THE FUTURE OF JOINT OPERATIONS IN THE PLA

At the end of 2010, China Central Television (CCTV) interviewed China’s Minister of National De-fense, Liang Guanglie, about China’s military devel-opment. In this interview, Liang discussed the future of China’s army and lays out what he calls a “three step blueprint.” In this blueprint, China’s military will achieve major progress in informatization building by 2020.⁵⁹ According to this standard timeline, first artic-ulated publicly in the 2006 Defense White Paper:

The first step is to lay a solid foundation by 2010, the second is to make major progress around 2020, and the third is to basically reach the strategic goal of building informationized armed forces and being ca-pable of winning informationized wars by the mid-21st century.

The PLA has made only modest progress toward achieving the 2020 goal, and has a number of hurdles yet to overcome to produce a force that can fight high technology wars. One major obstacle is the lack of standardized equipment that links all the service-spe-cific information command platforms that have been developed to date. Second is the lack of a PLA-wide training structure, organization, and mechanisms to set the standards for joint operations skills. This sec-tion briefly explores these two challenges and fore-casts the effect that overcoming them could have on the force.

The past 4 years have seen efforts by all services, branches, military regions, and academic institutions to develop, produce, and test equipment that meets the key requirement of interconnectivity in joint op-erations.⁶¹ As noted previously, there is still criticism among trainers and users about the equipment falling short of expectations. A Jiefangjun Bao article discuss-ing theater joint traindiscuss-ing exhorted units to make good use of a theater information system to join together all individual combat forces, units, and elements and

“break the information technology barriers that sepa-rate the armed forces in theater so that information systems are linked and interoperable.”⁶² According to a 2012 report in the Guangzhou Nanfang Zhoumo news-paper, Chinese armed forces have problems organiz-ing and conductorganiz-ing trainorganiz-ing due to “restrictions of the organization structure and the command system,”

and academies continue exploratory efforts to over-come that problem.⁶³ During a 2012 Lanzhou MR ex-ercise, commanders complained about inconvenience and instability in the new information systems.⁶⁴ The chief of the GSD Training Department said in January

2012, that further development and research is needed to formalize and standardize the equipment that has been fielded and to solve problems encountered using it in training.⁶⁵

Until late-2011, most developments in joint opera-tions theory, training and exercises were led by ground forces officers. Ground­centered development of joint operations theory has constrained the development of navy, air force, and Second Artillery joint doctrine.

Multiservice participation in “joint” exercises has been limited and consists more of coordinated action than true integrated operations. According to Sun Dayong, chief of the operations and training section of a group army in Jinan MR, “in previous joint operations, the Army used to play the main role, and the Navy, Air Force, the Second Artillery just dispatched liaison of-ficers as representatives to the Army command post to receive tasks assigned to them.”⁶⁶ Multiservice joint training has not been the leading form of training for the force.⁶⁷

PLA academics contend that to truly transform the force to meet the challenges of informatized warfare, joint operations development needs to become a mul-tiservice effort. In early-2012, PRC leadership reorga-nized and renamed the GSD Military Training and Arms Department—formerly focused solely on ground forces training—to the Military Training Department, overseeing all services in order to “strengthen the cen-tralized and unified management of training.”⁶⁸ The reorganization is intended to address the problem of joint operations concept development and training be-ing too “army centric” and too focused on combined-arms rather than true joint training.⁶⁹ The promotion of four nonground officers to the CMC in 2012—Ad-miral Wu Shengli, General Ma Xiaotian, General Wei

Fenghe, and General Wu Qiliang—is another reflec-tion of Beijing’s effort to embrace the diversity and benefits of a truly joint force.⁷⁰ As of early-2013, there is little reporting of what effect this reorganization has had on training reform and training execution in 2012.

This may be addressed in the annual GSD training wrap-ups normally published early in the year.

Along with establishing a central group to lead joint operations development and training, ostensibly operating above the interests of any single service, the PLA also needs to normalize training mechanisms to ensure the entire force trains to the same standards.

Prior to creation of the Military Training Department, joint training was executed independently within the services, with few all-service, all-element joint exer-cises. Regional service­specific training facilities and tactical training bases adopted their own experiments to train their units in joint operations.⁷¹ There have been many calls for mechanisms to normalize train-ing across the services.⁷² Over the last 2 years, all ele-ments within the PLA intensified research and explo-ration of joint training under informatized conditions to come up with a multi-service, all-element training requirement.⁷³

Chen Zhaohai, then director of the Military Train-ing and Arms Department, said in 2010 that within 5 years the PLA would “basically establish a train-ing systems under informatized conditions and have regularized training under close to actual war con-ditions.”⁷⁴ GSD Military Training Guidance for 2012 specified that joint training structures, organizational management, and operating mechanisms were to be built and perfected this year.⁷⁵ The impact of this cen-tralization and standardization will likely be reflected in the execution of more GSD- or MR-led multiservice training events in the next few years.