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Brendan S. Mulvaney has been studying the Chinese military since 2003 when, as an officer in the Marines, he was sent to get his PhD at Shanghai’s Fudan University. In 2017, he was named the inaugural director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), a think-tank based out of the Air Force’s Air University and the National Defense University that researches Chinese air power. Mulvaney spoke to The Wire China about China’s ambitions in near space, what we should make of the spy balloon saga, and why we need to keep the lines of communication with China open. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: As someone who has been tracking China’s capabilities for a long time, how shocked are you by the balloon incident?

A: I’m not shocked that they exist, they’ve existed for a long time. It’s not just China, countries around the world have them. I don’t expect any countries to stop using them because they bring a lot of benefits. But now that it’s been brought to light, people are going to be more attuned to them and they’ve probably lost a little bit of their ability to stay out of the limelight.

I’m not shocked that they found one over the United States. When I learned, along with the rest of the public, there have been more of these — who knows how many — in the past that were unreported and or undetected, that was a little bit more concerning. Obviously, the United States doesn’t disclose everything that it picks up on its radars, and it certainly doesn’t need to. No country does. But something of this magnitude that appears to have been surveilling the United States, that would be more concerning that we didn’t pick it up and do something sooner. 

What might the balloon have been able to collect?

Until it’s officially released what exactly they found, it’s hard to say. It was reportedly big enough to have a whole suite of capabilities. It was probably able to collect multiple different kinds of signals or images and potentially transmit them back, or at least store a significant amount of information, simply based on the size of the “basket” under the balloon.

One of the things to emphasize is it doesn’t really matter if it’s a balloon, dirigible, or a slow moving controllable UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle]. It’s really the equipment on board that we care about and the technology to get it there. As for the “delivery vehicle,” aka the balloon, we need to look at: Does it simply float? Is there some ability to do what we call station keeping, so it can stay over that object or that area for a longer period of time? How controllable is it? If it was supposed to be over Guam and Hawaii, and it somehow ended up over Canada and Montana, that doesn’t seem like you did a really good job of controlling it. If you meant for it to get there, you did a great job, because it just happened to show up in Montana over some missile fields.

There’s a whole series of these vehicles that China has been studying and producing for multiple years. Each one probably has specific benefits: one maybe goes a little higher, one maybe has better station-keeping, one maybe has a lower signature [meaning it’s less likely to be detected by infrared sensors], one maybe has a longer duration [so it can stay in the air longer]. Ideally, what you would do is you would create a whole suite of these things and then tailor their use to whatever the particular mission is.

There could have been communications equipment on it to soak up information and send it back to China. There potentially could have been cameras, optical sensors, or infrared sensors. There also may have been some scientific equipment on there, measuring things like the winds, altitudes, and temperatures. Those are good for weather forecasting, but also for understanding how aircraft run, how the balloon is functioning, how the signals are being picked up, and all of those kinds of things that lead to a better future operation of this kind of equipment.

And there’s been some speculation that the information collected could help in developing hypersonic weapons.

Probably not this particular balloon, but maybe there’s some sensing equipment that could help for that. You need to know the atmospheric conditions. At some point you have to test the material that you’re eventually going to have go at hypersonic speeds to see how it’s going to work at high altitudes, where air has different qualities than it does at sea level. 

I’ve also seen talk that such balloons could carry equipment to jam signals. Is that something you think is possible, or under development?

It doesn’t appear as though this one was actively emitting signals. Otherwise, we would have picked it up much earlier. But you could certainly put that on in a future mission. A lot of these things are plug and play. You could take a communication sensor, and you put an active jammer next to it, maybe jam some signals once you detect them, or collect those signals and jam the sources later. 

…if you can learn something about your rival or your challenger on either side, then you’re going to try to capitalize all you can, even if that means you essentially lose that asset.

I would guess this one was a passive receiver because it makes it harder to detect, and if you detect it, it doesn’t look that threatening. If something’s emitting all the time and jamming signals, that’s certainly getting into the attention of the relevant authorities.

What can China learn from the U.S. reaction?

They learned about our ability to detect — or not — the balloon. They learned what our response to a balloon would be: We flew U-2s [high-altitude reconnaissance planes] up there to monitor it, and didn’t shoot it down over populated areas, so maybe if China sent another one, they could expect that to float. And the U.S. shot it down with an air-to-air missile, here’s where the aircraft came from, all those kinds of things. We learned about how they were operating, and how to detect them. We learned what the balloon was doing, and who it may or may not have been sending signals back to. 

There’s all sorts of intelligence both sides can glean. Now, whether or not this was the optimal way, or the intended way, that’s something completely different. But if you can learn something about your rival or your challenger on either side, then you’re going to try to capitalize all you can, even if that means you essentially lose that asset.

The missile that was used to eventually shoot down the spy balloon over the Atlantic Ocean on February 4 reportedly cost more than $400,000. The U.S. has since shot three more objects out of the sky, and people are beginning to question the price tag.

