Room 286 in the McNeil Building could just as well have been a West Point lecture hall last night.
More than 30 people came to listen to former Air Force officer Ken Allen talk about the structure and development of China's national military, the People's Liberation Army, and the difficulties impeding American understanding of the organization.
Allen, who served for 21 years in the U.S. Air Force and currently works as a military analyst for a nonprofit research institution that advises the federal government, spent most of the hour-long talk discussing changes in the capabilities and organizational structure of the PLA since its creation in 1927.
He described his work as a necessary counterweight to the majority of publications on the Chinese military, which he said look at the "China threat" from a purely strategic perspective. Allen encouraged students to question their sources when theorizing about international conflict.
"Very few people understand the PLA," Allen said. "How could you [without] these numbers?"
Allen's speech highlighted three major changes in China's military.
Since 1985, there have been an expansion of the boundaries of engagement and a shifting relationship with China's Communist Party, which controls the PLA. In the future, the PLA will work to become more operationally independent.
There has also been an enormous decrease in manpower to advance technical capacity.
The PLA has gone from 6 million troops in 1985 to about 2.25 million today.
To illustrate this last point, Allen talked about the PLA air force, his area of expertise, which five years ago could not fly over water or during moonless nights but can now operate under advanced enemy radar jams.
Questions for the speaker dealt mainly with the possibility of future conflicts between China and other nations, such as Taiwan and Japan, though Allen said these are unlikely scenarios.
But he added the PLA certainly is formulating "contingency plans."
College senior Jenny Suen, a Chinese citizen, said that she could appreciate Allen' investigative work. "It lessens conflict. A lot of wars are fought over miscommunication."
Despite the highly technical nature of the discussion, the audience represented a diverse set of interests, with many people from the East Asian Studies Center and Political Science Department attending.
"It was almost too much to take in," said Jennifer Lind, a Political Science research fellow, who was excited to hear from someone with "real background" in the field.
