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China’s Deceptively Weak (and Dangerous) Military

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
beachstartup 13y ago
ah yes, the good ol' yellow peril two-step. weak, yet dangerous. smart, yet uninnovative. studious, yet aggressive. ubiquitous, yet surreptitious. industrious, yet backwards. cultured, yet barbaric. coy, yet brave. did i miss any?
- Zuider 13y ago
  I believe that you missed this (the actual point of the article): capable of starting a devastating war, but not, ultimately, of winning.
  - beachstartup 13y ago
    no, i absolutely did not miss the point. nearly anybody worth studying militarily, whether a state or non-state actor, is capable of that. 12 guys with plane tickets started the last one. tell the millions of dead people that war wasn't devastating.
  - rdl 13y ago
    Sounds like the US! Or really any power today -- capable of inflicting great damage on a foreign power, but not capable of occupation and pacification.
    - latham 13y ago
      You are gay whey
thrownaway2424 13y ago
I bet you could say all or nearly all of these bad-sounding things about the US military or any randomly selected Western military. There is surely some crank out there patrolling a SAC installation on horseback. The US certainly has capital ships that don't work and have to go right back to the shipyard. The US still operates 1950s-era aircraft that have been repurposed from airlift to bombers to mine layers to signals intelligence to tankers. "Elite" pilots of the USAF, many of whom are in fact in the ANG, also fly 10 hours per month, or even less[1]. Overall I'm not sure who this author is arguing with. It reads like pure strawman stuff. [1] http://www.airforcemag.com/AircraftAccidentReports/Documents/2013/122712_F-16C_Fresno_full.pdf http://www.airforcemag.com/AircraftAccidentReports/Documents... page 13
- Daniel_Newby 13y ago
  Are you serious? The U.S. has successfully fought wars in the recent past. High ranking officers are routinely sacked when they lose touch of soldiering and their mission fails. The U.S. version of party political indoctrination is just a little silliness like lesbian sensitivity training.
  - vacri 13y ago
    Things like the Rifleman's Creed aren't political indoctrination? Every army has political indoctrination - it's how you motivate people to put their lives on the line for your goals.
    - jessaustin 13y ago
      I'm sure your general point is somewhat correct, but how is "This is my rifle" political? It seems more like a commitment to professionalism, like the Hippocratic Oath, but inverted.
      - vacri 13y ago
        Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy. It's basically saying "I will be an effective soldier for America". It's just one of many things working together to that end.
ww520 13y ago
I don't get it. If China's military is as weak and as far behind as the author claims, why is he worrying about China's military threats? It should be a cakewalk to head off any threats from them with our much more advanced capabilities. Why is he advocating to increase the military spending for US and its allies? Aren't our current capabilities so much better and so much ahead of them that they will have no hope of catching up?
- spc476 13y ago
  It's worrying because they're unpredictable and won't necessarily do the appropriate counter move. For instance, I'm a horrible chess player, and I even tell my opponents that, but yet, they often take a much longer time to play because my moves are so unpredictable it really throws them off their own game (also---I'm regarded as a smart fellow, and I wouldn't make obviously stupid moves, so when I do, my opponent wastes time trying to figure out what they're missing).
firstOrder 13y ago
> 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...Chinas 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. Beijings worst nightmare is that the PLA could one day forget that its number one mission is protecting the Communist Partys civilian leaders against all its enemies especially when the CCPs enemies are domestic student or religious groups campaigning for democratic rights, as happened in 1989 and 1999, respectively. And in 1992, US marines marched into Los Angeles because domestic groups wanted democratic rights, like not being beaten by police officers once down on the ground. As far as political loyalty in the army for communist countries - Stalin purged his army of generals whose loyalty was suspect prior to World War II. Hitler did not. Stalin won the war, and Hitler's high command tried to kill him.
- Zuider 13y ago
  Stalin purged 'his' army of any and all officers (not just generals) showing the remotest competence for fear that they could become a threat to his power. It was nothing to do with their 'loyalty'. He proceeded to wage the war with an incompetence only equaled, and ultimately exceeded by Hitler. The cost in lives was appalling. Stalin did not win. Hitler lost.
- rmc 13y ago
  And the UK has used their armed forced on a part of the country that was in an undeclared civil war by an oppressed minority in the late 20th century. You can spin this many ways.
r0h1n 13y ago
