The following is a summary of the presentation and discussion at the China Aerospace Studies Institute 2026 Conference panel on the The PLA Aerospace Force (ASF). The presentation draws from an updated 2024 edition of the PLA space operations textbook and statements from PLA officials.

View a reconstruction of the presentation slides below.

The PLA Aerospace Force (ASF)

1. Where the ASF sits

• The PLA has, in the conference’s phrasing, “four services and four forces.” The four services are the Army, Navy, Air Force and Rocket Force; the four new arms are the Aerospace Force (ASF), Cyberspace Force (CSF), Information Support Force (ISF) and Joint Logistics Support Force (JLSF).
• The official English used by the PRC Ministry of National Defense is “arms” (兵种), not “forces” — a small terminology gap between the CASI usage and the Chinese-issued English.
• The ASF (军事航天部队), CSF and ISF were created out of the dissolution of the Strategic Support Force on 19 April 2024, each reporting directly to the Central Military Commission. The ISF panel at this same conference dates the reorganisation correctly.
• The conference framing was deliberately narrow. Burke: the PLA branches are usually examined strategically, so the panel agreed to drill into what each branch says about tactical support to joint war-fighting — and how that tactical work is done jointly.
• Burke’s stated advantage over the other panelists: for the ASF there are two authoritative reference points — the CMC’s tasking at establishment, and an updated (2024) edition of the PLA space operations textbook, which she reads against the 2013 edition. She notes the joint-warfighting angle is new research for her and that she “wrangled everybody in to do this with me.”

2. Three tasks and five missions

The tasks slide is built around one sentence of Chinese official language, parsed into three columns.

The MND line, quoted on the slide: “PRC Ministry of Defense 4/2024: ‘Strengthen the capacity to safely enter, exit, and openly use space.’”

This is verbatim. Sr. Col. Wu Qian, at the MND press conference of 19 April 2024: “Building the Aerospace Force is of great significance to strengthening the capacity to safely enter, exit and openly use space, enhancing crisis management and the efficacy of comprehensive governance in space and promoting peaceful utilization of space.” The slide’s attribution — source, month, wording — is exact.

Three interior quotations on the same slide

• “Using space is the ASF’s most important task.”
• “Most of what we see today are deterrence operations.”
• “Defense operations are most difficult mission.”

The three tasks, as three columns

• Enter/Exit Space — Deterrence; Defense (in red, i.e. tactical); and a third item hidden behind the podium.
• Use Space — largely behind the presenter. A first bullet ending “…rence” and line-ends “…tion / …t and / …ce” are all that survive.
• Ensure “Openly Use” — Deterrence; Defense; Blockade; Offense. Defense and Blockade are in red, marking them as the tactical pair. This column is fully legible.

Reconstruction note: the line-end fragments “tion / t and / ce” fit “Information support and assurance” wrapping across three lines, which is the fifth mission. That reading is supplied, not read. It is the least certain element on any of the eight slides.

Five missions in the space operations textbook

• Deterrence
• Blockade
• Offensive
• Defensive
• Space information support and assurance

Of these, two are described as tactical: defensive and blockade. Those are the two Burke drills into, and the two the slide colours red.

3. Defense missions (tactical)

The slide, verbatim: “3 types: counter-missile operations; space base defense; and spacecraft defense.”

Described as reactive operations. The pie chart gives the three near-equal weight, labelled Counter-missile, Spacecraft and Space Base — with the Spacecraft wedge pulled out of the pie. That offset is deliberate: Burke calls spacecraft defense the most difficult of the three, “so that’s why it’s off a little bit.”

The three, as the slide sets them out

• Counter-missile: joint, with ground- and space-based early warning and joint fires.
  • Base 37
• Space base defense: independent emergency launch and joint fires.
• Spacecraft defense: independent, with spectrum weapons, maneuver, and “active defense.”
  • Base [?] and 36 — the first numeral is behind the presenter in the photograph and cannot be read.

The growth areas Burke flags

• Merging space and missile early-warning sensors under Base 37. This checks out in detail against open reporting: Base 37 (Unit 32035, Lintong district, Xi’an) is a wholly new unit focused on space situational awareness and missile early warning, formed by merging tracking and sensor departments carved out of the Xi’an Satellite Control Center with elements of the PLA Air Force’s early-warning radar units, and now controlling large phased-array radar sites in Qinghai and Yunnan that the Air Force previously ran. Burke’s formulation — “merging those sensors under Base 37” — is precisely right.
• Fusing that space situational awareness with air-domain information to conduct a counter-missile mission. Burke calls this the clearest area of tactical and joint warfighting for the ASF.

