China’s Deceptively Weak (and Dangerous) Military
In many ways, the PLA is weaker than it looks – and more dangerous.
In April 2003, the Chinese Navy decided to put a large group of its best submarine talent on the same boat as part of an experiment to synergize its naval elite. The result? Within hours of leaving port, the Type 035 Ming III class submarine sank with all hands lost. Never having fully recovered from this maritime disaster, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council
never to have conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine.
oh wow, 23 likes, somebody really wish these were true lol. And some people wonder why we bring up India, why do you think.
Now let's talk article, since no one here has talked about it yet, I mean pre-page 4 didn't read past it.
First, the Ming class did sink, reason is China tried to push the submarine past its limit and it turns out the type 35 is utter crap and lost the crew. The wanted it to go far beyond the limit for depth.
Just to let you know, since that time, that target has been broken by new models easily.
China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five” never to have built and operated an aircraft carrier. While it launched a refurbished Ukrainian built carrier amidst much fanfare in September 2012 – then-President Hu Jintao and
all the top brass showed up –
soon afterward the big ship had to return to the docks for extensive overhauls because of suspected engine failure; not the most auspicious of starts for China’s fledgling “blue water” navy, and not the least example of a modernizing military that has yet to master last century’s technology.
Chinese admiral wanted a carrier in the 80s, but Chinese leaders clearly said, military must take a back role to economic progress, people's livelihood is the most important thing. Result? 30 years later we are where we are economically because of those policies. Tell me it was wrong.
There was no boiler problem, all carriers need massive time on the dock, you should know that seeing as India has carriers. BTW, French, Brits and Russia are not exactly problem free from carrier problems, nor even the Americans.
So yes, we do have problem mastering last century tech, but we got it done far quicker than anybody else, because we are a major manufacturing and RD economy, even India's new carrier uses American.
Indeed, today the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) still conducts
long-distance maneuver training at speeds measured by how fast the next available cargo train can transport its tanks and guns forward. And if mobilizing and moving armies around on railway tracks sounds a bit antiquated in an era of global airlift, it should – that was how it was done in the First World War.
China lacks enough transports yes, recent cross region exercises has proved the need for more transport planes, the Y-20 can carry more than 66 tons of cargo and China has plans for 300+ to truly be a strategic force. This is a problem.
Though transporting troops, even EU has problems doing that, the French almost didn't make it to Mali.
China will solve it with in the decade.
Not to be outdone by the conventional army, China’s powerful strategic rocket troops,
the Second Artillery Force, still uses cavalry units to patrol its sprawling missile bases deep within China’s vast interior. Why? Because it doesn’t have any helicopters. Equally scarce in China are modern fixed-wing military aircraft. So the Air Force continues to use a 1950s
Soviet designed airframe, the Tupolev Tu-16, as a bomber (its original intended mission), a battlefield reconnaissance aircraft, an electronic warfare aircraft, a target spotting aircraft, and an aerial refueling tanker. Likewise, the PLA uses the
Soviet designed Antonov An-12 military cargo aircraft for ELINT (electronic intelligence) missions, ASW (anti-submarine warfare) missions, geological survey missions, and airborne early warning missions. It also has an An-12 variant specially modified for transporting livestock, allowing sheep and goats access to remote seasonal pastures.
The An-12 has been greatly overhauled and redesigned as the Y-8 and Y-9, they are exported and have gotten good reviews, as the other air crafts, big airliners able to perform electronic and ASW as well as early warning will be done within 10-15 years in C919, C929, and C939 as well as Y-20. The 1, 2, 3 means hundreds of seats.
We also lack helicopters, though just for our proud Indian members, we far out number you, we got a army aviation brigade in every military region and talks are for on in every army now, that will more than double the current amount.
We got more helicopters than anyone other than Americans and Russians.
But if China’s lack of decent hardware is somewhat surprising given all the hype surrounding Beijing’s massive military modernization program, the state of “software” (military training and readiness) is truly astounding. At one military exercise in the summer of 2012, a strategic PLA unit, stressed out by the hard work of handling warheads in an underground bunker complex, actually had to take time out of a
15-day wartime simulation for movie nights and karaoke parties. In fact, by day nine of the exercise, a “cultural performance troupe” (common PLA euphemism for song-and-dance girls) had to be brought into the otherwise sealed facility to entertain the homesick soldiers.
Apparently becoming suspicious that men might not have the emotional fortitude to hack it in high-pressure situations, an experimental all-female unit was then brought in for the 2013 iteration of the war games,
held in May, for an abbreviated 72-hour trial run. Unfortunately for the PLA, the results were even worse. By the end of the second day of the exercise, the hardened tunnel facility’s psychological counseling office was overrun with patients, many reportedly too upset to eat and one even suffering with severe nausea because of the unpleasant conditions.
Our military training is benign overhauled right now, military readiness under peaceful conditions is the new slogan. This particular incident I have no idea about so I won't comment.