This is the most interesting part, for me: > 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. > 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.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  I am given to understand that British soldiers entering the army swear their allegiance to the Queen, not to the constitution nor the population. So?
  - wiredfool 13y ago
    The British don't have a constitution to swear on.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Yes, they do. It just is not codified in a single document.
  - tsotha 13y ago
    Sure, but do they spend 40% of their time strengthening that allegiance?
  - argumentum 13y ago
nl 13y ago
Hmm. The Sino-Indian war dismissed as a minor border skirmish? It only went for a month, but it was in the Himalayas. Also, it only took the Chinese a month to get what they wanted[2]. 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. Is there any evidence apart from some staged pictures of some event that this is actually true? 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. Interestingly, the C-130 is still in use by US forces for most of the uses listed above. It first flew in 1954[3]. The B-52 remains the primary US bomber. It first flew in 1952[4]. 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. The more aggressive Chinese position in the South China Sea is possibly the most important strategic development in the last 5 years (and of course it has pretty much been ignored by most media). Saying it is caused by PLA leadership while ignoring the HUGE OIL AND GAS RESERVES the area has is a pretty major oversight (One of the Chinese leadership's biggest concerns is how dependant it is on overseas sources of energy, and how easily those sources could be cut off. A source of oil and gas in Chinese controlled waters is something they see as a major goal, and they may well be willing to fight for it). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War#Ceasefire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War#Ceasefire [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-130_Hercules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-130_Hercules [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress
- eklavya 13y ago
  Well the Sino Indian war is much more a testament to the sheer incompetency and spinelessness of the then prime minister of India. He was caught off guard with the blatant abuse of Indian trust by China. There were no clear directives and because of this reinforcements were too late. The Indian Air Force at that time was vastly superior to what China had but again the fear and incompetence of Nehru got the better of him and the nation. My point is that war doesn't show a strength of Chinese army as much as it shows the gigantic fail on the Indian side.
aryehhoffman 13y ago
Time does not stand still, and to assume that China will is foolish. With wealth comes power, and China's military will likely be unrecognizable in 30 years. To underestimate one's enemy is simply stupid.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  China has often been wealthy, but has rarely been able to conquer... anywhere. They're not the first, or twentieth, place I would look if I were worrying about foreign aggression.
  - Zuider 13y ago
    China conquered China, unifying a large area of territory under one government. Historically, they have not shown much inclination to capture foreign territory and colonize it (even when they could have done so easily). Note that their current, de facto control of large areas of the African continent is a departure from tradition. If they consider (or can rationalize) a territory to be rightfully part of China, then they will be inclined to be warlike. Right now, the presence of a large reserve of gas and oil in their area of influence, combined with increasing energy requirements in order to industrialize does give them a motive for war.
    - matthewrudy 13y ago
      I think China is trying to build a nation that can thrive for another 1000 years. They're building great infrastructure and securing natural resources wherever they can. But they're doing it for the Chinese people. Invading foreign lands doesn't make sense in that view. But being patient on the Taiwan issue will pay off. Economics not militarism will likely lead to the reunification.
      - democracy 13y ago
        This is exactly it. This is the wisdom of the tiger.
    - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
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ENGNR 13y ago