On the unreadable base number: Base 36 (Unit 32026, Kaifeng) is real and is described in open sources as handling space equipment R&D, test and evaluation, including co-orbital interference and laser ASAT work — a natural pairing for a spacecraft-defense line. Its partner cannot be read. Base 35 is an unlikely candidate: it was reassigned to the ISF in 2024.

4. Blockade missions (tactical, but not only tactical)

The slide, verbatim: “4 types: information blockade; space base blockade; launch path blockade; and orbital blockade.”

• Blockade is one of two offensive mission areas for the ASF.
• The distinguishing condition: blockades are for when the PLA believes it has the upper hand. Burke notes this framing is consistent across both the 2013 and 2024 textbook editions, and says plainly that she does not know what “upper hand” means operationally.
• Blockades can be conducted at any level of war — tactical, campaign, or strategic. Burke examines only the tactical slice.

The inverted pyramid, top to bottom

• Information — tactical, and by far the most emphasized
• Space Base — tactical, and the other heavily emphasized type
• Launch Vehicle
• Orbital

The pyramid is ordered by stated importance and by time devoted. Burke: information blockade and space base blockade are “by far described as the ones of most significance that they’re most likely to use and they’re spending the most time building capacity.”

How the two tactical types would be executed

• Coordinated information blockade: joint, with ground- and space-based spectrum weapons. Two sub-types on the slide — “General” and “Targeted at space bases.” In the transcript Burke expands this as ground-based spectrum weapons drawn from all services and branches (the ASF included) plus the ASF’s own independent space-to-space jammers.
• Space base blockade: joint fires and spectrum weapons, special forces, and cyber. Mostly joint from a fires perspective, with the ASF contributing space and initial early-warning sensors.
• New in the 2024 textbook: information blockade now explicitly targets space bases. The 2013 edition did not.

5. Theater-command tasking and joint warfighting

The doctrinal frame

Burke works from the 2020 CMC joint guidance, which she reads as emphasising shared domains for the services and cross-domain fusion for the branches. The slide names its source precisely: the One-Year Review of the Implementation of the *Outline for Joint Operations of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (Trial) — 《中国人民解放军联合作战纲要（试行）》, issued November 2020.

The slide carries the Chinese passage in full with an English translation beside it. The Chinese, transcribed from the photograph:

在《纲要》指引下，联合理念逐步确立，军兵种行动“配合”、作战域能力“整合”的壁垒逐渐被打破，陆、海、空、火等军兵种并域联合，太空、网络、电磁空间等作战域跨域融合逐步成为现实。

Rendered: the philosophy of jointness is gradually being established; the barriers to “coordination” of actions among services and branches, and to “integration” of capabilities across operational domains, have been gradually dismantled; land, naval, air and rocket forces are joining across domains, and cross-domain fusion of operational spheres such as space, cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum is steadily becoming a reality.

What Burke can establish about ASF equipment under theater tasking

• Laser dazzlers / directed energy. The Central Theater Command has written extensively — her cited example is from 2020 — on tasking directed-energy laser dazzlers across multiple services. Spectrum weapons are therefore something a theater command demonstrably can task across branches and services, which is the lens she uses for the whole question.
• Eastern TC Joint Operations Command Center. The slide shows a photograph of a JOCC station with a placard reading “Intelligence Integration Group.” ISF and JLSF liaisons there are documented — the other panellists found concrete examples. Burke looked for an ASF liaison and could not find dedicated sources to establish one. She says it would make sense, but declines to assert it.
• The 2025 PLA parade. The ASF’s parade contribution was shown in a joint formation with the Army — radar reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance equipment, which she notes is spectrum equipment that could be used to jam ahead of counter-missile and counter-air operations alongside the Army, and therefore theater-taskable. The ASF’s parade debut on 3 September 2025 is confirmed in open reporting; the specific formation and equipment description is not.
• Space-to-space jammers. The one capability known to be ASF-unique. Burke puts an explicit question mark on whether a theater command could task it, but notes that if it falls under the coordinated information blockade it potentially could be tasked jointly.
• Laser dazzlers against missile-warning satellites. The “What we know” slide reproduces a four-panel map set from a Chinese technical paper modelling effective suppression zones of laser interference against an SBIRS GEO 1 gaze detector under different laser deployments (north-east, north-west, south-east, south-west), plus a jamming-geometry figure labelled “relay satellite / interfering satellite.”

