In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career.

Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and WarTalk's Tony Stark, Justin McIntosh, and Bryan Clark.

We discuss…

• Why 2027 is not a go date — the three "strategic capabilities" the PLA pulled forward from its 2035 goals, and why a capability milestone says nothing about intent
• What the Iran war taught Beijing — day-one decapitation and the heaviest firepower campaign in decades still didn't deliver the political outcome, and PLA journals noticed
• The purges are what they look like — Occam's razor on PLA corruption, "fake combat capabilities," and why joint fires fail when artillery support runs on connections
• The nuclear shield — early-warning counterstrike, low-yield options, and why a thousand more US warheads would buy less deterrence than a thousand more boats
• Beijing's Japan fixation — the Chinese nuclear strategy text with a chapter on every nuclear state, plus Japan
• Inside vs. outside — what you can know about the PLA without a clearance, the mirror-imaging trap, and the pitch to undergrads who read Chinese

Plus: the PLA's corruption tip line, Polymarket odds on the next purge, and where an escaped POW should beg for food.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices