Differences in personnel quality can have dramatic effects on military capability. This is illustrated by an experiment that was conducted at the U.S. Army's National Training Center (NTC) a few years ago. The NTC maintains a dedicated “Opposing Force” that, in simulated battles, routinely defeats the visiting units that deploy to the NTC for training, largely because of its familiarity with the terrain, scenario parameters, and so on. When a visiting commander was allowed to create a battalion entirely out of high-performing soldiers and officers, however, his unit was able to defeat the Opposing Force in every simulated battle.

Personnel quality is a function both of the innate abilities of individuals (intelligence, intuition, work ethic, etc.) and of the knowledge they acquire through experience, formal training, and so on. Studies of the U.S. military have found that personnel who are above average in innate ability (as measured by Armed Forces Qualification Test scores) perform significantly better in a variety of military tasks – such as tank and air defense simulations, making communications systems operational, and maintaining equipment – than personnel who are below average in innate ability, even when controlling for other factors such as training and experience. Training and experience are important, too, however. Multiple studies have found that experienced personnel are anywhere from 25 percent to ten times more productive than first-term personnel in a variety of different military specialties. Studies of naval pilots showed that those with the most lifetime flying hours (forty-five hundred to fifty-five hundred hours) were three times less likely to make an unsatisfactory landing attempt on an aircraft carrier, up to twice as accurate in marine bombing exercises, and only a fifth as likely to be “killed” in simulated air-to-air combat as compared to pilots with the least lifetime flying hours (five hundred hours).

Thus, quality of personnel is an important aspect of any military. Since the late 1990s, however, its importance for the PLA has steadily increased, for two main reasons. First, the modernization of the weaponry of the PLA is transforming it from a force in which the only piece of equipment many of its personnel needed to know how to operate was a rifle, into one in which growing numbers of personnel must be capable of operating and maintaining a variety of modern vehicles, weapon systems, computers, communications devices, and sensors.