Thread: Tactical Impressions of the People's Liberation Army

Originally Posted by indianbomb

Do you know the status of their special forces in terms of numbers, equipment and structure. I am asking these basic questions becasuse I am not a military man, and whatever I learnt so far is thru surfing sites like these. I find the whole thing very interestig.

You're going to have to be alot more specific. Special Forces is an extremely broad term and one which does not have any specific meaning.

In general,

There is the PLAAF 15th Airborne Corps which do US Ranger style operations. Though corps size, they actually do company size operations. The PLAAF is forming another corps but only on paper and is stripping 15ABC assets to do so.

All recee coys and platoons are considered SOF by the strictist definition of the term.

The People's Armed Police, though officially not part of the PLA, has fielded ~100 SWAT/Anti-Terrorist teams.

Originally Posted by highsea

Incidentally where ever I have seen pictures of PLA troops in exercises there are massess of men and equipment running around with a lot of huge red flags. How good are the training standards of these guys. How would they hold division to division against a western army say( not US)???

Apples to watermelon comparison,

from my article

The [PLA Motor Rifle Regiment] is a very robust organization centering heavily on the use of well-disciplined and well-trained troops supported by massive firepower. It minimizes PLA weaknesses while maximizing its strengths. The lack of an effective C3 experience, knowledge, and equipment makes a combined supporting arms operation hard to achieve. By effectively isolating the sub-ordinate units from support, the MRR bypasses this problem. Instead, the MRR aims to create chaos amongst enemy ranks while relying on a faster reacting commander sending in well-disciplined and well-drilled troops to outslug the opposition individual soldiers.

Much depends on the operational plan. While the battalions and companies are expected to fight their local actions without support, the problem remains have they been given the correct objectives? Penetration forces may easily be directed into killing zones or simply ending up where they would be of no use. At the tactical level, the only solution is to ensure a proper operational plan.

And that is the main problem with this, the PLA has not demonstrated that they can consistently come up with good operational plans. There is no doubt the PLA can perform an operation brilliantly but a poor plan would still result in poor results no matter how brilliant the execution.

The PLA's MRR doctrine is obviously aimed at the PRC's southern neighbours. It currently lacks the responsiveness and the speed of its rear echelon units to overcome Western Task Forces/Battle Groups. The PLA might very well be able to seize the initiative but be very hard pressed to keep it. Western forces currently enjoy overwhelming mobility, precision firepower, and co-ordination capabilities the PLA currently does not have. Given such circumstances, the Western commander has more resources to react with then that of the PLA commander even though the PLA commander may react first.