That is one of the considerations. The cost of the balloon is relatively cheap, probably tens of thousands. The expensive part is the surveillance and communications equipment, which could run into the millions depending on the amount and level of the tech. If I can put up a relatively cheap balloon, and you’re using a somewhat expensive missile to shoot it, there’s a price disadvantage there. The problem is that the altitude that these things are at, way above civilian traffic, is above where most aircraft can fly. But there’s nothing that can go up and grab this thing and bring it down. You have to use some sort of air-to-air missile. Hopefully, we’re using the cheaper ones. 

Since the balloon incident, the U.S. has added five companies and one research institute to the Commerce Department’s Entity List for supporting China’s airship program. China has since added Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to its own Unreliable Entity List. We hear a lot in the States about military-civil fusion in China and how private companies are feeding into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). How is that different from how defense contractors operate in the US?

Military-civil fusion for China is a national strategic-level policy, integrating their development policy with their national security policy. It is far larger in scope and scale than anything that the U.S. has. China has state-owned enterprises, and even their commercial enterprises often have links back to state-owned enterprises or banks, so they do the bidding of the Communist Party. When the Communist Party decides the PLA needs to get a specific technology or piece of hardware or software, they use military-civil fusion to entice or compel companies to make things the PLA might want. 

There are certainly similarities between Lockheed Martin producing something for the government. But when Lockheed Martin produces something for Lockheed Martin, we in the West would consider that a commercial asset. When a state-owned enterprise or state lab produces something for China, that we know has the intent of supporting the party and the party’s military. 

The other thing that military-civil fusion does is requires companies to build technology or develop software to certain specifications, so that in the future, it would be transferable and meld into their networks. It can also give the CCP and the PLA some plausible deniability because those companies may be acting at the behest of the CCP, but not directly ordered by or linked to the PLA. China can claim [a product] is “just commercial,” even though the end customer and user is the PLA and the national security system.

At this point, even with the change in the rhetoric on both sides, cooler heads will prevail. 

Chinese officials have talked about “near space” as an area of focus for the military. Is that different from how the U.S. defines near space? And what is each country working on in near space?

Here’s the nebulous part: Where does your territorial airspace end, and where does space begin? Perfectly rational people can come to different conclusions on that. We all acknowledge that there is a place that is no longer your sovereign territory because we all have satellites zipping around the Earth. We’re not shooting them down wherever they come over the United States. The problem is that as technologies allow you to get closer and closer to whatever that magical line is, we’ll have to come to some sort of national policy: anything below X number of thousand feet is still our sovereign territory, and yes, we are going to take action against it. 

We have a bunch of unmanned aerial vehicles that we call HALE, high-altitude, long-endurance. These [Chinese] balloons put them to shame because especially if they have solar power they can stay up for weeks, months, potentially longer, as long as they have some sort of ability to communicate that information back. The balloons are cheaper, and they operate in this currently nebulous regime of way up high, but probably below space. They’re probably easier to refit and swap out the sensors. You can drive them back home and bring them down in a controlled way. If you want to fix the satellite, you have to go up and get it. Most of the time, it’s too expensive to fix. We just put up a different satellite.

You can put up lots of them, and do a lot of different things with them all at the same time because they’re operating out of everybody’s area of concern. They’re not going to last very long in war, but everything short of that they’re terrific for. You would expect if they were out in international airspace, we would be much more hesitant to take direct action against it. 

You founded CASI in 2017. How do you conduct research? 

Almost everything we do is open source, native language, publicly available information. Everyone thinks that China has this magical black box and nothing comes out, except for very controlled state controlled propaganda. There’s tons of information that China tells the world, and that China tells itself. There’s a lot you can learn by just simply taking the time and reading their military journals and newspapers. I don’t know the last time you read a magazine cover to cover. Certainly, if you’re talking about a professional military journal, sometimes they’re a little bit dry. I don’t know many officers that sit down and read ours cover to cover. But that’s basically what we do for China. It isn’t until you read all that that you’re like, Oh, this is the important one, this is a change, this is some messaging, this is an interesting new idea, this is what they think about a new U.S. idea. 

We watch Chinese television, we watch the Chinese internet, and just kind of try to get as much information as we can put it out into usable format to as many people as possible so they can make the best decisions. Thankfully, it’s a growing enterprise. When I started in 2017, there were just a handful of us doing it. The Navy started their version, the China Maritime Studies Institute, about ten years before us. And the Army is standing up their version now.

In the past, you’ve met with officials from PLA academic institutions. Are you still able to have conversations with your Chinese counterparts?

We just happened to be in China in November 2019. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the relationship between the U.S. government and Chinese government has deteriorated somewhat. I assume it will be more of a challenge over the coming a short period of time for me to get the opportunity to go back and talk about some of these things. 

The conversations I had in 2019 were still fairly frank and open. You can tell that there were certain attitudes and, and ways of viewing things that had shifted since I lived there 20 years ago. Military topics probably have gotten a little bit more sensitive. But the flip side of that is the Chinese are probably a little bit more proud of their achievements and their military accomplishments and not so worried about exposing what they would have seen 20 years ago is a relative weakness. 

