PLA GROUND FORCES LESSONS LEARNED: EXPERIENCE AND THEORY
The lessons learned by PLA ground forces since their founding can be divided into two distinct periods: first, lessons learned through their own combat experience from 1927 to 1979 and second, lessons from studying the experience of other armies in modern wars from 1979 to the present. This division roughly parallels Chinas revolutionary experience, led primarily by Mao Zedong, followed by the period of economic development, characterized by reform and opening, initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Many of the lessons of the revolutionary period are now considered assumptions about army building in the period of reform. Underlying both periods are lessons derived from the pre-modern Chinese military, primarily the tenets of Sun Tzu Art of War, and the influence of the Soviet military, especially in force structure, doctrine, and equipment.
The lessons learned in the first 52 years of the PLA were derived from combat experience in both guerrilla and conventional action against the Nationalists (KMT), Japanese, and Americans and their allies. The 1979 campaign against the Vietnamese was a major influence for the period of reform to follow. Prior to the self-defense counterattack, Deng had already identified many elements of future reform, but the bloody combat in northern Vietnam provided impetus for their implementation (along with Dengs accession to the countrys primary leadership role). To reinforce the value of combat experience, the PLA rotated a series of units to the Vietnamese border in the 1980s to expose the troops to battlefield conditions.
This chapter will examine each of those two periods in turn. Major lessons are categorized into civil-military relations; Chinas technological level, including the Red versus Expert debate; and military doctrine, tactics, and force structure.
Though there are certainly other sources from the revolutionary period, this chapter will rely on the fountainhead of Chinese Communist wisdom, the thoughts of Mao Zedong, for its outline of lessons learned. While these quotations from the Chairman are certainly party line, they were selected because of their enduring impact on the PLAs current ideology, force structure, and doctrine. There have been numerous modifications to Maos lessons over the years, but many of his observations have become traditions in the PLA and are now assumptions used to structure the force and formulate its doctrine in the modern period. The examples cited illustrate how these lessons remain a major factor in PLA modernization.
Civil-Military Relations.
Every Communist must grasp the truth, Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.
Though the primary mission of the PLA is defense of the country from external threats, it retains a secondary mission of domestic security, including protection of senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders. Party control of the gun is emphasized foremost here because it is likely the army would be called on to perform internal security operations if the Public Security police and Peoples Armed Police (PAP) failed to maintain order.Party control over the armed forces was not much of an issue during the revolutionary period when most Party leaders were or had been Army leaders. Of course, internal disputes flared over which Party-Army leaders were in control, but except for confusion during the decade of the Cultural Revolution that culminated in Lin Biaos alleged coup attempt, the military as a whole stood behind the Party. The issue was put to the test in the spring of 1989 when a significant number of officers and men failed to follow the orders of their chain of command. Nevertheless, the Party prevailed and units of the PLA from across the nation applied deadly force against an unknown number of demonstrators and citizens.
In the following decade, Party and PLA leaders stressed absolute loyalty to the Party in numerous political slogans and campaigns. Ideological training was consistently listed as first priority demonstrated by three of Jiang Zemins Five Sentences on Army Building (politically qualified, militarily competent, good work style, strict discipline, and adequate logistical support), referring to political loyalty and party discipline. In recent years, political training has focused on Jiangs Three Represents.
Party control is supervised by the political commissar/instructor and Party committee systems that extend from the highest levels to basic grass roots units. Periods of tension between commanders and commissars have occurred, but that tension appears to have lessened today even as fewer officers move from one track to another.
Traditionally, the PLA has also been a school to train young communists for their eventual return to society as loyal servants of the Party.Though there has been talk of transforming the PLA into a state army, these efforts were set aside after Tiananmen and, in reality, Party control trumps any mention of state control. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, two Party and state leaders with no formal uniformed military experience, head the Central Military Commission (CMC); currently no uniformed military officers are found on the Partys highest policy making organ, the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau.
The sole purpose of this army is to stand firmly with the Chinese people and to serve them whole-heartedly.
The Red Army was different from warlord and Nationalist armies in its relationship to the Chinese peasants and workers. For example, the Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention were a code of behavior intended to enlist support from the Chinese masses in the Red Armys fight against stronger KMT forces. As a guerrilla force, the Red Army was the fish in the sea of the Chinese people.The concept serve the people continues into the modern period in the PLAs provision of labor to economic projects, such as the laying of optical fiber lines throughout the country, and especially in its efforts in disaster relief throughout the country. The manpower-heavy, mobile, and disciplined ground force with logistics and helicopter support has regularly been used as a shock force, along with PAP, reserves, and militia, during floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. These undertakings have multiple benefits: 1) they improve the image of the PLA in the eye of the average Chinese and 2) they allow the units to exercise their command and control and logistics functions while providing valuable leadership experience for officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in small units.
For the first time in 2002, the PLA included rescue and disaster relief operations in its unit training programs. Additionally, a total of 19 special units to fight floods have been formed in designated engineering regiments and brigades.
We have an army for fighting as well as an army for labor. For fighting we have the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies; but even they do a dual job, warfare and production.
In its early years of fighting against both the KMT and Japanese, the Red Army had to fend for itself in remote, rural areas. The communists reduced the burden on the peasants by raising their own crops and livestock. This tradition continued into the PLA era, helping to reduce government expenditures for defense. However, the practice got out of hand in the mid-1980s and 1990s during the period of rapid economic growth, but of limited official allocations to the military. Training time was lost, graft and corruption were rampant, and profits were problematic as the PLA moved from subsistence farming and light industry into a vast array of commercial enterprises.
In 1998, President and Chairman of the CMC Jiang ordered the PLA and PAP to divest themselves of most of their commercial enterprises. However, as noted by the U.S.-China Commission:
The Chinese government decided to allow the PLA to retain a number of production units and enterprises, proving the notion that the PLA is out of business is not true. Observers estimate the PLA has held onto 8,000 to 10,000 such enterprises and units of which a vast majority were subsistence units like farms and food-processing units. Militarily useful enterprises were retained for national security reasons, most notably telecommunications, space and satellite-launch services, radar technologies and optoelectronics, lasers, civil aviation and railways. Some enterprises that provided cover for intelligence gathering, national security, foreign affairs, and front operations were only partially divested.
Chinas Technological Level.
Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive.
Maos view of the importance of man over technology, sometimes criticized as an attempt to make a virtue out of necessity, was logical at the time for a guerrilla force operating in a country with a large population and of limited industrial modernization. In 1959 Lin Biao modified the precept with the formulation that men and material form a unity with man as the leading factor. Lins balanced policy was important in providing justification for the development of the PLAs more technical arms, i.e., missile, air, and naval forces, at the expense of the ground forces.
The balance of man and weapons is directly related to the tension between Red and Expert that began almost immediately after the founding of the Red Army. In oversimplified terms, Maos Red vision emphasized the ideal Party soldier operating with the support of the masses in a Peoples War, utilizing hit and run guerrilla tactics. Modern weapons were less important to this kind of force, which often was under-equipped and relied on what it could acquire from the enemy, than they were to a more technologically advanced foe. This vision contrasts with the Expert professional military concept that stressed regularized organization and conventional tactics as advocated by Zhu De and nearly all early Red Army leaders. In fact, the Chinese army has used both styles of fighting depending on the circumstances and today the PLA requires that soldiers be both Red (politically reliable) and Expert (capable of employing modern weapons and equipment in a highly structured organization).
. . . a force which is inferior but prepared can often defeat a superior enemy by surprise attack.
more to follow but this should be enough for now.
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