by Ravi Rikhye
In 2003 Second Gulf, Rumsfeld wanted to put his ideas into practice. One plan was to send just 50,000 troops. Earlier, he had thought of cutting the US Army from its already pathetically low strength of 10 divisions to eight or even less. The US would invade in March, by December the last troops would be home. The US’s job was to destroy the Iraq forces; it was expected the people would welcome the US as liberators and immediately form their own government and rule themselves. Where exactly the pixie dust falling on US officials was coming from is another matter. 2003 was only the start of an 8-year campaign, and at every stage shortages of troops severely hampered the US. It did raise another six brigades, but that was laughable, considering global commitments, Iraq, and Afghanistan.[169] Later Rumsfeld denied responsibility for these ideas, saying he was guided by the generals. [170] This is a flat-out falsehood: Rumsfeld fired the army chief who insisted on more troops; after which of course generals wanting to keep their jobs went along and prepared plans as the Secretary of Defense wanted. The army chief estimated 500,000 troops were needed. Rumsfeld dismissed this, saying at most 125,000 and like far less could do the job. [171] When criticizing someone, fairness is mandatory. If the US aim sole aim fully destroy the Iraq military, probably Rumsfeld was right, it could have been done with limited numbers and unlimited firepower. The US was helped by many deals the CIA cut with senior Iraq officers, and in many cases, formations simply melted away without fighting. Nonetheless, it was exceptional naïve of Rumsfeld and others to think that with Saddam gone, Iraq would peacefully become a democracy where none had existed earlier. Did the US not see that the Sunnis would hit back, the Kurds would want to go their own way, and the Shias were split into numerous tribal faction? An insurgency began and expanded, and that required the 500,000 troops Shineski had wanted, and were nowhere to be found as the US Army had come down to 10 divisions. The reason I am relating this story is that you can never tell how things are going to turn out when you start playing based on new, theoretical rules. The same applies to China. The solution when going into an unknown situation is not to assume your wishful thinking is the reality, but to have ample reserves of extra troops. The US did not, and it is unclear to me that China will either if I gets into a war with limited numbers.
With that background, let’s consider China and 1991. That US-led campaign was the first deliberate exercise of the shock-and-awe strategy. The ground war lasted 4-days, destroying an enemy army of 40+ divisions. The Chinese were shocked-and-awed. Being diligent and hardworking, despite vested interests they tossed their traditional doctrine of the massed People’s Army and proceeded to focus on quality instead of quantity. The culmination of that, about ground forces, is the 2017 army of 13 armies, which are corps each with six combat brigade corps. Though the Chinese switch may seem sudden, but they had been experimenting with brigades since the 1990s. The current force reduced from 35 armies before the Gulf War 1991, each with three triangular divisions. The pre-Gulf War PLA had 130 divisions and 70 independent regiments, plus 30 artillery and AD divisions, back by a regional force of 70 divisions and 140 independent regiments. Naturally, the bulk of the equipment was obsolete and vehicles few. In 1984, for example, a first-class Chinese regiment (brigade) had just 30 trucks. There were no additional 4-wheel vehicles. Divisions were maintained at three levels: A, at 80% manning, B, probably at 50% or less, and C, which were basically cadres. Category C was abolished some years ago. In 1949, the PLA had 70 armies and likely 230 divisions. The pre-1991 Army could put up a strong defense, but offensive capability was severely limited. Armies were essentially confined to their theatres.
An excellent summary of current Chinese Army doctrine is by Roger Cliff: [172]
Since 1999 the PLA has had a doctrine that emphasizes indirection and maneuver. Authoritative PLA publications advocate avoiding directly engaging an adversary’s main forces and instead conducting “focal point” strikes on targets such as command and control centers, information systems, transportation hubs, and logistics systems, with the goal of rendering the adversary “blind” and “paralyzed.” The transient and unpredictable nature of opportunities to attack such targets means that effectively implementing this doctrine requires an agile organization that is decentralized, has a low degree of standardization, and has a high degree of horizontal integration. By all accounts, however, the PLA has precisely the opposite type of organization.
The concept of “blinding and paralyzing” is, of course, at the heart of mobile warfare and thus not a new idea. Readers wanting to know where the firepower is are reminded that the Chinese will now rebuild their air force for that purpose. Even with their enormous GDP, because China is spending a minimum on defense, it will take 10-20 years for the air force to rebuild.
Though Cliff does not specifically say so in the above quote, there is an obvious implication that after the adversary is left “blind and paralyzed”, firepower is used to destroy him. That the new Chinese army organization is contrary to the one required and explained by Cliff, does not bother me. For one thing, it is useful to remember that in World War II, it was fashionable to think of the German Army as a Prussian battle robot, capable only of blindly following orders without question. After the war, it was realized that to the contrary, it was the US Army that was rigid and fixed in its ways. The Prussian Revolution in Military Affairs was designed by Gneisenau, said to be his country’s greatest general since Frederick the Great. Using his combat experiences in the War of the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Gneisenau developed the truly revolutionary concept of the Commander’s Intent. The commander was to outline his intent to his subordinates and give them the freedom to carry it out as they wanted. Staff officers served rotations with field units to always understand the realities of battle. Commander were to share with their subordinates the objective of their plan so that officers were always “in the loop” – a fractal repetition of the Commanders Intent.
