The Military Shapes Up

By Liu Feng’an

Recent development trends in China’s armed forces demonstrate the new leadership’s pragmatism

The author works for the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Headquarters

Since the beginning of this year, China’s military forces have been closely observed by both domestic and foreign news media. The public, too, is intrigued by the new evolution of China’s armed forces.

After Xi Jinping took over as chairman of the Communist Party of China Central Military Commission (CMC) last November, he ordered the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to increase its “real combat” awareness. The exact requirement is that the armed forces must “be ready to fight and win battles at all times.”

China’s military forces have not been engaged in warfare for more than three decades, which greatly challenges its readiness to fight. Whether China’s military is a capable fighting force is a major question concerning China’s national security, sovereignty, territorial integrity, national dignity and other core interests. Therefore, China’s military must remain committed to dismissing any doubt about its capacity to fight and win battles.

KNOCKED INTO SHAPE: New army recruits stationed in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region conduct basic training under extremely low temperatures on January 8

Enhanced preparedness

In response to Xi’s demands, Fan Changlong and Xu Qiliang, vice chairmen of the CMC, insisted that the PLA should concentrate all of its efforts on building its capacity to win battles.

To achieve this goal, the four general departments of the PLA—the General Staff Headquarters, the General Political Department,the General Logistics Department and the General Armaments Department—have spearheaded a change of work style to be more pragmatic and effective.

When the General Staff Headquarters issued the annual military training instructions, it required the armed forces to increase combat awareness,enhance combat capacity and use actual combat results as evaluation standards. The document calls for more military drills. Later, the General Staff Headquarters announced that the PLA would organize 40 drills in 2013 to enhance capacity to fight real battles.

In February, the four general departments issued a regulation to strengthen the management of spending, demanding that money should be spent on efforts to guarantee victories on the battlefield.

This strategic shift of focusing on winning wars has been integrated into the whole force,the planning and implementation of military drills in particular.

Realistic war games

Since last year, China’s military leadership has ordered the addition of more military exercises with operations mimicking real combat.

In order to enhance real combat capacity,the priority is for the PLA to abandon the lax habits brought about by a prolonged period of peace and stability.

Brigades from three branches of the armed forces stationed in the Beijing Military Region conducted an exercise in a training base in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in January.A total of 22 weapons and 21 kinds of ammunition were used during this drill, when the temperature dropped to -32 degrees Celsius.

Participating units were criticized during the post-drill review meeting. The armored brigade was condemned for carrying only enough supplies for the drill and the artillery brigade was reprimanded for running out of ammunition at the end of the drill without thinking about “potential enemies” on their way back to camp.

According to a PLA Daily editorial about the drill,the decline of a military often starts with bad habits borne out of a long period of peace. Although peace itself is most welcome, soldiers’ laxity is corrosive to combat effectiveness.

British newspaper The Times published a story titled Chinese Soldiers Are Knocked Into Shape Ready for “Real War” on February 16. The report said that China’s military is recasting its training toward actual war scenarios, and training exercises have broken with tradition and have begun to throw surprise twists into each situation—sudden, realistic changes to battlefield scenarios that illustrate the kind of threats that China believes it may now face.

Why more exercises?

The announcement that China would conduct 40 military drills in 2013 was widely reported by both Chinese and foreign media and has sparked discussion among China watchers.New weapons, tactics, training methods, and command-and-control systems are routinely tested in military exercises conducted.

Some analysts believe that such a high profile announcement was a concrete measure to implement Xi’s order on enhancing the military’s capacity to fight and win battles to project power to the outside world.

Besides the 40 drills in the General Staff Headquarters’ announcement, a number of smaller exercises will also be organized by group armies,naval fleets and various air forces this year.

Meanwhile, Chinese troops are also going to participate in joint military drills with counterparts from Russia, Belarus, Pakistan and Colombia. For example, the Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet and Chinese Navy’s North China Sea Fleet are planning to hold a joint live fire exercise this June in the Peter the Great Gulf in the Sea of Japan. Peace Mission 2013, another Sino-Russian joint military drill of army and air forces,is also planned.

On March 4, the 14th Chinese naval flotilla heading for the anti-piracy escort mission in the Gulf of Aden and waters off the coast of Somalia attended the Aman-13 multi-national exercise in Pakistan.

All of China’s military exercises are to serve the common purposes of increasing fighting capacity, safeguarding national security and maintaining peace and stability in the region and the world.

Budget rationale

The increase in China’s defense budget has been widely reported in recent years. The Chinese Government plans to spend 720 billion yuan ($116 billion) on national defense in 2013,a growth of 10.7 percent over the previous year.

For a long time, the proportion of defense spending to GDP in most countries has stood between 2 percent and 5 percent. However,the ratio for China has long been far below 2 percent.

Yin Zhuo, a retired rear admiral, said that the growth of China’s defense budget is reasonable considering China’s insufficient defense spending in the past. Between the 1980s and 1990s, China’s defense budget was quite small. During the 10th Five-Year Plan period (2001-05), the proportion of China’s defense spending to GDP was between 1.2 percent and 1.3 percent. Since the beginning of the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-15), the ratio has edged up between 1.6 percent and 1.8 percent.Over the same periods, the ratio was between 4.5 and 4.8 percent for the United States, between 2.6 and 3.5 percent respectively for Britain and France,and around 3 percent for India.

According to Major General Yu Aishui of the Chinese Air Force, China’s national defense and armed forces badly need compensatory increases; otherwise, China’s military strength would lag even farther behind other countries and the failure would also do irrevocable damage to the country’s overall economic development.

“Despite the growth of China’s defense spending in recent years, the annual growth is not large enough. Even faster growth is needed for the future, which is required for and will benefit China’s economic development,” Yu said.

He believes that in the next five to seven years,China’s military spending should be kept at around 4.5 percent of its GDP and the ratio could gradually drop to somewhere between 3 and 3.5 percent.Yu said that before China’s defense budget stabilizes, growth is needed to make up for the previous shortage of investment.

Yu suggested that China should quickly raise its ratio of defense spending against GDP to ensure the development of its military is suf ficiently financed, and then the ratio can be increased or decreased according to current circumstances. ■