From the U.S. perspective, there’s concern that China’s getting on war footing or preparing to invade Taiwan. And if you talk to a Chinese person, they think that they’re surrounded by U.S. bases. How do the military officials you’ve had contact with view these issues? 

In the 1970s and 1980s, the military balance of power really was on the other side of the Strait. The PLA has come very far, even over the last 15–20 years, but certainly since 1991, when they really kicked it into full drive after the US displayed what it was able to do with the first Gulf War. They are now well ahead of anyone else, except for the United States, in that whole region, and I don’t think that there is any reasonable way that that would ever shift back. So with more capability and capacity, perhaps comes a change in methods. 

Personally, I believe that the PRC would like to be able to accomplish the goal [of reclaiming Taiwan] without resorting to force or violence. I believe them when they say that, but I also very much believe that they are willing to resort to violence and military action should it become, in their minds, necessary. That’s important to understand: It’s not in our minds; it’s not in the minds of even the Taiwanese people. It’s in the minds of Xi Jinping, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the Central Military Commission of the Communist Party of China. 

I don’t know that they’re necessarily moving toward a war footing. But they’re trying to return to, the Xi Jinping saying is, “the rightful place on the center of the world stage.” It bears monitoring and trying to spend even more time and effort understanding what the Chinese, specifically those in Beijing in leadership roles, want and how they want to achieve it.

What do you think would make China’s leaders feel they need to take military action?

The trillion dollar question really is, what are those red lines? And where’s the gray zone that we can all live in? Certainly any outright declaration of independence on Taiwan’s part is a red line that China has stated over and over again. Beijing continues to be specific on some points and very vague on others, just like the United States government. We have a “one-China policy” that we say we continue to adhere to, but China’s understanding of that policy is different from our understanding. The other thing is that when you have three separate and equal branches of government, you have more chances for mixed messaging. When the Speaker of the House decides to go to Taiwan, China finds it hard to believe that the president can’t stop that. 

It’s super important for people like me and other people to have those exchanges and go to China and for them to come here to continue to talk about these things — even if we disagree — so that we avoid stumbling our way into a war that nobody wants.

I think at this point, even with the change in the rhetoric on both sides, cooler heads will prevail. People are working to increase communications and mutual understanding. We need to be very clear in both our messaging to them and understanding the messages that they’re trying to send us. It’s super important for people like me and other people to have those exchanges and go to China and for them to come here to continue to talk about these things — even if we disagree — so that we avoid stumbling our way into a war that nobody wants.

There’s a perspective I often see in Chinese media that the U.S. is trying to hold China back. 

Certainly there’s been a shift. You could trace it back probably to the Obama administration’s infamously named “pivot to Asia.” President Trump took a much harder stance, and President Biden has taken President Trump’s playbook and just continued on. China used to definitely feel that it was the weaker partner, the lesser partner, and was trying to do all they could to catch up. That was a very big source of insecurity to them and may still be in some people’s minds. In other cases, it may be a very convenient fiction for them to continue. 

The idea that China is somehow still a developing country, a weaker country, or a lesser country has been laid to rest, certainly at the close of the Hu Jintao era and the beginning of the Xi Jinping era. They have a modern, very large military. They have a large economy, and have made great advances in scientific research over the last couple of decades, which is why the U.S. calls it a strategic competitor. We didn’t used to be so concerned because China was so far behind. That’s the new dynamic we have to figure out how to come to grips with. 

How are the U.S. and China matched militarily in the South China Sea and around Taiwan?

As many advances as China has made, they still are behind the U.S. in almost every appreciable measure, especially when it comes to air and naval power. They’re catching up quickly, but there’s still a way to go. 

What I tend to tell everyone I talk to is, it’s not just about the United States, but also about our allies and partners, especially those in the region, Japan, Australia, Singapore. The Brits sailing the HMS Queen Elizabeth through the South China Sea shows the ability of the United States government to work with its allies. The way to avoid a crisis is not through having bigger, better toys, which certainly is a requirement. But it’s knitting together the international community, to what we consider modern norms and ways of governing and acting in a civilized world, and making it so that China values that more than the need to militarily use force to invade and occupy Taiwan. That’s why the NATO and EU response to the Russian war has been so important. 

If China at the end of the day says, you know what, this is going to cost us way too much to try to take Taiwan by force, they will continue to find peaceful ways to try to coerce them to come back. Or maybe somebody a decade or two from now comes up with a great idea of how they can come to some sort of agreement. Maybe we’ve just got to forestall the conflict until we can get to that solution. 

Do you think some of your military counterparts within China are thinking along the same lines?

I truly believe that if Xi Jinping could accomplish his goals without ever firing a shot, he would be perfectly happy to do that. It’s simply a question of finding ways to push those timelines back until we can find a solution. I certainly expect the officials in the PLA to be planning for war, because that’s what militaries do. You have to be ready for the worst case scenarios. I’m sure they have their military plans for an invasion and occupation of China and to go into combat against United States forces. They would be remiss if they weren’t doing that. 

Both sides want to avoid armed conflict, as best as they can. But both sides are preparing for that, should it come to pass.

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