One of the most important aspects of modern warfare is the asymmetry. It's best to pursue small efforts that can have stupidly large and devastating effect on your opponent. China is investing in sophisticated information attacks to steal military and industry capabilities, disable infrastructure and remove a communications advantage from an invader. Their heavy submarine focus threatens to obliterate trade routes and defend their own, causing others to hesitate to attack or suffer economic devastation. And their precision missiles are a described as a pocket of excellence within the army. They can use their missiles to destroy military satellites, taking away advantages like communication and GPS. On the ground, sending missiles directly into concentrated C&C centres like air craft carriers, command posts, etc can turn the enemy into a semi-organised mob. With the enemy taken down a notch or two, suddenly China's moderately trained but extremely numerous ground forces can start to look fairly intimidating. They mention horses for surveying as barbaric compared to survey helicopters, but what a great asset horses would be when both sides have used their precision missiles to take out all of the supporting infrastructure. No maintenance or fuel supply line needed, they even double as their own horse manufacturing line. Whether these approaches are enough to defend or attack, who knows, but the strategy is an excellent and efficient one that shouldn't be underestimated. You can't just look at what forces they have, but what relevant effects they can achieve with those forces.
- learc83 13y ago
  >what a great asset horses would be when both sides have used their precision missiles to take out all of the supporting infrastructure. No maintenance or fuel supply line needed, they even double as their own horse manufacturing line. Think about what you're saying for a second. It takes years and plenty of manpower and supplies to raise a horse for riding. Riding horses most definitely do not self replicate in any useful fashion or time-frame. Horses are in no way useful, at scale, in modern warfare. They require far more training, manpower, and time per-mile-covered than a motorized vehicle. If both sides have obliterated their respective infrastructures to the point that they rely on horses, each would have long since lost the capability to wage a modern war.
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Asymmetric warfare is a way for small numbers of people with little more equipment than what they can carry to fight a professional, modern armed force that's occupying their nation or is very close to their borders; a significant amount of their time is spent scrounging for food and working out where to sleep. Any nation planning to fight a war asymmetrically is not planning to project power beyond its borders, and is effectively hoping that if they're enough of a nuisance (and they don't anger their own population too much doing it) the other side will get tired and go home. It is not an excellent or efficient strategy. It's bad. It relies on cells operating independently, which is massively inefficient, and it relies on those cells being armed with whatever they can scrounge; a professionally trained and equipped armed force is far more efficient and far more effective.
astkaasa 13y ago
HN readers discuss some military issue. Mmmmmmmmm, sounds like Obama shared a story about his programmer life. He had completed a successful side project -- a health care website, for example. And he proudly mentioned that his project is written in VB6!!!
- EliRivers 13y ago
  You might be surprised how many HNers have military experience.
astkaasa 13y ago
The United States Department of Defense should take a look at this article and stop asking for more military expenditures. They are wasting Americans taxes actually. Just let Japan release its military power, such as Gundam or Ultraman, then China will be scared. Just let Indian do a military parade. Imagine many HAL repaired fighter aircraft flying across the sky and China will be scared again. China will show its real weakness. This is a perfect strategy. I thought the United States Department of Defense should give me a BIG GOLDEN MEDAL as a reward. \^o^/
- latham 13y ago
  How darec you
bhrgunatha 13y ago
> 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. I've no idea where the author gets the idea that Taiwan's beaches are the world's most inhospitable. China has continually increased it's stockade of short range missiles located along the coast by the Taiwan Strait. Their strategy most likely would be to decapitate the command and control structure and probably much of the military hardware along with power generation and infrastructure in Taiwan first. It would be a relatively relaxed "invasion" across the Taiwan Strait after that - assuming no retaliation or retribution from the US or Japan first.
- matthewrudy 13y ago
  I think the last point is valid, though. Taiwan people are very proud of their independence. I can't imagine how Beijing could approach winning over hearts and minds.
  - BugBrother 13y ago
    There are more than one way to skin that cat. I've been working in Romania a while. The takeover here by Soviet after WWII wasn't ... nice. E.g. all grown people with German ancestry were sent to Siberia for at least years (lots of people in Transylvania). And so on. tl;dr: One way to win someone's heart is by using a knife.
    - democracy 13y ago
      Wikipedia says: By year 1950 about 253,000 Rumäniendeutsche were expelled and 421,846 remained in Romania.[citation needed] By year 2011 about 36,000 remained as the result of mass migration to Germany. [4] And for people involved in SS crimes - what do you think we should have done to them - sent them to St Tropez instead?
dublinclontarf 13y ago
