PLA Strategic Support Force

The PLA Strategic Support Force (SSF) (战略支援部队) was created on 31 December 2015 as part of Xi Jinping's sweeping reorganization of the People's Liberation Army. It brought together capabilities previously scattered across the General Staff Department and other organs, with the goal of integrating space, cyberspace, electronic warfare, and information operations into a single force designed to support joint operations across the other PLA services.

The SSF was generally understood to comprise two principal components:

• A Space Systems Department, responsible for satellite launch, tracking, telemetry, reconnaissance, navigation, and counterspace operations.
• A Network Systems Department (sometimes called the Cyber Corps), which absorbed signals intelligence, cyber espionage, cyberattack, and electronic warfare missions, including units historically associated with the former 3PLA such as Unit 61398, which was indicted by the US Department of Justice in 2014.

The SSF was widely analyzed by Western researchers — including at the US National Defense University, RAND, and CSIS — as the PLA's institutional answer to fighting and winning "informatized" and "intelligentized" wars, concepts central to Chinese military doctrine.

On 19 April 2024, the SSF was dissolved and replaced by three new arms reporting directly to the Central Military Commission: the Aerospace Force (军事航天部队), the Cyberspace Force (网络空间部队), and the Information Support Force (信息支援部队). Xi Jinping personally presented the flags at the inauguration ceremony in Beijing. The restructuring was interpreted as elevating these domains' status and giving the CMC more direct operational control, rather than mediating through an intermediate force headquarters.

For researchers, the SSF remains a key reference point for understanding how China organizes cyber and space power, and much open-source literature on Chinese cyber operations from 2016–2024 is framed around its structure.