The People’s Liberation Army is a learning adversary rapidly improving its lethality, flexibility, and command and control through high-intensity realistic training against a dedicated opposing force (OPFOR) across multiple domains. China’s expansion of training centers and the use of dedicated OPFOR training units offer important insights into the speed and direction of this modernization.

While China’s largest training base at Zhurihe in Inner Mongolia has received the vast majority of attention due to its role as a direct analogue to the U.S. Army’s National Training Center, its armed forces have a large and rapidly modernizing ecosystem of training centers and OPFOR units that are providing increasingly realistic, challenging training opportunities across a range of missions and environments.

U.S. Forces facing Chinese formations would likely face a joint, multidomain force operating in a complex information and electromagnetic environment. Effective threat replication at U.S. Army combat training centers entails incorporating an understanding of the Chinese approach to conflict into exercises and other training.