Article aside, the Chinese military (all branches) is rife with nepotism. Family members, family friends and friends help get preferential placement and position. To a large extent it's more about enforcing CCP control of the country and people than protecting it from invasion or invading. In a place like China, you need to spend more money protecting yourself from Chinese people than from outsiders.
xiaq 13y ago
Chinese here. Wow it's actually hilarious to read how some western people see the PLA exactly the way we see DPRK army. I have no military experience, but with access to Chinese sources, I feel justified to point out some obvious errors: > 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. I believe all calvary troops, except a few symbolic ones, are canceled during the "Million Disarmament" in the middle 1980s. The linked gallery should be showing a group of guards of honor or simple soldiers in recreation. They are even equipped with swords; if it's fair to claim that the Second Artillery still use horses for patrolling, it's fair to say they use swords for combat too, which is absurd. China produces helicopters, for civil or military uses. For instance, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAIC_Z-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAIC_Z-10. They were used extensively during the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes. > 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. This is exaggerating too much. According to the PLA Political Work Regulation (http://www.ljxw.gov.cn/news_detail-3993.html http://www.ljxw.gov.cn/news_detail-3993.html), political work are recommended to be organized "weekly and lasting a half-day", and required to be "no less than twice per month". That is 10% or 5% of working hours. Well, some army officers may be over-enthusiastic about political work and organize such activities very frequently, but that definitely would make him unpopular... > 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. Some have already mentioned the Sino-Indian war. There has also been Sino-Vietnamese war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War). The world is relatively peaceful today, and the troops of most big nations have not fighted big wars for many decades. Except for USA which actively provokes wars. > 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. From a purely cultural POV, western and Chinese militarists may have vastly different ideas of "traditional methods of war fighting". Saying that the (supposed) enemy will not obeys the "traditional rules" sounds like an excuse of not actually trying to understand them.
bane 13y ago
Obvious Western propaganda piece is propaganda. And like the best sort of propaganda has enough kernels of truth to be dangerous. China's military is optimized for maintaining internal stability and national unity. A civil war is the worst case scenario for China's leadership. You don't need a deep water navy, or a massive air force to achieve this goal. You need a massive tier-2 riot police force with some heavy hardware to augment when things really get out of control. Along with almost no practical combat experience beyond internal stability operations, the PLA is simply not optimized for engagements outside of the national borders. There's pitifully few deployable logistics units. However, on the few times China has chosen to mobilize against neighbors, the PLA has shown an ability to move truly unbelievable number of soldiers moderate distances away from the border. There's also some debate if the PLA acquitted themselves better during the Korean War than during the later Sino-Vietnamese war. I think there's something to that, the end of the Chinese Civil War wasn't all that long before that, and it's likely that veterans of that conflict were in field command positions during the Korean War, but were not in the Sino-Vietnamese war. The outcome of the Sino-Indian war (1962) also probably falls at the career end of the same veteran commanders. In fact, China was at it's most muscular directly following the end of the Civil war (Tibet, Korea, India all between 1950 and 1962). The Soviet border conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese war, which were almost a decade later were not great victories for the PLA. If that trend is true, the modern non-combat honed PLA may be lacking in critical modern battlefield experience. But it doesn't take a terribly long time for a military to gain that experience and capture it for a few years. Any conflict with the PLA, even if it started poorly for the PLA, would likely turn around not long after. A friend of mine says that China is historically does not psychologically act in an outwardly facing expansionist way. It simply looks inward to admire itself, and sometimes to get a better view of the Middle Kingdom, steps backwards a few steps into somebody else's territory. What remains to be seen, is if China's new economic policy creates a golden period of internal stability, if that gives military planners more time to regear and reoptimize the PLA for external conflicts rather than internal peace keeping. Right now, it's too distracted by domestic issues to really do this whole heartedly. But with a massive industrial capacity, I would predict that if such a shift were to occur, the world would be blindsided with how quickly that shift would happen.
latham 13y ago
Sing your favourite songs