[I am obliged to acknowledge my debt to Major Agha H. Amin, Pakistan Army Retired, who for years has pushed me to understand Gneisenau’s concepts. Having no interest in theory, for years I did not understand Major Amin’s intent until very recently, reading The German Army Handbook[173] made everything very clear. Incidentally, this is not the German Handbook: that is Handbook on German Military Forces, a 670-page wrist-sprainer by David I. Norwood and originally was a US Army field manual.]
So, I think we as outsiders can really tell how Chinese commanders will behave. A quick glance back at the 1962 War shows they were experts at infantry mobile war in the mountains. They were quick to outflank and equally quick to keep up the momentum of the attack. This requires both initiative and decentralization, particularly as their signals network was primitive compared to that of western armies. You cannot get more primitive than bugles and flags for tactical control. Incidentally, these cannot be jammed.
What is possibly not usually realized is that among its multiple, interlocking concepts, the RMA relies on the new technologies of battlefield communication, and these, instead of encouraging flexibility, force centralization. This is so obvious that we don’t need Martin van Crevald’s most excellent study Command in War. Nonetheless, he speaks with precision and eloquence. He uses the period 1965-68 in the Vietnam War to explain that – if I may be permitted to paraphrase, US commanders were fighting two wars: against the communist adversary, and against the tsunami of information. Ultimately the US defeated the enemy on the ground, but it was less successful at defeating the torrents of information. This resulted in what Crevald calls “the pathology of information” (p. 248). Strictly, pathology means the study of disease, but he uses the term in the sense of pathological, “extreme in a way that is not normal or that shows an illness or mental problem”. He gives sad examples: McNamara having to decide on assigning two C-141 transport aircraft to the theatre; Lyndon Johnson having to make the decision to send three battalions, 2500 soldiers in an in-country deployment of 550,000, or 750,000 in the theatre. There is the
tragic case of the Son Tay raid to free 61 US POWs. From the day the information of their location was received, to the day of launch required six months of debate at the highest levels of the military and national leadership, selection of troops and airmen, and training. The result: When the rescuers arrived, the prisoners were gone somewhere else, likely because of heavy rains flooded the campsite and put toxic material into the well. Moreover, the US received last-minute information that the prisoners had been moved; conferences were held starting five hours before launch. Lack of consensus on the reliability of the information led to a decision to go ahead. None of this is to play down the technical precision of the raid into Vietnam that lasted 27 minutes of the 30 allocated.
The greater the density of communication, the greater the centralization. To illustrate where we are going, Battle Management Systems allow the commander to know where every single man and vehicle is located. The US – always to be admired for its military innovativeness, is taking this further: thanks to technology, the commander can also see what his single man and single vehicles see. Color video cameras attached to a soldier’s helmet will show, in fine detail, what the soldier sees. The input from a single rifleman, squad, platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division, corps, army, army group, theatre and so on will be fed into computers running Artificial Intelligence to present every changing situation and the best options to meet them. Each commander, at each level, now will have complete situational awareness. What will happen to the initiative? It will wither and die. The higher commander will control all subordinate commanders, using his bird’s eye rule to impose rigidity on the conduct of the battle.
The flaw in the Chinese RMA doctrine, as with the US, is immediately apparent: what if the communications networks go down due to enemy action or error? Then the paralyzed and the blind becomes you, not the enemy. In a paper I did some years ago for a graduate degree in information security, I analyzed the vulnerability of the satellite-based US networks to disruption. The solution is equally apparent: make every single soldier into a communication node, interconnected to every other soldier. Then, even if huge gaps are torn in your network, information will always be received and sent. Naturally, there are bandwidth constraints, but this is a technical problem resolvable in 10-20 years. For example, data compression and satellites with millions of channels can be developed. The Chinese problem, obviously, is that they are not the US. They want champagne on a beer budget. Moreover, their systems are untested in war. The US, thanks to its Endless War Syndrome, becomes increasingly proficient every year. One day the Chinese will resolve these issues, but what happens in the meanwhile? If their networks go down, they are dead in the water, as helpless as blind fish.
What disturbs about the Chinese doctrine is its curious expectation of Indian passivity. It assumes that with their networks taken down, the Indians will sit there helplessly, waiting to be picked off from the air. In 1962, Indian forces often lost their tactical networks because of their insufficiency, thinness, and obsolete equipment. For example, they had a severe problem with a shortage of radio batteries and non-working batteries. Without a doubt, Indian troops were paralyzed and blinded by the rapid encirclements of strong-points. The Indians, however, kept fighting. Their difficulty was an extreme shortage of forces both to reinforce and to counterattack. Their terminal problem was an inept higher command, civilian and military, incompetent and weak of spirit. Exercising the tenets of mobile warfare, the Chinese advances kept rendering irrelevant the hastily arriving reinforcements, straight from low-lying Punjab and other parts of the country, because as the Indians tried to set up, they’d find themselves bypassed. In Ladakh, despite heavy enemy attacks, 114th Brigade executing its battle plans, holding the enemy back as long as possible, and then withdrew in good order. The brigade has been criticized for not launching counterattacks. With what? Its four battalions, after the arrival of 70th Brigade with a nominal two battalions, were stretched along a 60-km front and were attacked in detail. In the east, 7th Brigade was in indefensible positions with no reserves, a six-day trek from their base at Tawang, severely short of supplies. What exactly were they to do against China’s eight available regiments (brigades)? This is not a a good example of successful blinding. It can be conceded that 4th Division’s staff and the OCs of the reinforcing brigades were clueless because of the confusion. Much of that was due to their being picked up by US C-130s and dumped at various points on the 1-ton track back to the plains. With the corps and division commanders unable to provide leadership, what exactly were the brigade commanders supposed to do? The result of “last man, last round” is that you really do ewnd up with the last man.
