An interview with former CIA analyst John Culver, an authority on China’s military.
By MAX BOOT
Washington Post
May 11, 2026
John Culver is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military, a subject he began studying as a CIA analyst in 1985. From 2015 to 2018, he served as national intelligence officer for East Asia. Since retiring from the CIA in 2020, he has been a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In advance of the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, I spoke with Culver about China’s military capabilities and what lessons the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is drawing from the U.S. conflict with Iran. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Could you briefly summarize how China’s military has changed since the 1980s?
It’s hard to not be hyperbolic when you talk about the transformation from the force that I first saw, which was equipped largely with Korean and some Vietnam War-era gear. Today, it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage. I don’t think we have an advantage in missile, space, cyber, reconnaissance, etc. I think they are leading us in some categories such as air-to-air missiles, surface-to-air missiles, counter-space capabilities and electronic warfare.
The thing that should jump off the page at you is how many advanced munitions they’re building — magnitudes greater than our industrial base could produce. The Chinese have one shipyard that builds more than all of our shipyards combined. They deploy enough ships every year to replicate the entire French navy. If the reports are true that we expended a huge portion of our long-range strike and theater missile defense capacity fighting Iran, then we don’t have anywhere near the inventory we would need for a China fight.
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