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ah yes, the good ol' yellow peril two-step. weak, yet dangerous. smart, yet uninnovative. studious, yet aggressive. ubiquitous, yet surreptitious. industrious, yet backwards. cultured, yet barbaric. coy, yet brave. did i miss any?

Zuider 13y ago
I believe that you missed this (the actual point of the article): capable of starting a devastating war, but not, ultimately, of winning.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  no, i absolutely did not miss the point. nearly anybody worth studying militarily, whether a state or non-state actor, is capable of that. 12 guys with plane tickets started the last one. tell the millions of dead people that war wasn't devastating.
- rdl 13y ago
  Sounds like the US! Or really any power today -- capable of inflicting great damage on a foreign power, but not capable of occupation and pacification.
  - latham 13y ago
    You are gay whey

thrownaway2424 13y ago

I bet you could say all or nearly all of these bad-sounding things about the US military or any randomly selected Western military. There is surely some crank out there patrolling a SAC installation on horseback. The US certainly has capital ships that don't work and have to go right back to the shipyard. The US still operates 1950s-era aircraft that have been repurposed from airlift to bombers to mine layers to signals intelligence to tankers. "Elite" pilots of the USAF, many of whom are in fact in the ANG, also fly 10 hours per month, or even less[1]. Overall I'm not sure who this author is arguing with. It reads like pure strawman stuff. [1] http://www.airforcemag.com/AircraftAccidentReports/Documents/2013/122712_F-16C_Fresno_full.pdf http://www.airforcemag.com/AircraftAccidentReports/Documents... page 13

Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Are you serious? The U.S. has successfully fought wars in the recent past. High ranking officers are routinely sacked when they lose touch of soldiering and their mission fails. The U.S. version of party political indoctrination is just a little silliness like lesbian sensitivity training.
- vacri 13y ago
  Things like the Rifleman's Creed aren't political indoctrination? Every army has political indoctrination - it's how you motivate people to put their lives on the line for your goals.
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    I'm sure your general point is somewhat correct, but how is "This is my rifle" political? It seems more like a commitment to professionalism, like the Hippocratic Oath, but inverted.
    - vacri 13y ago
      Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy. It's basically saying "I will be an effective soldier for America". It's just one of many things working together to that end.

ww520 13y ago

I don't get it. If China's military is as weak and as far behind as the author claims, why is he worrying about China's military threats? It should be a cakewalk to head off any threats from them with our much more advanced capabilities. Why is he advocating to increase the military spending for US and its allies? Aren't our current capabilities so much better and so much ahead of them that they will have no hope of catching up?

spc476 13y ago
It's worrying because they're unpredictable and won't necessarily do the appropriate counter move. For instance, I'm a horrible chess player, and I even tell my opponents that, but yet, they often take a much longer time to play because my moves are so unpredictable it really throws them off their own game (also---I'm regarded as a smart fellow, and I wouldn't make obviously stupid moves, so when I do, my opponent wastes time trying to figure out what they're missing).

firstOrder 13y ago

> 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...Chinas 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. Beijings worst nightmare is that the PLA could one day forget that its number one mission is protecting the Communist Partys civilian leaders against all its enemies especially when the CCPs enemies are domestic student or religious groups campaigning for democratic rights, as happened in 1989 and 1999, respectively. And in 1992, US marines marched into Los Angeles because domestic groups wanted democratic rights, like not being beaten by police officers once down on the ground. As far as political loyalty in the army for communist countries - Stalin purged his army of generals whose loyalty was suspect prior to World War II. Hitler did not. Stalin won the war, and Hitler's high command tried to kill him.