The tank Biathalon proved Chinese training, moving targets, hitting moving targets while moving, and more were on display, we finished 3rd, but in terms of real life combat conditions we far out rank the others, for one thing on the battle field, you can not shot the target and take a penalty lap, or stop to take a 10 second shot.
Oh and btw you know who you are.
While recent years have witnessed a
tremendous Chinese propaganda effort aimed at convincing the world that the PRC is a serious military player that is owed respect, outsiders often forget that
China does not even have a professional military. The PLA, unlike the armed forces of the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other regional heavyweights, is by definition not a professional fighting force. Rather, it is a “party army,” the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Indeed, all career officers in the PLA are members of the CCP and all units at the company level and above have political officers assigned to enforce party control. Likewise, all important decisions in the PLA are made by Communist Party committees that are dominated by political officers, not by operators. This system ensures that the interests of the party’s civilian and military leaders are merged, and for this reason new Chinese soldiers entering into the PLA swear their allegiance to the CCP, not to the PRC constitution or the people of China.
Not a professional army? The party's army? Now who's a moron, all operations are done by military officers, unlike the first crop of political commissars, this crop are actual military officers from military colleges, they are just as qualified as their military counter part.
You might not understand the political commissar's role, but they are important to the Chinese army.
The party is the country btw, the difference is only in your head and not relevant on the battlefield.
This may be one reason why China’s marines (or “naval infantry” in PLA parlance) and other amphibious warfare units train by landing on
big white sandy beaches that look nothing like the west coast of Taiwan (or for that matter anyplace else they could conceivably be sent in the East China Sea or South China Sea). It could also be why
PLA Air Force pilots still typically get less than ten hours of flight time a month (well below regional standards), and only in 2012 began to have the ability to submit their own flight plans (previously,
overbearing staff officers assigned pilots their flight plans and would not even allow them to taxi and take-off on the runways by themselves).
Chinese marines train everywhere, inner mongolia, forests, all kinds of beaches and more, this is easily proven btw, come on man.
PLA pilots fly more than 250 hours a year, easily, it's easily confirmed it's not really out in the public but it's also not a secret.
Chinese golden helmet competition is a free for all competition that wants complete freedom from pilots to engage, so unless they get to do this once a year, which makes no sense, there's that out the window. BTW, I know American pilots need permission and ROEs too and that's what china does.
Intense and realistic training is dangerous business, and the American maxim that the more you bleed during training the less you bleed during combat doesn’t translate well in a Leninist military system. Just the opposite.
China’s military is intentionally organized to bureaucratically enforce risk-averse behavior, because an army that spends too much time training is an army that is not engaging in enough political indoctrination.
Beijing’s worst nightmare is that the PLA could one day forget that its number one mission is protecting the Communist Party’s civilian leaders against all its enemies – especially when the CCP’s “enemies” are domestic student or religious groups campaigning for democratic rights, as happened in 1989 and 1999, respectively.
For that reason, the PLA has to engage in constant “
political work” at the expense of training for combat. This means that 30 to 40 percent of an officer’s career (or roughly 15 hours per 40-hour work week) is wasted studying CCP propaganda, singing patriotic songs, and conducting small group discussions on Marxist-Leninist theory. And when PLA officers do train, it is almost always a cautious affair that rarely involves risky (i.e., realistic) training scenarios.
We do do more political work, why not, that's one of the traditions, on the NK border, only party members can undertake the most dangerous roles, it's their mindset to sacrifice that makes them effective.
Last major national exercises in August resulted in 6 death. 5 of 6 red army were defeated by the blue(enemy) all were made to relook at their strategy and bring it back to their own regions. Though to not use exercises as a punishment and encourage risk taking we still promoted one of the commanders as planned to show victory doesn't matter as long as you take risks and you improve.
Live fire is pretty much standard affair now, I mean all these things are all available online, on Chinese shows, and talking to Chinese retired soldiers, it's not difficult to come to this.....
Abraham Lincoln once observed that if he had six hours to chop down a tree he would spend the first four hours sharpening his axe. Clearly the PLA is not sharpening its proverbial axe. Nor can it. Rather, it has opted to invest in a bigger axe, albeit one that is still dull. Ironically, this undermines Beijing’s own
aspirations for building a truly powerful 21st century military.
Really, every exercises is accompanied by an even longer series of meetings to discuss what to improve and what to do next, what went wrong exactly, so....This is out the window.
Yet none of this should be comforting to China’s potential military adversaries. It is precisely China’s military weakness that makes it so dangerous. Take the PLA’s lack of combat experience, for example. A few minor border scraps aside, the PLA hasn’t seen real combat since the Korean War. This appears to be a major factor leading it to act so brazenly in the East and South China Seas. Indeed, China’s navy now appears to be itching for a fight anywhere it can find one. Experienced combat veterans almost never act this way. Indeed, history shows that military commanders that have gone to war are significantly less hawkish than their inexperienced counterparts. Lacking the somber wisdom that comes from combat experience, today’s PLA is all hawk and no dove.
