PLA SSF scrapped, it’s now the PLA ISF: What does it mean?
People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Central Military Commission (CMC), the apex military bureaucracy, held the founding meeting of the new Information Support Force (ISF) on April 19, 2024. The Chinese Communist Party General Secretary and Chairman of the CMC, Xi Jinping, awarded the military flag to the ISF. It was later announced that the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLA SSF) would cease to exist. Formed on December 31, 2015, the PLA SSF centralised space, cyber, electronic and psychological warfare capabilities into a single service. It was formed to create synergies between various advanced warfighting capabilities and was hailed as instrumental in achieving Xi’s stated goals of modernisation, informatisation, and converting the PLA into a world-class army. With this change, the PLA now has a new system with four services — the Army, Navy, Air Force and Rocket Force, and four arms — the Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force, Information Support Force and Joint Logistic Support Force.
What is Information Support Force?
The Information Support Force (信息支援部队), as clarified by the PLA spokesperson Wu Qian, is a new PLA arm along with the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force and the Joint Logistic Support Force. Earlier, the PLA space, cyber and network capabilities were clubbed together into the PLA SSF. Furthermore, the PLA Joint Logistics Support Force (JLSF) was an additional independent force that provided strategic logistics support to all five theatre commands. But now, the PLA SSF is broken
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