Zuider 13y ago
Stalin purged 'his' army of any and all officers (not just generals) showing the remotest competence for fear that they could become a threat to his power. It was nothing to do with their 'loyalty'. He proceeded to wage the war with an incompetence only equaled, and ultimately exceeded by Hitler. The cost in lives was appalling. Stalin did not win. Hitler lost.
rmc 13y ago
And the UK has used their armed forced on a part of the country that was in an undeclared civil war by an oppressed minority in the late 20th century. You can spin this many ways.

r0h1n 13y ago

This is the most interesting part, for me: > 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. > 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.

thaumasiotes 13y ago
I am given to understand that British soldiers entering the army swear their allegiance to the Queen, not to the constitution nor the population. So?
- wiredfool 13y ago
  The British don't have a constitution to swear on.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Yes, they do. It just is not codified in a single document.
- tsotha 13y ago
  Sure, but do they spend 40% of their time strengthening that allegiance?
- argumentum 13y ago

nl 13y ago

Hmm. The Sino-Indian war dismissed as a minor border skirmish? It only went for a month, but it was in the Himalayas. Also, it only took the Chinese a month to get what they wanted[2]. 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. Is there any evidence apart from some staged pictures of some event that this is actually true? 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. Interestingly, the C-130 is still in use by US forces for most of the uses listed above. It first flew in 1954[3]. The B-52 remains the primary US bomber. It first flew in 1952[4]. 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. The more aggressive Chinese position in the South China Sea is possibly the most important strategic development in the last 5 years (and of course it has pretty much been ignored by most media). Saying it is caused by PLA leadership while ignoring the HUGE OIL AND GAS RESERVES the area has is a pretty major oversight (One of the Chinese leadership's biggest concerns is how dependant it is on overseas sources of energy, and how easily those sources could be cut off. A source of oil and gas in Chinese controlled waters is something they see as a major goal, and they may well be willing to fight for it). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War#Ceasefire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War#Ceasefire [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-130_Hercules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-130_Hercules [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress

eklavya 13y ago
Well the Sino Indian war is much more a testament to the sheer incompetency and spinelessness of the then prime minister of India. He was caught off guard with the blatant abuse of Indian trust by China. There were no clear directives and because of this reinforcements were too late. The Indian Air Force at that time was vastly superior to what China had but again the fear and incompetence of Nehru got the better of him and the nation. My point is that war doesn't show a strength of Chinese army as much as it shows the gigantic fail on the Indian side.

aryehhoffman 13y ago

Time does not stand still, and to assume that China will is foolish. With wealth comes power, and China's military will likely be unrecognizable in 30 years. To underestimate one's enemy is simply stupid.

thaumasiotes 13y ago
China has often been wealthy, but has rarely been able to conquer... anywhere. They're not the first, or twentieth, place I would look if I were worrying about foreign aggression.
- Zuider 13y ago
  China conquered China, unifying a large area of territory under one government. Historically, they have not shown much inclination to capture foreign territory and colonize it (even when they could have done so easily). Note that their current, de facto control of large areas of the African continent is a departure from tradition. If they consider (or can rationalize) a territory to be rightfully part of China, then they will be inclined to be warlike. Right now, the presence of a large reserve of gas and oil in their area of influence, combined with increasing energy requirements in order to industrialize does give them a motive for war.
  - matthewrudy 13y ago
    I think China is trying to build a nation that can thrive for another 1000 years. They're building great infrastructure and securing natural resources wherever they can. But they're doing it for the Chinese people. Invading foreign lands doesn't make sense in that view. But being patient on the Taiwan issue will pay off. Economics not militarism will likely lead to the reunification.
    - democracy 13y ago
      This is exactly it. This is the wisdom of the tiger.
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ENGNR 13y ago

