US experience fighting Iran offers lessons for China, experts say

By Brad Lendon, Sylvie Zhuang, Wayne Chang, CNN

(CNN) — As the war in Iran enters its third month, it’s providing a window for China into how US military capabilities work under fire, and a useful reminder that, on any battlefield, the adversary always has a big say in the outcome.

CNN spoke with a range of experts in China, Taiwan and elsewhere about how the last two months of fighting in and around the Persian Gulf can inform what might happen in any possible conflict that would pit Beijing against Washington.

They warned of China misreading its own strengths, lack of experience and holding on to a too-narrow view of the conflict and its consequences.

Fu Qianshao, a former colonel in China’s air force, said his major takeaway from the fighting so far is that the People’s Liberation Army can’t forget about its defenses, noting how Iran has found ways around US anti-missile systems like the Patriot or Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).

“We need to devote significant efforts to identify weakness in our defensive side to ensure we remain invincible in future wars,” Fu told CNN.

The PLA has rapidly expanded offensive firepower capacity in recent years, adding missiles with hypersonic glide vehicles that can evade interceptors and the platforms that can launch them.

The PLA Air Force is adding fifth-generation stealth fighters at a rapid rate and will field around 1,000 J-20 jets – the rough equivalent of US F-35s – when performing in a long-range precision strike mode, according to the British think tank RUSI.

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

But its defenses are another matter.

Analysts note Iran was able to penetrate US air defenses in the Persian Gulf with relatively primitive technology, including low-cost Shahed drones and lower-cost ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile, the US unleashed an air campaign on Iran with much more sophisticated weaponry, like F-35s and B-2s, and mixed it with cheaper, less high-tech guided munitions dropped from B-1s, B-52s and F-15s. They’ve knocked out everything from missile launchers to naval vessels to bridges.

It’s a mix that Beijing must plan for, Fu said.

“We have to delve deeper to effectively guard our key sites, airfields and ports against attacks and raids,” he said.

Across the Taiwan Strait

When it comes to a possible US-China conflict, Taiwan is often viewed as a potential flashpoint.

China’s ruling Communist Party has vowed to “reunify” with the self-governing democracy, despite having never controlled Taiwan. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has not ruled out using military force to do so.

In Taiwan, analysts recognize that China has assembled a military that can match both the US in high-tech precision weaponry and Iran in low-cost, high-volume drone warfare.

“Long-range rockets and drone swarms will definitely play a key role in China’s joint military operations against Taiwan,” Chieh Chung, an associate research fellow at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told CNN.

But would that key role be enough to win a war across the Taiwan Strait?

China is the world’s leading drone manufacturer, and the numbers of unmanned weapons systems its manufacturers can produce is staggering, according to analysts.

“Chinese civilian manufacturers have the capacity to retool in under a year to turn out one billion weaponized drones annually,” a 2025 report on China’s drone program in the analytical platform War on the Rocks states.

Some warn that Taiwan isn’t ready to face those kinds of numbers.

A recent report by a government watchdog said the Taiwanese military’s current drone countermeasures are “ineffective” and pose a “major security risk” to critical infrastructure and military bases.

To be fair, Taiwan is not standing still, and it is taking steps to improve those countermeasures.

Gene Su, the managing director of Taiwan’s flagship drone manufacturer Thunder Tiger, called for more investment in Taiwan’s capability to mass-produce drones. “We need to produce continuously, day and night, to counter our enemies,” he said.

The US is learning, too, and there is recognition that in a conflict in the Pacific, it may find itself as the defender, not the attacker.

Drones make warfare much more costly for the offensive side, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Paparo, told a US Senate hearing in April.

If there were a fight over Taiwan, the island or the US could use drones to target Chinese ships or aircraft carrying possibly hundreds of thousands of PLA troops across the Taiwan Strait for an assault and occupation.

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

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

The enemy has a say

That’s the thing for all militaries taking lessons from the Iran war: Your enemy is learning, too. And it may apply those lessons in ways you don’t expect.

More than two months into the Iran war, many analysts are still scratching their heads that wartime leaders in Washington did not plan for an Iranian shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz.

Others wonder how the Iranian government is still functioning with the military beatdown it has taken, but they see clear lessons for Beijing.

“Tactical wins don’t equal political outcomes,” Craig Singleton, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told CNN.

“Military pressure … has not translated cleanly into a durable political settlement.

“For China that reinforces a core lesson: battlefield success doesn’t automatically produce the end state you want.”

Then there’s something the Chinese military just doesn’t have: combat experience. The PLA hasn’t faced angry fire since a war with Vietnam in February 1979. Since then, US forces have had extensive campaigns in Iraq twice and in Afghanistan and quicker combat actions in places like Kosovo and Panama, to name a few.

“This is (what) real warfare looks like,” Chinese military analyst Song Zongping said of the Iran conflict.

If China were to engage in a conflict with the US in the next decade, Washington would retain a large amount of personnel who faced combat in the current Persian Gulf conflict or in planning the campaign.

They’ve lost comrades, lost assets, achieved overwhelming victories and executed precision warfare at a high level.

And they’ve adjusted – for example, pivoting from punishing airstrikes to a blockade of Iranian ports, or moving to harden aircraft shelters when key pieces of equipment like an AWACS radar plane were lost.

How quickly a PLA under fire could adjust to a similarly changing battlefield remains to be seen, analysts said.

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

China had better fighter jets, in Soviet-made MiG-15s. But US pilots, though flying the inferior F-86s, did better because many brought World War II experience to the air war.

The lesson was “an excellent pilot in a mediocre airplane will always beat a mediocre pilot in an excellent airplane,” Thompson said.

Another lesson to be learned from Iran is that wars at this level, involving a great power and a lower-tier one, can’t always be tidy operations that end when a president is snatched by special forces in the middle of the night. (See Venezuela.)

“Iran’s ability to leverage (a) chokepoint and ingest risk into global supply chains shows how quickly a localized conflict can become internationalized,” said the FDD’s Singleton.

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

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