Order of Battle
Armies are not one big crowd — they are boxes inside boxes, and almost every article about them assumes you already know the shape. This is the shape: who commands what in the Chinese and United States armed forces, what each formation is responsible for, what it specialises in, and how the whole structure has been redrawn since 2010.
Start here if none of this is familiar
Three ideas do most of the work, and they are the three tabs above that are not the tree:
- Size is the thing nobody tells you. A brigade is about 4,500 people — a full secondary school, staff included. A corps is a stadium. Once the numbers have a shape, every news report about "a brigade deploying" means something. That is the scale ladder.
- A unit usually has two bosses. One organisation recruits, trains, pays and equips it. A different one tells it where to go and what to do. In the United States these are formally separate chains and most people have never seen them drawn apart; China rebuilt its entire military around the same split in 2016. That is two chains.
- The chart is not fixed. In February 2016 seven Chinese military regions were dissolved and five theatre commands appeared. In April 2024 a force created only eight years earlier was broken into three. In December 2025 the US Army merged two four-star commands and moved three of its four corps to new parents. Drag the year and watch it happen — that is the reform timeline.
Posts, not people
This tool holds offices and what they are responsible for. It names no commanders, and it never will.
Partly that is because post-holders are the fastest-rotting information in this subject: China expelled nine senior officers from the Party and the armed forces in October 2025, including a serving vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. Any roster published in 2024 was wrong twice over within a year.
Mostly, though, it is because the interesting question is what an organisation does, and that survives its occupants.
How confident we are, entry by entry
Every entry carries a confidence mark, and it describes how strongly open sources support it — not how important the unit is.
Where sources genuinely disagree — the headquarters of the Southern Theater Command, the number of Rocket Force combat bases, whether a Chinese group army is the size of an American corps or an American division — both positions are published side by side and neither is quietly chosen.
What is deliberately not here
This is a reference work about organisation. It documents what formations are responsible for and who they report to.
It carries no readiness or capability assessment, no vulnerability or gap analysis, no weapon-to-target reasoning, and nothing about private individuals. Unit locations stop at the headquarters city. Equipment appears as classes only — never counts, never serial numbers.
Where the facts come from
The backbone is public-domain United States government work: the Department of Defense annual report on Chinese military developments, the China Aerospace Studies Institute at Air University, and Congressional Research Service primers. Chinese structure, names and characters come from the PRC Ministry of National Defense and China's defence white papers.
Every entry cites its source and carries the date that source was published. No prose is taken from anywhere — the facts are free, the sentences are ours.
Every entry lists its own sources, with dates and links — open any unit and scroll to the bottom of its dossier. See these places on the map →