One of the most important aspects of modern warfare is the asymmetry. It's best to pursue small efforts that can have stupidly large and devastating effect on your opponent. China is investing in sophisticated information attacks to steal military and industry capabilities, disable infrastructure and remove a communications advantage from an invader. Their heavy submarine focus threatens to obliterate trade routes and defend their own, causing others to hesitate to attack or suffer economic devastation. And their precision missiles are a described as a pocket of excellence within the army. They can use their missiles to destroy military satellites, taking away advantages like communication and GPS. On the ground, sending missiles directly into concentrated C&C centres like air craft carriers, command posts, etc can turn the enemy into a semi-organised mob. With the enemy taken down a notch or two, suddenly China's moderately trained but extremely numerous ground forces can start to look fairly intimidating. They mention horses for surveying as barbaric compared to survey helicopters, but what a great asset horses would be when both sides have used their precision missiles to take out all of the supporting infrastructure. No maintenance or fuel supply line needed, they even double as their own horse manufacturing line. Whether these approaches are enough to defend or attack, who knows, but the strategy is an excellent and efficient one that shouldn't be underestimated. You can't just look at what forces they have, but what relevant effects they can achieve with those forces.

learc83 13y ago
>what a great asset horses would be when both sides have used their precision missiles to take out all of the supporting infrastructure. No maintenance or fuel supply line needed, they even double as their own horse manufacturing line. Think about what you're saying for a second. It takes years and plenty of manpower and supplies to raise a horse for riding. Riding horses most definitely do not self replicate in any useful fashion or time-frame. Horses are in no way useful, at scale, in modern warfare. They require far more training, manpower, and time per-mile-covered than a motorized vehicle. If both sides have obliterated their respective infrastructures to the point that they rely on horses, each would have long since lost the capability to wage a modern war.
EliRivers 13y ago
Asymmetric warfare is a way for small numbers of people with little more equipment than what they can carry to fight a professional, modern armed force that's occupying their nation or is very close to their borders; a significant amount of their time is spent scrounging for food and working out where to sleep. Any nation planning to fight a war asymmetrically is not planning to project power beyond its borders, and is effectively hoping that if they're enough of a nuisance (and they don't anger their own population too much doing it) the other side will get tired and go home. It is not an excellent or efficient strategy. It's bad. It relies on cells operating independently, which is massively inefficient, and it relies on those cells being armed with whatever they can scrounge; a professionally trained and equipped armed force is far more efficient and far more effective.

astkaasa 13y ago

HN readers discuss some military issue. Mmmmmmmmm, sounds like Obama shared a story about his programmer life. He had completed a successful side project -- a health care website, for example. And he proudly mentioned that his project is written in VB6!!!

EliRivers 13y ago
You might be surprised how many HNers have military experience.

astkaasa 13y ago

The United States Department of Defense should take a look at this article and stop asking for more military expenditures. They are wasting Americans taxes actually. Just let Japan release its military power, such as Gundam or Ultraman, then China will be scared. Just let Indian do a military parade. Imagine many HAL repaired fighter aircraft flying across the sky and China will be scared again. China will show its real weakness. This is a perfect strategy. I thought the United States Department of Defense should give me a BIG GOLDEN MEDAL as a reward. \^o^/

latham 13y ago
How darec you

bhrgunatha 13y ago

> 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. I've no idea where the author gets the idea that Taiwan's beaches are the world's most inhospitable. China has continually increased it's stockade of short range missiles located along the coast by the Taiwan Strait. Their strategy most likely would be to decapitate the command and control structure and probably much of the military hardware along with power generation and infrastructure in Taiwan first. It would be a relatively relaxed "invasion" across the Taiwan Strait after that - assuming no retaliation or retribution from the US or Japan first.

matthewrudy 13y ago
I think the last point is valid, though. Taiwan people are very proud of their independence. I can't imagine how Beijing could approach winning over hearts and minds.
- BugBrother 13y ago
  There are more than one way to skin that cat. I've been working in Romania a while. The takeover here by Soviet after WWII wasn't ... nice. E.g. all grown people with German ancestry were sent to Siberia for at least years (lots of people in Transylvania). And so on. tl;dr: One way to win someone's heart is by using a knife.
  - democracy 13y ago
    Wikipedia says: By year 1950 about 253,000 Rumäniendeutsche were expelled and 421,846 remained in Romania.[citation needed] By year 2011 about 36,000 remained as the result of mass migration to Germany. [4] And for people involved in SS crimes - what do you think we should have done to them - sent them to St Tropez instead?

