How China is learning lessons from US fighting in Iran

Militaries and strategists from around the world are learning lessons from the war in Iran. Starting with the USA, of course. But also China, whose armed forces today have no combat experience

The war in Iran, now in its third month, is providing China with insight into how U.S. military capabilities perform under enemy fire, and becomes a useful reminder that on any battlefield, the adversary always has a major influence on the outcome.

CNN spoke to several experts in China, Taiwan and elsewhere about how the past two months of fighting in and around the Persian Gulf could give insight into what could happen in an eventual conflict that could pit Beijing against Washington.

Experts warn of the risk of China misinterpreting its own strengths, lack of experience and maintaining a very limited view of the conflict and its consequences.

Fu Qianshao, a former colonel in the Chinese Air Force, says his main takeaway from the fighting so far is that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) cannot forget its defenses, highlighting how Iran has found ways to bypass US anti-missile systems such as the Patriot or the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).

“We need to devote significant efforts to identifying weak points in our defense to ensure that we remain invincible in future wars,” Fu told CNN.

The People’s Liberation Army has rapidly expanded its offensive firepower capabilities in recent years, adding hypersonic glide missiles capable of evading interceptors and the platforms that launch them.

According to the think tank British RUSI, the PLA Air Force is adding fifth-generation stealth fighters at an accelerated pace and will put into service around a thousand J-20 jets – the rough equivalent of US F-35s – when operating in long-range precision strike mode.

China has a long-range stealth bomber in development, similar to the US B-2 or B-21.

But its defenses are another matter.

Analysts note that Iran has managed to penetrate US air defenses in the Persian Gulf with relatively primitive technology, including low-cost and even lower-cost ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile, the US launched an air campaign against Iran with much more sophisticated weaponry, such as the F-35 and B-2, combining it with cheaper and less technologically advanced guided munitions launched from B-1, B-52 and F-15. They destroyed everything from missile launchers to warships and bridges.

It’s a combination that Beijing has to prepare for, warns Fu.

“We must deepen our analysis to effectively protect our key locations, airfields and ports against attacks and incursions”, he declares.

Across the Taiwan Strait

Taiwan is often seen as a potential flashpoint when it comes to a possible conflict between the US and China,

The ruling Chinese Communist Party has promised to “reunite” autonomous democracy despite never having controlled Taiwan. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has not ruled out using it for this.

In Taiwan, analysts recognize that China has assembled an army capable of rivaling both the US in high-tech, precision weaponry and Iran in low-cost, high-volume drone warfare.

“Long-range rockets and swarms of drones will certainly play a key role in China’s joint military operations against Taiwan,” Chieh Chung, associate researcher at Taiwan’s National Defense and Security Research Institute, told CNN.

But would this fundamental role be enough to win a war in the Taiwan Strait?

China is the world’s largest drone manufacturer and, according to analysts, the number of unmanned weapons systems that its manufacturers are able to produce is impressive.

“Chinese civilian manufacturers have the capacity to retool in less than a year to produce a billion armed drones annually,” says a 2025 report on China’s drone program on analytics platform War on the Rocks.

Some warn that Taiwan is not prepared to face these numbers.

A recent report from a government watchdog stated that the Taiwan military’s current countermeasures against drones are “ineffective” and pose a “major security risk” to critical infrastructure and military bases.

To be fair, Taiwan is not sitting idly by and is taking steps to improve these countermeasures.

Gene Su, general director of Thunder Tiger, Taiwan’s leading drone manufacturer, calls for more investment in Taiwan’s ability to mass produce drones. “We need to produce continuously, day and night, to fight our enemies”, he says.

The US is also learning, and there is a recognition that in a Pacific conflict it can become the defender rather than the attacker.

Drones make war much more costly for the offensive side, the head of US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo, said at a US Senate hearing in April.

If there were a conflict around Taiwan, the island or the US could use drones to attack Chinese ships or aircraft carrying possibly hundreds of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers across the Taiwan Strait for an assault and occupation.

Each ship or plane, and the troops it carries, is much more expensive than the drones that could destroy them. This is a deterrent that has been in evidence in the war with Iran, where the US Navy, wary of Iran’s asymmetric warfare, has rarely sent ships through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf.

Beijing almost certainly took note that Paparo advocated filling the Taiwan Strait with thousands of drones in the air, on the water and under the sea, targeting the Chinese military, so that the PLA would have difficulty crossing the waterway to advance on Taiwan.

The enemy has a say

This is what all armed forces that learn lessons from the war in Iran must take into account: the enemy is also learning. And you can apply these lessons in ways you might not expect.

More than two months after the start of the war with Iran, many analysts continue to scratch their heads over why war leaders in Washington did not foresee an Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Others wonder how the Iranian government continues to function after the military defeat it suffered, but see clear lessons for Beijing.

“Tactical victories do not equate to political results,” Craig Singleton, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a nonpartisan organization, tells CNN.

“Military pressure… has not clearly translated into a lasting political settlement.” it says. “For China, this reinforces a fundamental lesson: success on the battlefield does not automatically produce the desired end result.”

Then there’s something the Chinese military simply doesn’t have: combat experience. The People’s Liberation Army has not faced enemy fire since the war with Vietnam in February 1979. Since then, U.S. forces have conducted extensive campaigns in Iraq twice and Afghanistan, as well as more rapid combat actions in places like Kosovo and Panama, to name a few.

“This is what real war looks like,” says Chinese military analyst Song Zongping about the conflict in Iran.

If China were to enter into conflict with the US in the next decade, Washington would rely on a large number of military personnel who have seen combat in the current Persian Gulf conflict or in planning the campaign. They lost comrades, lost resources, achieved crushing victories and carried out precision warfare at a high level.

And they adapted – for example, moving from devastating airstrikes to a blockade of Iranian ports, or taking steps to reinforce aircraft shelters when essential equipment, such as an AWACS radar plane, was lost.

It remains to be seen how quickly a People’s Liberation Army under enemy fire could adapt to a similarly changing battlefield, analysts say.

Drew Thompson, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, presents a historical example, from the last time the US and China engaged in combat, in the Korean War.

China had better fighters, the Soviet-made MiG-15s. But American pilots, despite flying inferior F-86s, performed better because many brought World War II experience to the air war.

The lesson was that “an excellent pilot in a mediocre plane will always beat a mediocre pilot in an excellent plane,” confides Thompson.

Another lesson to learn from Iran is that wars at this level, involving a great power and a lower power, cannot always be organized operations that end when a president is captured by special forces in the middle of the night. (See Venezuela.)

“Iran’s ability to take advantage of a choke point and introduce risk into global supply chains shows how quickly a localized conflict can become international,” says FDD’s Singleton.

“For Beijing, this is a warning that any Taiwan scenario would immediately implicate global trade, energy flows and third-party actors in ways difficult to imagine.”

Top image: Photo provided by the U.S. Air Force shows the U.S. Army High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) launch station preparing to be loaded onto a C-17 Globemaster III from the 4th Airlift Squadron at Fort Bliss, Texas, Feb. 23, 2019. Sergeant Cory D. Payne/AP