A recently translated Chinese military journal article shows that senior People's Liberation Army Navy officers view small, mobile U.S. Marine teams scattered across Pacific islands as a serious problem, and they want Beijing to respond with offensive countermeasures.

Three senior captains in China's military published their assessment in the Chinese journal Military Art in 2023, warning that the U.S. Marine Corps' Stand-In Forces concept threatens China's ability to operate freely in its own near seas. The U.S. Navy's China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College recently translated the article into English, giving American analysts and policymakers a rare window into how Beijing's officer corps thinks about the Marines' evolving Pacific posture. Marine Corps Times reported on the translation and its implications.

The bottom line from the Chinese officers, Senior Captains Yue Zhiqiang, Wang Li, and Li Jinqia, is blunt. They believe the Marines' small, forward-deployed units will erode China's advantages in sea denial, complicate efforts to break through island-chain blockades, and drain Chinese combat resources faster than Beijing can afford.

Beijing's officers see Marines on Pacific islands as a direct challenge to Chinese naval freedom

The Stand-In Forces concept sits at the center of Force Design 2030, the Marine Corps' restructuring plan first released in 2020. The idea is straightforward: instead of massing large amphibious formations, the Marines would deploy small, stealthy teams to Pacific islands. Those teams would carry sensors and anti-ship missiles, giving them the ability to track and threaten Chinese naval movements while feeding targeting data back to the broader U.S. fleet and air assets.

From Washington's perspective, the concept turns geography into an advantage. The island chains running from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines, and beyond become a lattice of surveillance and strike positions, hard to find, hard to hit, and cheap to maintain compared to a carrier strike group.

From Beijing's perspective, the picture is far less comfortable. The three Chinese authors described U.S. Marine Stand-In Forces as "key assets for deterrence and containment along China's frontiers" that "maintain a persistent forward presence in China's near seas." That language frames the Marines not as a distant contingency but as a standing challenge to Chinese operations in waters Beijing considers its own backyard.

The authors did not hold back about the stakes. In a passage from the translated article, they wrote:

"The USMC's continuous refinement of the SIF concept and optimization of deployment and operational employment will erode our land-enabled advantages in sea denial, make it more difficult for us to breach island chain blockades, induce rapid depletion of our combat resources, and complicate our operating environment."

They added a call for urgency:

"This escalates the real-world threats facing us and we must maintain strategic resolve and respond proactively and effectively."

That kind of candor from serving officers in a professional military journal is worth paying attention to. It suggests the concern runs deeper than academic debate, it reflects operational anxiety within the PLA Navy's planning circles.

Drones, submarines, and ambush: what worries Beijing most

A significant portion of the Chinese article focused on the undersea dimension. The authors warned that during a crisis or armed conflict, Marine Stand-In Forces could deploy large unmanned underwater vehicles or coordinate with submarines to launch smaller UUVs near Chinese shipping lanes.

"They can covertly ambush or conduct suicide attacks against our undersea forces and large vessels."

That concern tracks with the broader direction of U.S. military investment in unmanned systems. Small drone submarines loitering near chokepoints could threaten Chinese submarines trying to leave port or transit key waterways, a scenario that would constrain Beijing's ability to project power beyond its immediate coastline. The Marine Corps' growing emphasis on U.S. military readiness and forward-deployed capabilities only sharpens that concern.

Lyle Goldstein, director of the China Initiative at Brown University's Watson School and director of the Asia Program at the think tank Defense Priorities, said the article reflects deep worry about how American strategy could use drones and small combat units to disrupt China's military.

"The article is suffused with major concerns about how U.S. strategy might use drones especially, but also small combat units to try to unhinge China's military."

Goldstein pointed to the submarine dimension as a recurring theme. He noted that the Chinese authors placed "a very high premium on China's ability to wield UUVs, along with the related undersea acoustic detection arrays off of Chinese ports and key waterways." In other words, Beijing's officers are worried not just about American drones but about whether their own countermeasures, underwater sensor networks and Chinese-built unmanned subs, can keep pace.

PLA officers recommend an offensive posture, not a defensive crouch

The most consequential section of the translated article lays out what the Chinese authors believe Beijing should do about the problem. Their answer is not to hunker down. It is to push forward.

"To effectively counter the USMC SIF, we should adopt a proactive offensive posture, aggressively expand our operational reach, project forces forward, and apply countermeasures at the source."

The specifics are concrete. The authors recommended extending undersea combat capabilities "as far forward as feasible" and developing "undersea pre-positioned weapons systems", essentially hidden arsenals planted on the ocean floor in advance of a conflict. They also called for expanding surveillance through radar, satellites, underwater sensors, and patrol aircraft, and for better integrating military, paramilitary, and civilian ships to fix what they described as "fragmented, redundant, and inefficient coastal surveillance efforts."

On the technology front, the authors urged China to develop cheap drones of its own, along with anti-drone lasers and microwave weapons to counter American unmanned platforms. They also recommended targeting the command-and-control networks that coordinate Marine Stand-In Forces, using cyber and electromagnetic warfare capabilities.