dublinclontarf 13y ago

Article aside, the Chinese military (all branches) is rife with nepotism. Family members, family friends and friends help get preferential placement and position. To a large extent it's more about enforcing CCP control of the country and people than protecting it from invasion or invading. In a place like China, you need to spend more money protecting yourself from Chinese people than from outsiders.

xiaq 13y ago

Chinese here. Wow it's actually hilarious to read how some western people see the PLA exactly the way we see DPRK army. I have no military experience, but with access to Chinese sources, I feel justified to point out some obvious errors: > 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. I believe all calvary troops, except a few symbolic ones, are canceled during the "Million Disarmament" in the middle 1980s. The linked gallery should be showing a group of guards of honor or simple soldiers in recreation. They are even equipped with swords; if it's fair to claim that the Second Artillery still use horses for patrolling, it's fair to say they use swords for combat too, which is absurd. China produces helicopters, for civil or military uses. For instance, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAIC_Z-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAIC_Z-10. They were used extensively during the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes. > 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. This is exaggerating too much. According to the PLA Political Work Regulation (http://www.ljxw.gov.cn/news_detail-3993.html http://www.ljxw.gov.cn/news_detail-3993.html), political work are recommended to be organized "weekly and lasting a half-day", and required to be "no less than twice per month". That is 10% or 5% of working hours. Well, some army officers may be over-enthusiastic about political work and organize such activities very frequently, but that definitely would make him unpopular... > 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. Some have already mentioned the Sino-Indian war. There has also been Sino-Vietnamese war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War). The world is relatively peaceful today, and the troops of most big nations have not fighted big wars for many decades. Except for USA which actively provokes wars. > 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. From a purely cultural POV, western and Chinese militarists may have vastly different ideas of "traditional methods of war fighting". Saying that the (supposed) enemy will not obeys the "traditional rules" sounds like an excuse of not actually trying to understand them.

bane 13y ago

Obvious Western propaganda piece is propaganda. And like the best sort of propaganda has enough kernels of truth to be dangerous. China's military is optimized for maintaining internal stability and national unity. A civil war is the worst case scenario for China's leadership. You don't need a deep water navy, or a massive air force to achieve this goal. You need a massive tier-2 riot police force with some heavy hardware to augment when things really get out of control. Along with almost no practical combat experience beyond internal stability operations, the PLA is simply not optimized for engagements outside of the national borders. There's pitifully few deployable logistics units. However, on the few times China has chosen to mobilize against neighbors, the PLA has shown an ability to move truly unbelievable number of soldiers moderate distances away from the border. There's also some debate if the PLA acquitted themselves better during the Korean War than during the later Sino-Vietnamese war. I think there's something to that, the end of the Chinese Civil War wasn't all that long before that, and it's likely that veterans of that conflict were in field command positions during the Korean War, but were not in the Sino-Vietnamese war. The outcome of the Sino-Indian war (1962) also probably falls at the career end of the same veteran commanders. In fact, China was at it's most muscular directly following the end of the Civil war (Tibet, Korea, India all between 1950 and 1962). The Soviet border conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese war, which were almost a decade later were not great victories for the PLA. If that trend is true, the modern non-combat honed PLA may be lacking in critical modern battlefield experience. But it doesn't take a terribly long time for a military to gain that experience and capture it for a few years. Any conflict with the PLA, even if it started poorly for the PLA, would likely turn around not long after. A friend of mine says that China is historically does not psychologically act in an outwardly facing expansionist way. It simply looks inward to admire itself, and sometimes to get a better view of the Middle Kingdom, steps backwards a few steps into somebody else's territory. What remains to be seen, is if China's new economic policy creates a golden period of internal stability, if that gives military planners more time to regear and reoptimize the PLA for external conflicts rather than internal peace keeping. Right now, it's too distracted by domestic issues to really do this whole heartedly. But with a massive industrial capacity, I would predict that if such a shift were to occur, the world would be blindsided with how quickly that shift would happen.

latham 13y ago

Sing your favourite songs