US vs China: two armies, two theories of the body

In the same week that China’s People’s Liberation Army quietly continued its annual mass immunization drills, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that American service members would no longer be required to receive the flu vaccine — a break from a practice in place almost continuously since 1945.

On the surface, this looks like a narrow administrative tweak. Read against the Chinese approach, it is something larger: a philosophical split over where the individual soldier ends and the collective instrument of national power begins.

The new US policy, signed April 21, makes the seasonal flu shot voluntary for all active and reserve personnel and Defense Department civilians, while retaining mandates for measles, mumps, polio and other diseases. The stated rationale is “medical autonomy” and religious freedom.

The PLA, by contrast, treats routine immunization as an unremarkable extension of force-health protection — closer in logic to physical fitness testing than to personal medical decision-making.

This is not simply a contrast between a democracy and an authoritarian state. Western militaries from Singapore to Israel to the United Kingdom maintain non-negotiable vaccine schedules without being described as illiberal.

What the new American posture introduces is something genuinely novel in great-power defense policy: the idea that a soldier’s immune system is, by default, private property.

Strip away the politics, and militaries must answer one practical question: can a respiratory virus that thrives in shared berths, barracks and ships be managed one personal preference at a time?

The historical ledger is unforgiving. Roughly 45,000 US soldiers died of influenza in World War I, and for most of American military history, disease has killed more service members than combat.

Flu hospitalization among recruits, who live in the densest quarters, runs about ten times the rate of the broader force. On a submarine or a forward operating base, an outbreak is not a personal inconvenience. It is a mission-capability problem.

China’s planners, working with a force increasingly oriented toward expeditionary operations and long-duration naval deployments, appear to have internalized this arithmetic without ambivalence.

The US, which helped write the modern playbook on force-health protection, is now running a real-time experiment in whether voluntary uptake can replicate mandate-level coverage.

Public-health researchers warn that mandates are the most reliable lever for reaching herd-immunity thresholds in closed populations. If American uptake drops meaningfully, the PLA will enjoy a small but non-trivial readiness advantage during peak respiratory seasons — without firing a shot or issuing a statement.

The less obvious cost is cultural. When senior Pentagon leadership characterizes a decades-old preventive measure as “overly broad and not rational,” it teaches the force that readiness medicine is negotiable and ideologically coded.

That signal will not stay confined to influenza. Commanders planning for anthrax threats, pandemic variants or engineered biological agents now face a subtly different environment, in which troops may reasonably ask why this shot is mandatory when last year’s was not. Adversaries who invest in biological deterrence read such signals carefully.

The PLA faces the mirror problem. Its rigid compliance culture buys coverage but forfeits the legitimacy dividend that comes from persuasion. Soldiers who vaccinate because they understand the reasoning are more resilient partners in a long campaign than soldiers who comply because refusal is impossible.

A force that cannot distinguish between consent and obedience will struggle when it must improvise under stress, particularly in joint operations with allies who expect informed participation. Neither model is obviously optimal — and this is where Asian and Western defense establishments might usefully learn from each other rather than caricature each other.

A mission-indexed vaccine doctrine would ask of each requirement a single question: does this immunization materially protect deployability and reduce preventable operational disruption? Where the answer is yes, the policy should be defended as readiness policy rather than culture-war policy.

Under such a doctrine, influenza vaccination would be required where the operational case is strongest — recruit training, ships, submarines, aviation units, medical settings, rapid-deployment forces and overseas missions.

It could be strongly encouraged, but not universally compelled, in lower-risk settings. Exemptions would remain available, but tied to mission risk, not ideological identity.

Such an approach would preserve the PLA’s operational discipline while borrowing the Western instinct that legitimacy is itself a combat multiplier. It would also free the US debate from the binary choice between maximalist mandates and consumer-style opt-outs.

A flu shot is a trivial medical event. The policy around it is not. It encodes how a state understands the relationship between the individual and the mission, between conscience and cohesion, between freedom and force.

China and the United States are now running parallel experiments in that relationship. The results will show up not in press releases but in sick-call rosters, delayed deployments and the quiet metrics of readiness.

Biology, as military planners have relearned in every generation since 1918, does not become less operational because policy calls it personal. Whichever military remembers that most clearly — and translates it into a doctrine its troops actually believe in — will hold an edge that no procurement budget can buy.

Y Tony Yang is an endowed professor at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.