"We must leverage our late-mover advantage in cyber and electromagnetic domain technologies to develop offensive capabilities which can effectively paralyze U.S. maritime command and control networks."

One line from the article stands out for its tactical pragmatism. The authors cautioned against mismatching resources:

"We absolutely must avoid engaging small capabilities with large capabilities, or resource-intensive assets against lightweight assets."

That warning reflects a core challenge for Beijing. The Marine Stand-In Forces concept is designed to be cheap and dispersed. If China responds by throwing expensive missiles and warships at small teams on remote islands, it plays into the American strategy of forcing Beijing to burn through high-cost munitions against low-cost targets. The Chinese authors recognized that trap and urged a more asymmetric response, deception, electronic warfare, and information overload.

"We can conduct maritime deception to overwhelm U.S. SIFs with massive information overload to paralyze and neutralize their capabilities, effectively supplementing our own reconnaissance and surveillance assets."

Why this translation matters now

Professional military journals are not policy directives. An article in Military Art does not mean Beijing has adopted every recommendation the three senior captains laid out. But these publications serve as a forum where serving officers float ideas, test arguments, and signal institutional concerns. The fact that three senior captains devoted a full article to the Marine Stand-In Forces concept, and that the U.S. Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute thought it worth translating, suggests both sides view this as a live and consequential issue.

The Marine Corps has faced its own domestic critics. Some traditionalists have argued that small Marine detachments on Pacific islands would be unsupplied, unsupported, and vulnerable, essentially stranded if a shooting conflict breaks out. Those concerns have not gone away, and the Corps' broader operational tempo has raised questions about readiness. The recent cancellation of a major joint amphibious drill with South Korea due to deployment strain from the Iran conflict illustrates the pressure the Marines are already under.

But the Chinese article, read in full, suggests that whatever American skeptics think of the Stand-In Forces concept, Beijing's naval planners take it seriously. They see it as a genuine threat to their operational freedom, one that could bottle up Chinese submarines, drain Chinese resources, and complicate any attempt to project power beyond the first island chain.

Goldstein framed it in terms of what the article reveals about the broader undersea competition:

"A major theme of the article is the undersea contest and how the USMC strategy could impact China's egress of submarines."

Submarine egress, the ability to get attack and ballistic missile submarines out of home waters and into the open Pacific, is one of the most sensitive operational questions for any naval power. If Marine units on Pacific islands can track, harass, or threaten Chinese submarines as they transit narrow straits and shallow waters, the strategic calculus shifts significantly. The demanding nature of Marine training operations in coastal and maritime environments underscores how seriously the Corps takes this mission set.

The translated article also hints at a broader information challenge for Beijing. The authors acknowledged that China's coastal surveillance is fragmented and inefficient, a striking admission in a military journal. If China cannot reliably track small Marine teams moving between islands, the Stand-In Forces concept becomes even harder to counter. The recommendation to integrate military, paramilitary, and civilian vessels into a unified surveillance network suggests the PLA Navy knows it has gaps to fill.

Force Design 2030 drew skeptics at home but alarm in Beijing

Force Design 2030 was a deliberate bet by Marine Corps leadership that the next major conflict would look nothing like the counterinsurgency campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. The plan traded tanks, heavy artillery, and large infantry formations for missiles, sensors, drones, and small teams designed to operate inside an adversary's weapons range, hence the name "Stand-In Forces." The valor and sacrifice of Marines in recent conflicts remains central to the Corps' identity, but the institutional direction has shifted toward a lighter, more distributed force.

That shift created fierce internal debate. Critics argued the Marines were abandoning proven capabilities for an untested concept tailored to a single adversary. Supporters countered that the old model, large, slow amphibious assaults, would not survive in a contested environment saturated with Chinese missiles and surveillance.

The Chinese journal article suggests the supporters had a point. If the concept were not credible, Beijing's officers would not have devoted a detailed assessment to it, complete with recommended countermeasures spanning undersea warfare, electronic attack, drone development, and surveillance reform. The very specificity of the Chinese response, avoid mismatching expensive assets against cheap targets, develop pre-positioned undersea weapons, flood Marine units with deceptive information, indicates the PLA Navy views Stand-In Forces as a problem it has not yet solved.

None of this means the concept is without risk. Small teams on remote islands still need resupply, communications, and extraction plans. The Chinese authors' recommendation to target command-and-control networks with cyber and electromagnetic attacks points directly at the vulnerability that American critics have also identified: cut the links, and the Stand-In Forces become isolated scouts with no way to call in the cavalry.

But risk and irrelevance are different things. The translated article makes clear that China's naval officers do not consider the Marine Stand-In Forces concept irrelevant. They consider it dangerous.

When your adversary's own officers create in professional journals that your strategy threatens their operational freedom and demands an urgent, offensive response, that is not a guarantee of success, but it is a strong signal you are on the right track.