Two points where the outside record sharpens the panel

• Burke’s negative finding looks structural, not evidentiary. Independent analysis of the ASF concludes it “does not strictly align with the regional Theater Command construct,” with its bases reporting to ASF Headquarters, which interfaces with the joint theater commands as needed. The liaison she could not find may not exist to be found.
• The Xi’an point from the ISF panel resolves cleanly. The ISF presenter placed ASF forces at the Xi’an satellite control and monitoring centre, working with the ISF on spatial data and PNT. Base 26, the Xi’an Satellite Control Center, remains ASF; Base 35 — Battlefield Environment Support, covering survey, mapping, PNT and the BeiDou ground segment — was reassigned to the ISF and is headquartered in Wuhan. That independently accounts for both the Xi’an and the Wuhan clusters the ISF presenter identified from recruitment data.

6. The four implications

All four are numbered “1.” on the slide. That is not a transcription artefact — it is visible in the photograph, and Burke jokes about it: “there are four. There are four number ones.”

• Misinterpret the presence of ASF personnel. Because the ASF has a growing counter-missile mission, ASF personnel observed at a mobile missile deployment does not mean an ASAT. It could be a mid-course ballistic missile defense system.
• Under-prepare for their seriousness about attacking space bases. The emphasis on attacking space bases — via information blockade or joint fires — is a significant shift from the 2013 textbook, which focused on spacecraft. The stated rationale: “space bases are the roots of many satellites.” Burke calls this the narrative shift worth discussing further.
• Under-prepare for counter-missile capabilities. The ASF’s growing counter-missile role implies preparation for additional PLA capacity in that mission set.
• Misinterpret on-orbit behavior with “active defense.” On-orbit activity is de-emphasized in the new textbook’s blockade section, while the defensive-operations section discusses the need for active defense of on-orbit spacecraft — a direction Burke notes the U.S. Space Force has also approved for its own on-orbit spacecraft defense.

The through-line worth the most attention: the 2024 textbook moves the target from spacecraft to the ground segment. The word runs through all three tactical formulations — space base defense, space base blockade, and information blockade targeted at space bases. It is a coherent doctrinal move, not a stray phrase, and it is the finding least dependent on any single reading of the audio. The first version understated this, having mis-transcribed one of the three as “space-based.”

7. The open question from the Q&A

An audience member — transcribed as “Mike Don from the Michelin Institute for Aerospace Studies,” both name and affiliation garbled — raised the theater joint operations command center, calling it his “white whale.” He said he can substantiate an air operations sub-center, a land operations sub-center, a maritime operations sub-center and a conventional missile operations sub-center. He then cited a U.S. Army product containing an uncited graphic that shows a joint logistics operations sub-center and a “multi-domain operations sub-center” comprising ASF, ISF and CSF elements, and asked whether it exists.

The publication is real: “How China Fights in Large-Scale Combat Operations,” TRADOC G-2, April 2025, with a foreword by Ian Sullivan, Deputy Chief of Staff G-2, published 8 May 2025. Whether it contains that graphic was not checked here — the PDF itself was not opened.

Burke’s answer: she could not confirm it. She contrasted a single-organization paper with the coordinated annual China Military Power Report (“everyone chopped here”), said she looked for evidence of an ASF liaison at joint theater commands and found no concrete example unlike the ISF and JLSF analysts, tried approaching it instead from a theater counter-space weapons angle, and could not corroborate it from additional sources. Her position: it might sit under the intelligence group, but it does not have to.

8. What these documents still do not contain

• No ASF order of battle, unit list, personnel strength or budget.
• No ASF leadership names. (Open sources name a commander and a personnel figure, but both trace to citations not examined here — do not use them.)
• No Chinese-language terminology for the ASF’s missions. The only Chinese on the slides is the Joint Operations Outline passage and the figure captions from the laser-dazzler paper.
• No detail on Base 37 beyond its role as the merge point for space and missile early-warning sensors — the supporting detail above comes from outside the documents.
• No confirmation of ASF representation in a theater joint operations command center.