In case you ask: was there nothing we could have done? Of course there was: it’s all standard tactics and strategy. You withdraw to a point where you can reorganize and go on the counteroffensive. That point was the Bhramaputra River.
India now has a substantial ECM capability, air power, surface-to-surface missiles, helicopters, medium artillery, armor, redundant networks, a large signals capability – a corps has its own three signals regiments aside from the one regiment per division, and above all, it has numbers. Thanks in part to the government’s criminal neglect of modernization, India is nowhere as dependent as China on satellite networks.
This phenomenon of over-centralized command was first seen during the Vietnam War. Thanks to the helicopter, commanders could turn-up anywhere on the battlefield to issue orders to subordinates. Thanks to an incredibly complex and mammoth signal network, the commander could control large numbers of units himself. Purely as an allegory, if pre-Vietnam a commander could lead three subordinate units, he could now lead 32, or nine units, and in much closer detail than the commander of three could. Creveld estimates in Vietnam information flow compared with World War II had increased by 20x. I have not researched the current flow but guess it has easily increased by two orders of magnitude to 2000x, particularly with so much data automatically collected and transmitted in a netcentric force. Naturally, no commander can deal with this. So, AI will be used in the decision-making process. Even the commander becomes an automaton unable to use his brain, because the AI will take input from every soldier in the field, run thousands of simulations per second and ding: “Unit 6543210, shift your position to 0123456” – no need to explain, because the unit’s sensors and AI will show the exact route needed, projected on his retina. And Unit 6543210 could be a single rifleman. So much for flexibility, initiative, intuition.
8.3 Overview of the new Chinese Army Tables of Organization
This is the approximate organization of Chinese brigades in 2008:[174]
Armored (4000 men)
Mechanized (5000 men)
4 tank battalions, each 33 tanks (11 per company)
1 tank battalion, 41 tanks
1 mechanized bn, 3 companies @ 13 IFV/APC
4 mechanized bns
1 SP Arty Bn (18 guns + 6 MRL)
1 SP Arty Bn (18 guns + 6 MRL)
1 SP AD Bn (18 guns)
1 SP AD Bn (18 guns)
Signal Bn
Signal Bn
Engineer Bn
Engineer Bn
Logistics Bn
Logistics Bn
New Brigade Organization 2017 (Dennis Blasko,[175] other sources)
Armored/Mechanized Combined Arms Brigade (5000 men)
HQ
1 Guard and Service Company
1 reconnaissance battalion (includes UAVs)
4 Combined Arms Battalions, each
2 mechanized companies @ 13 IFV tracked or wheeled
2 tank companies, @ 13 MBT or wheeled
1 SP Arty Bn (18 SP guns + 6 MRL)
1 SP AD Bn (1 coy 3 SAM launchers @ 4 missiles; 1 coy 12 shoulder SAM and 6 vehicles
Signal Bn
Engineer and Chemical Warfare Bn (like 1 engineer coy and 1 CW coy)
Service Support Battalion
Logistics Support Battalion
There are information, propaga
nda, and health sections, but I am unsure under which battalion they fall. Many questions remain about the brigade TO, more so if you don’t read Chinese. In particular, I am unclear on the battalion’s companies. While I’ve not seen specific information that there are four companies, if there are only three the brigade ends up with significantly less firepower (12 versus old 15 companies), and this would not seem acceptable.
As best I can tell at this point, Chinese brigades now have 4 battalions of 4 companies each, for sixteen companies versus 15 previously, and the battalions have two tank and two mechanized companies each. Earlier, the battalion did not have a staff, only a CO, XO, and equivalent of battalion sergeant. Now there is CO, XO, Chief of Staff, battalion sergeant major, 4 staff officers, and 2 NCOs, for a total of 10, more like western battalion staffs.
Rifle Squad
The PLA rifle squad in the 1980s and later used to have 12 men. It then came down to ten, and when mechanization took place. it became nine. The dismount is seven; the IFV (tracked or wheeled) driver and gunner stay with the vehicle.
Vehicle - ZBL-08 8×8 Infantry Fighting Vehicle
Squad Leader/Vehicle Commander – Corporal QBZ-95 Automatic Rifle
Vehicle Driver - Lance Corporal QSZ-92 Pistol
Vehicle Gunner - Private 1st class QSZ-92 Pistol