It’s September, which means beginning the ritual of back-to-school season. That ritual doesn’t just apply to kids with backpacks—military cadets across the world are heading back into classrooms too. In China, cyber-track cadets are heading into classrooms that don’t look quite like last year’s. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has recently reshuffled its military cyber education system and that shake-up is going to shape the future of China’s information warfare forces. So let’s take a closer look at what that system looks like and why it matters.
Over the past six months, Beijing has overhauled its military cyber education system in step with broader reforms to the force itself. The PLA’s cyber forces, which were once grouped together under the Strategic Support Force (SSF), have now been split into three components: the Information Support Force (ISF), the Cyberspace Force (CSF), and the Aerospace Force (ASF). The education system has followed suit, with new campuses and specialized programs aligned to each of the successor organizations.
These changes are less about swapping names on an org chart and more about sharpening roles. The SSF’s “all-in-one” approach to generating cyber power has given way to a structure built around specialization, with responsibilities divided across distinct schools. The result is an education pipeline that mirrors the PLA’s operational priorities and signals how it imagines future wars.
This blog offers a quick overview of the recent reforms to China’s military cyber education system and will lay out how those structural changes work in practice. By looking at how campuses are organized, we can see where the PLA’s cyber force is headed (and by extension the kind of force U.S. and allied defenders may face in future conflicts).
Background: The Life and Times of the Artist Formerly Known as the SSF
Until recently, the PLA’s information warfare education system revolved almost entirely around the SSF Information Engineering University (战略支援部队信息工程大学). For approximately the past decade, IEU served as the PLA’s central hub for cyber talent, channeling graduates into the Strategic Support Force which oversaw space, cyber, and electronic warfare. However, in 2024 the SSF was dissolved and split into three branches under the Central Military Commission. Once the force was dismantled, the schools that sustained it had to be reshaped as well.
Ch-ch-ch-changes (to China’s Military Education System)
Following the reorganization of the Strategic Support Force, the military education system was restructured to align with the new force structure. IEU itself stayed largely intact in terms of size, but parts of its portfolio were peeled away. Specifically, foreign language training moved to the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT, 中国人民解放军国防科技大学), and battlefield information assurance shifted to the new Information Support Force Engineering University. That left the IEU’s Zhengzhou campus to focus on what it has always done best: cryptography, network security, and math-heavy research.
A more dramatic shift happened in Wuhan, where the Central Military Commission created an entirely new institution for the freshly minted Information Support Force, dubbed the Information Support Force Engineering University (ISFEU, 信息支援部队工程大学). ISFEU was stitched together from parts of NUDT and the Army Engineering University (陆军工程大学), with the stated mission of training new generations of “new information warfare talent.” Splitting IEU and ISFEU into separate campuses served to codify a notional division of labor among the PLA’s information warfare forces. The bulk of the PLA’s network warriors would be trained in Zhengzhou and would commission into the CSF, while their counterparts tasked with providing information assurance in meatspace would be trained in Wuhan and go on to serve in the ISF.
So You Wanna Be a Cyber Plebe: Looking at China’s Military Cyber Education Recruitment in Action.
With the bureaucratic stage set, we can finally get into the weeds of how these reforms are reshaping the PLA’s military cyber recruitment. China’s military education system has always been highly specialized. Each branch and supporting force of the PLA maintain their own dedicated academies, training officers in branch-specific doctrine. Schools like IEU and ISFEU are cast in this same specialized mold: a flagship cyber school designed to support a specific mission set (cyber warfare and battlefield information assurance, respectively). This differs from the more centralized U.S. model wherein schools like West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy serve as broad, cross-disciplinary pipelines.
When founding a new premier cyber university, you require a few crucial things such as students and advertising. And advertising, by definition, is public—this means we OSINT-watchers get to peek over the PLA’s shoulder as ISFEU builds its very first freshman class.
Recruitment turned out to be one of the trickier parts of the rollout, and the PLA’s solution was… unconventional. Instead of a form letter or an acceptance packet, applicants to ISFEU sometimes found a group of officers at their doorstep—bearing flowers, cameras, and occasionally even a marching band.
The pomp and circumstance was reported to have extended to these recruits' campus experience as well. According to the Chinese media, school started on August 20th;recruits were welcomed with robotic presentations on party history, drone shows, robot battles, a robot dog, and the ubiquitous military academy haircut. Definitely a different experience than cadets’ first day at West Point or any of the other U.S. military academies.
The flowers and photo ops may just be a gimmick, but the choice of gesture matters. Institutions such as IEU and ISFEU are competing against private-sector opportunities that offer better pay, better hours, and better prospects outside the military. So, instead of competing with promises of pay or dorm room perks, they compete on symbolism by laying it on thick with ceremony to keep new recruits feeling special.
Mapping the Physical Geography of the PLA’s Information Warfare University System
Now that the PLA has recruited a fresh class of cyber cadets, the question is: how will they be trained within the newly reorganized military cyber education system? We know there’s a notional division of labor in PLA campuses but how has this bureaucratic mitosis actually been managed in practice? Assigning one campus to the ISF and another to the CSF sounds straightforward, but in practice it’s a complex process of moving staff, reallocating facilities, and building new student cohorts. Tracking this process is difficult because key details (such as faculty assignments or new curricula) remain murky due to a lack of available open source information.
