Officer of Engineers

Anoop,

Please be patient if we leave a few questions unanswered. We've only discovered the div-bn battle today. We don't know exactly what it means and how it fits into WZC thinking and execution. Remember, we don't have a PLA officer here explaining their thinking to us. We have to go back to previous examples and writings to extrapolate. If we're lacking Chinese examples, we would have to goto Soviet/Russian examples and finally towards NATO examples.

For example, it took us months to finally discover that corps is actually a re-enforced division in the Chinese battalion-brigade-corps structure. Also, note that WZC is still a work-in-progress for the PLA. Maybe they're making mistakes that they will discard later when it becomes unworkable and we have to be ready to jettison that thinking also. For example, FIST units (an elite company or battalion within a division) once was the example of Chinese military thinking are no longer mentioned. Also, as Andy stated in the Red vs Blue thread, alot of divisions are not being disbanded in favour of corps.

And it took years to discover that a PLA brigade is actually a glorifed regiment. Our original thinking was that it was a Western style brigade (wrong) and then we shifted to a reduced division (wrong again). Part of this was that the original mention of brigades within the PLA fitted our brigade's TOE. Later we learned that they took a division and cut a third of its combat service and combat support. It was not until Andy start realizing that these brigades were actually the "Hero" Regiments of the divsions that we finally clued in.

So, be prepare that we (and in fact, the PLA themselves) may be wrong.

This being said, let's attack your questions.

1st, let's review what we know so far about the various phases of WZC.

1) Recee by force. This is most likely done via the 15th Airborne Corps. Most of the exercises we've seen are at the company level. However, these companies are commanded by a LCol rather than a Captain as the norm in other PLA ground force elements. The main mission of these companies would most certainly to locate and identify major nodes of communications as well as hostile enemy units and size.

2) Defining the War Zone. This most certainly would be done by the new Motor Rifle Brigades and we recently discover, most likely to be the units acting as BLUEAR at their respective Military Training and Evaluation Programs. The major mission is to fix the enemy in place (to define the war zone), If Andy is right, then these troops could simply be airlifted to various depots around the Chinese border which speeds up their deployments since they're just transporting bodies to pre-positioned equipment. This has been done before when the 15ABC airlifted 2 regts to Tibet during the Indo-Sino chest bumbing in the 80s.

3) The Battle of Annhilation in which the PLA destroys the enemy force WITHIN the War Zone. We were thinking division originally since we anticipated that this was an acceptable march time.

4) The retreat (I'll leave this one alone since it's self explaintory).

So, within the WZ, there's more than one independent force with their own mission priorities. More than that, failure of any one phase does not preclude the other phases from starting. The failure of the recee will not stop the defining the WZ. Failure of Phase 2 will not stop the battle of annhilation. It's just make their jobs a whole lot harder.

So, what does this mean about the div-bn battle? It doesn't make sense until you figure out which battalion they're attacking. The reserved battalion. The force protection for the enemy field HQ. Destroy that and you destroy the enemy force.

Now, what about the other enemy forces? At this point, I don't know. It has taken me hours of thinking just to come to this point. I'm thinking they're being fixed by the Phase II brigades (and there are more than one) but I need to think these through. However, if you assume for one minute that they're somehow taken out or isolated from the main action, then the div-bn battle makes sense.

It's a relatively small force. Some 50,000 strong, nowhere near the 200,000+ in the 1st Sino-VN War. So, the casualty tolerance is acceptable. And with one division clobberring a single battalion, the losses would nowhere be intolerable even if we take the extreme example of the 3-7Cav against the Medina Division.

It's still a fight of companies against platoons. Divsional advantge would be the flanking moves.

Depends on which battalion. If this was the reserved battalion (either for brigade or division), then, they are also the force protection for the brigade and divsion HQ. Kill that battalion and at the very least, you've soft killed the brigade or division (one can't command while one is running).

Andy quite well stated that a favourite tactic of the PLA is to clobber any rescue force that tries to relieve the force under threat. That is where the meeting engagement comes in.

The Chinese have a smaller reserve because they have less need for one. However, let's examine this by using basic examples. Two forces with 100 men. The 2 up, 1 back would leave some 66 men for the initial fight while the other would have 85 men for the initial fight. Now, let's move this to the traditional 3to1 supperiority needed for attack meaning 300 to 100. Using the 2 up, 1 back, that means that you have 200 committed to the initial fight. Using 7 up, 1 back, you have 257 committed to the initial fight - against 66. That's almost a 4 to 1 advantage just be rearranging your reserves.

Now, a larger reserve would give you more flexibility. If the situation was reversed where the Chinese was on the defensive with 100 men. Using the 2 up, 1 back, I have an entire platoon I could counter-attack with. With the 7 up, 1 back, I have a section.

In the Chinese case on the attack, with alot of centralized planning and company and battalion do very little of their own planning and can suffer upto 50% casualties (regiment and brigade tells you what to do, not company and battalion), their system works for them.

The extremely limited nature of WZC does not call for rebuilding of forces.

I have not thought this far yet and we're lacking alot of help right now since CDF is going through a software upgrade at the moment.

The decision has been confirmed by Xinhua sometime this year. The process of which division is getting transformed is still unknown at this point.

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Chimo