- Service ensign · official · carried by People's Liberation Army
- State affiliation · China
- Vigil category device · not official insignia
Identity provenance
Service ensign: Flag of the People’s Liberation Army — carried by People's Liberation Army, not issued to this record. Drawn by Vigil in IconSprite.astro from the flag’s official construction; no file is fetched and no artwork is copied. The PLA flag was adopted on 15 June 1949 — a red field with a gold five-pointed star and the characters for eight and one in the upper hoist.
State affiliation: China.
The smaller square mark is a Vigil category device, drawn from this record’s own domain, echelon and role — not an official insignia.
In brief
The PLA's cyber arm, constituted in April 2024 from the Strategic Support Force's network organisation — its existence is documented and almost nothing else about it is.
- Scope
- Structure, role, lineage and links. No subordinate records published.
- Subordination
- Subordination confirmed
- Sources
- 4 on the record
- Record state
- Partial
- Broad area of activity
- Not territorial. The branch has no theatre; its relevance to this module is the class of activity Taiwan's connectivity and civil-resilience records prepare for, and nothing here attributes any incident to it.
- Notable history
- On 19 April 2024 the Central Military Commission dissolved the Strategic Support Force, created in the 2015 reforms to hold space, cyber and electronic capabilities together, and replaced it with three arms — the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force and the Information Support Force — each directly under the Commission beside the Joint Logistics Support Force. The Cyberspace Force inherited the Network Systems Department's remit: network defence, network operations and, in the public descriptions, the "information domain". The PRC's own announcement described the reorganisation as strengthening the capacity to win modern war; the United States Department of Defense's annual report treats the branch as the successor to the network-warfare mission. That is the extent of what is documented. Taiwan's records of cable damage, network throttling exercises and information pressure describe a threat environment; they do not, and Vigil does not, attribute specific incidents to this organisation.
- Strengths
- A branch-level home for network operations directly under the Commission, outside the theatre structure — which is itself the finding, since it places the capability beside the Rocket Force rather than under the Eastern Theater.
- Limitations
- Nothing about its structure, strength, doctrine or activity is public; the record is graded low and the profile exists to say what is not known as precisely as what is.
Related organisations
- PLA Information Support Force Institutionally linked to · as of 2026-09 · moderate confidence
Created in the same April 2024 reorganisation from the same predecessor; the two are the network and information halves of what the Strategic Support Force had held together.
Lineage & institutional history
Predecessors: PLA Strategic Support Force
Quick actions
System access
Where this record connects into the rest of Vigil. Each row is here because this organisation actually reaches it.
Assessed as of — 2026-09 Last reviewed — 2026-09-14
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