Has war actually happened? Why is it that country that actually war seem like they don't but us, we don't actually fire and suddenly it's so much worse.
India fired at Pakistan, with shells, but we are crazy cause we got some guys on the border.
The Chinese military is dangerous in another way as well. Recognizing that it will never be able to compete with the U.S. and its allies using traditional methods of war fighting, the PLA has turned to unconventional “asymmetric” first-strike weapons and capabilities to make up for its lack of conventional firepower, professionalism and experience. These weapons include more than
1,600 offensive ballistic and cruise missiles, whose very nature is so strategically destabilizing that the U.S. and Russia decided to outlaw them with the
INF Treaty some 25 years ago.
Never is a long time, especially considering we will soon have more resources than the Americans can hope. Ballistic missiles and Cruise missiles work, we are using it to cover for lack of conventional power, but we are fixing it, by 2030 we will match the USD in size and quantity of the US DDGs, close the gap in LPD, surpass in Frigates 4000+ and 6000+ tons, with new weapon system that has effectively the same effectiveness or better and some worse.
In concert with its strategic missile forces, China has also developed a broad array of
space weapons designed to destroy satellites used to verify arms control treaties, provide military communications, and warn of enemy attacks. China has also built the world’s largest
army of cyber warriors, and the planet’s second largest
fleet of drones, to exploit areas where the U.S. and its allies are under-defended. All of these capabilities make it more likely that China could one day be tempted to start a war, and none come with any built in escalation control.
Did we start a war? Punishment after the crime is the US way, US has crimed again and again in war, yet we are destabilizing cause we APPEAR like we are not from the stone age?
Yet while there is ample and growing evidence to suggest China could, through malice or mistake, start a devastating war in the Pacific, it is highly improbable that the PLA’s strategy could actually win a war. Take a
Taiwan invasion scenario, which is the PLA’s top operational planning priority. While much
hand-wringing has been done in recent years about the shifting military balance in the Taiwan Strait, so far no one has been able to explain how any invading PLA force would be able to cross over 100 nautical miles of exceedingly rough water and successfully land on the world’s most inhospitable beaches, let alone capture the capital and pacify the rest of the rugged island.
As I said, PLA is planning to have 6 LPD, hundreds of other transport ships, world's largest hovercraft, and even a few LHD. Carriers will be able to launch from all sides, Y-20 can drop massive troops, and transport material, missiles can destroy targets and air refuel ensures our fighters stay in the air.
Did I mention stealth fighters in J-20 and J-31? Land attack subs, and much much more.
It's really beyond me really, I mean we have no options when talking Taiwan.
The
PLA simply does not have enough transport ships to make the crossing, and those it does have are remarkably vulnerable to Taiwanese
anti-ship cruise missiles,
guided rockets,
smart cluster munitions, mobile artillery and advanced sea mines – not to mention its elite corps of
American-trained fighter and helicopter pilots. Even if some lucky PLA units could survive the trip (not at all a safe assumption), they would be rapidly overwhelmed by a small but professional Taiwan military that has been thinking about and preparing for this fight for decades.
We do, come on man.... These are not secret btw, I don't want to talk more on this issue.
Going forward it will be important for the U.S. and its allies to recognize that China’s military is in many ways much weaker than it looks. However, it is also growing more capable of inflicting destruction on its enemies through the use of first-strike weapons. To mitigate the destabilizing effects of the PLA’s strategy, the U.S. and its allies should try harder to maintain their current (
if eroding) leads in military hardware. But more importantly, they must continue investing in the training that makes them true professionals. While manpower numbers are likely to come down in the years ahead due to defense budget cuts, regional democracies will have less to fear from China’s weak but dangerous military if their axes stay sharp.
How can your advantage erode, I thought China still carries swords into battle.
I have easily showed how almost all of it is BS, all these facts are widely known facts, just because you are a think tank doesn't mean you are biased or a moron.
Chinese are a nation of playboys and sissies I wonder who said that about who and what happened to the ones that said it lol.
And how do you know that? Are you better aware of the state of the Armed Forces than an ex colonel who has served the PLA for most of his life? Are you serving in the Army? If not, then you need to pipe down. You're just an ordinary civilian who knows jack about the armed forces. Getting your 'knowledge' from tabloids and blogs doesn't make you an expert.
You need to read this:
Why the Chinese military is only a paper dragon - The Week
In other words, you're the one spouting rubbish, not the ex colonel of the PLA.
Floyd Mayweather is still looking to improve, US military wants more after 200 C-17s, we are trying to match the US, if we were looking at you, we can just stay where we are.
And you are proving him wrong by posting FROM a Tabloid? Lol what is this.
So by your combat harden standard. Pakistan or Assad Syria army shall be the best army since they battle insurgent, ISIS,Taliban?
