China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has embarked on its most wide-ranging and ambitious restructuring since 1949, including major changes to most of its key organizations. The restructuring reflects the desire to strengthen PLA joint operation capabilities- on land, sea, in the air, and in the space and cyber domains. The reforms could result in a more adept joint warfighting force, though the PLA will continue to face a number of key hurdles to effective joint operations, Several potential actions would indicate that the PLA is overcoming obstacles to a stronger joint operations capability. The reforms are also intended to increase Chairman Xi Jinping's control over the PLA and to reinvigorate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organs within the military. Xi Jinping's ability to push through reforms indicates that he has more authority over the PLA than his recent predecessors. The restructuring could create new opportunities for U.S.-China military contacts.

This study discusses the process of military reform in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto?s New Order regime in 1998. The extent of Indonesia?s progress in this area has been the subject of heated debate, both in Indonesia and in Western capitals. Human rights organizations and critical academics, on the one hand, have argued that the reforms implemented so far have been largely superficial, and that Indonesia?s armed forces remain a highly problematic institution. Foreign proponents of military assistance to Indonesia, on the other hand, have asserted that the military has undergone radical change, as evidenced by its complete extraction from political institutions. This study evaluates the state of military reform eight years after the end of authoritarian rule, pointing to both significant achievements and serious shortcomings. Although the armed forces in the new democratic polity no longer function as the backbone of a powerful centralist regime and have lost many of their previous privileges, the military has been able to protect its core institutional interests by successfully fending off demands to reform the territorial command structure. As the military?s primary source of political influence and off-budget revenue, the persistence of the territorial system has ensured that the Indonesian armed forces have not been fully subordinated to democratic civilian control. This ambiguous transition outcome so far poses difficult challenges to domestic and foreign policymakers, who have to find ways of effectively engaging with the military to drive the reform process forward.This is the twenty-third publication in Policy Studies, a peer-reviewed East-West Center Washington series that presents scholarly analysis of key contemporary domestic and international political, economic, and strategic issues affecting Asia in a policy relevant manner.

Here is the first social history devoted to the common soldier in the Russian army during the first half of the 19th-century--an examination of soldiers as a social class and the army as a social institution. By providing a comprehensive view of one of the most important groups in Russian society on the eve of the great reforms of the mid-1800s, Elise Wirtschafter contributes greatly to our understanding of Russia's complex social structure. Based on extensive research in previously unused Soviet archives, this work covers a wide array of topics relating to daily life in the army, including conscription, promotion and social mobility, family status, training, the regimental economy, military justice, and relations between soldiers and officers. The author emphasizes social relations and norms of behavior in the army, but she also addresses the larger issue of society's relationship to the autocracy, including the persistent tension between the tsarist state's need for military efficiency and its countervailing need to uphold the traditional norms of unlimited paternalistic authority. By examining military life in terms of its impact on soldiers, she analyzes two major concerns of tsarist social policy: how to mobilize society's resources to meet state needs and how to promote modernization (in this case military efficiency) without disturbing social arrangements founded on serfdom. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.