mean is that a com­plex force is one that is able to cre­ate more and dif­fer­ent options for action against an oppo­nent.
If this is right, a com­plex force would do bet­ter in a com­plex bat­tle space. Complex bat­tle space is a dig­ni­fied way of say­ing messy. Battlefields have always been messy, but the geo­graphic scope of bat­tle, the rapid pace at which it occurs, and the increase in the num­ber of actors make the con­flicts since the ’91 Gulf War (with com­bat mainly between two oppos­ing forces, in uni­form, in a mostly unin­hab­ited desert) very dif­fer­ent. Now, civil­ians don’t always have time to get out of the way, and there are other agen­cies, NGOs, the UN, press, pri­vate secu­rity con­trac­tors as well as insur­gents and local secu­rity forces. Instead of two sides, there may be nine or ten that are often indis­tin­guish­able from each other.
Complex bat­tle­space also involves extend­ing the scope for com­bat, to include ground, air, space, naval and infor­ma­tion (or cyber). We might want to amend the state­ment to say that a force that is bet­ter at man­ag­ing com­plex­ity will do bet­ter than a force that still tries to keep it simple.

DODs 2005 report on Chinas mil­i­tary power is actu­ally pretty level-​​headed. I was expect­ing some­thing more along the lines of the old Soviet Military Reviews, which rou­tinely attrib­uted astound­ing tech­ni­cal advances to the Soviets. The noise level in Washington over the yuan and CNOOC also led me to expect some­thing more vocif­er­ous.
One devel­op­ment regard­ing Chinas mil­i­tary that hasnt got­ten as much atten­tion is a pro­posed Commerce Department reg­u­la­tion that would restrict U.S. high tech trade with China. In non­pro­lif­er­a­tion terms, this would be a catch-​​all rule for exports that could make a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the PLA. The export wouldnt have to go directly to the PLA itself to be caught.
The catch-​​all was devel­oped in the late 1980s in reac­tion to an episode where Iraq was buy­ing a highly-​​specialized indus­trial tool for its WMD pro­grams and the US found it had no way to stop the sale. The reg­u­la­tion imple­ment­ing the catch-​​all is called the Enhanced Proliferation Control Initiative (EPCI), which gives the gov­ern­ment the abil­ity to stop any sale by a U.S. com­pany when it thinks that the export might con­tribute to the pro­lif­er­a­tion of WMD. Companies hate EPCI, but its been used with restraint.
The U.S. already blocks mil­i­tary exports to China, so a new catch-​​all for the PLA would apply only to com­mer­cial goods. The scope of a catch-​​all might be more lim­ited than EPCI, in that it might apply only to a list of high tech goods, but even this could still have a pretty broad reach, par­tic­u­larly as it would likely focus on com­mer­cial high tech prod­ucts. The Chinese blame the trade imbal­ance on U.S. tech­nol­ogy restric­tions and say the catch-​​all will only make things worse, but this is non­sense. Its not sup­ported by the num­bers, which sug­gest that U.S. exports to China would not increase very much if all sanc­tions were lifted.
Most peo­ple rec­og­nize that a catch-​​all wont stop PLA mod­ern­iza­tion. China cant make advanced weaponry, but while it tries to build a mod­ern defense indus­try, it can buy from Russia. It also gets mil­i­tary tech­nol­ogy from Israel and it would like to add Europe to its sup­pli­ers (and some Europeans would love to sell). The catch-​​all wont affect the arms pur­chases that are the basis of Chinas mil­i­tary mod­ern­iza­tion, although it raises the stakes for the EU if it tries again to lift its own arms embargo.
The catch-​​all might be aimed at Information Technology. China envies the U.S. mil­i­tary and is try­ing to dupli­cate the progress in infor­ma­tion warfare/​netcentric operations/​C4ISR that is at the core of trans­for­ma­tion. Since IT exports from Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Europe wont be affected, its not clear how much ben­e­fit well get from the catch-​​all, but we can­not dis­miss the pos­si­bil­ity of con­flict with China as com­pletely improb­a­ble. I still think its bet­ter to focus on mak­ing sure that the U.S. main­tains tech­no­log­i­cal lead­er­ship rather than wor­ry­ing about how to slow Chinese eco­nomic growth.
Links to the report and a story on the catch-​​all.