However, a data point that we can see clearly are campus buildings. Unlike students and personnel, campus facilities aren’t interchangeable; they house specialized labs and training centers vital for cyber education. Tracking how those facilities were divided between CSFEU and ISFEU provides one of the best data points we have on how the reforms to China’s military cyber education system are being implemented.
The Old: IEU’s Campus in Zhengzhou
The simplest way to track this campus shuffle is to start with the familiar: IEU’s long-standing campus. IEU has operated since 1999 and still maintains its old name and location. Accordingly, geolocating it was quite straightforward and a simple Baidu Maps search listed the old IEU location.
We also looked through Douyin (China’s domestic TikTok equivalent) and found a surprisingly rich set of posts showing day-to-day life at IEU and the functions of individual buildings. This information set allowed us to build out the map below, which displays the majority of IEU’s campus buildings aside from a few buildings (like the planetarium, swimming pool, shooting range, and foodcourt) that could not be located since only interior campus footage was available.
The New: Mapping ISFEU’s Campuses in Wuhan and Chongqing
The next challenge was mapping the newly established ISFEU campus. Our initial sources confirmed the institution’s creation but offered few details on its physical location. However, they did use language implying that the new ISFEU school was located on campuses previously run by NUDT and the NCO Communications School of the Army Engineering University. Following that trail, we found a Baidu post with a couple of images of both these schools accompanied with the following text:
1. Main Campus of the Information Support Force Engineering University (formerly the Information and Communications College of the National University of Defense Technology), located in Wuhan, Hubei Province, mainly responsible for teaching and scientific research;
2. Chongqing Campus of the Information Support Force Engineering University (formerly the Communications NCO School of the Army Engineering University of the People's Liberation Army), located in Chongqing, mainly responsible for teaching and training in related disciplines;
With that context, we moved on to the geolocation stage. Based on the available sourcing, we knew we were on the lookout for two campus locations: a main one in Wuhan and a satellite campus in Chongqing.
Finding the Wuhan location proved to be fairly straightforward, thanks to distinctive features such as its large size, a space-age-looking main building, and a library to the west. We found a source with some campus photos including one with a distinctive blue bridge in the background alongside both the main building overlooking the track complex and the library. This background allowed us to determine the following geolocation:
However, unlike the IEU campus, public information about ISFEU’s facilities was limited. This lack of information is likely due to the fact that ISFEU is a very young institution with a distinct educational purview from the NUDT campus it absorbed, making it difficult to determine how its specific facilities are used. This stands in stark contrast to IEU, which survived the May 2025 bureaucratic game of musical chairs largely intact, leaving behind years of archived footage to work with.
Finding the Chongqing campus took a bit more effort, since the source photo is taken at eye level with a blurred background and some visual effects posted overtop it. However, we were eventually able to geolocate it in the the Shapingba (沙坪坝) District of Chongqing, nestled between the hills. We located it by referencing the garden pattern seen directly behind the gate known to be in Chongqing against this 2020 satellite image from Chongqing where that same pattern is clearly visible.
To identify this facility we had to use 2020 satellite imagery, as by 2022 (the most recent available Google Earth imagery), the garden had been replaced by a flag emplacement. Nevertheless, the picture quality of the 2022 imagery was much clearer so we included that here as well. Notably, this campus is significantly smaller than the campus in Wuhan, which lends credence to our assessment that it mainly serves as a satellite campus.
Our geolocation work leaves us with partial answers and plenty of open questions. Pinning down ISFEU’s campus is a start, but it’s still unclear whether its facilities are being reshaped for the Information Support Force or simply continuing their old NUDT roles under new management. The university also claims seven national military labs, but their locations remain unverified. Even so, the exercise provides a baseline for tracking how these institutions expand and adapt over time.
Conclusion and Next Steps
So where does this leave us? Geolocating campuses may seem like a minor detail in the grand scheme of tracking PLA force evolution, but it matters nevertheless because form follows function. The construction of new, specialized facilities signals how the PLA intends to train its next generation of information warfare officers. Watching these changes over time provides a barometer for the future direction of China’s military cyber education system (and, by extension, its information warfare forces).
With that in mind, there are a few key areas to watch for in the future, listed roughly in descending order of ease. The first of these is to monitor new buildings or expansions at Zhengzhou and Wuhan, as the types of infrastructure each campus invests in (such as labs, dorms, and training complexes) will signal growth and shifting mission priorities. Next, keep an eye on curriculum and training outputs, with IEU focusing on cyber, cryptography, and network security, while ISFEU develops programs in information assurance and communications, revealing the types of operators the PLA aims to produce. Finally, track the activity of affiliated research labs, as the projects they undertake offer some of the best clues about the future direction of the PLA’s information warfare capabilities. In short, the campuses are the tell. By observing how IEU and ISFEU build, teach, and conduct research, we gain one of the clearest insights into where the PLA sees the future of cyber conflict heading.
