v*****s
发帖数: 20290 | 1 http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/chinas-deceptively-weak-and-dang
In April 2003, the Chinese Navy decided to put a large group of its best
submarine talent on the same boat as part of an experiment to synergize its
naval elite. The result? Within hours of leaving port, the Type 035 Ming III
class submarine sank with all hands lost. Never having fully recovered from
this maritime disaster, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still the
only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council never to have
conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine.
China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five” never to have built
and operated an aircraft carrier. While it launched a refurbished Ukrainian
built carrier amidst much fanfare in September 2012 – then-President Hu
Jintao and all the top brass showed up – soon afterward the big ship had to
return to the docks for extensive overhauls because of suspected engine
failure; not the most auspicious of starts for China’s fledgling “blue
water” navy, and not the least example of a modernizing military that has
yet to master last century’s technology.
Indeed, today the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) still conducts long-
distance maneuver training at speeds measured by how fast the next available
cargo train can transport its tanks and guns forward. And if mobilizing and
moving armies around on railway tracks sounds a bit antiquated in an era of
global airlift, it should – that was how it was done in the First World
War.
Not to be outdone by the conventional army, China’s powerful strategic
rocket troops, the Second Artillery Force, still uses cavalry units to
patrol its sprawling missile bases deep within China’s vast interior. Why?
Because it doesn’t have any helicopters. Equally scarce in China are modern
fixed-wing military aircraft. So the Air Force continues to use a 1950s
Soviet designed airframe, the Tupolev Tu-16, as a bomber (its original
intended mission), a battlefield reconnaissance aircraft, an electronic
warfare aircraft, a target spotting aircraft, and an aerial refueling tanker
. Likewise, the PLA uses the Soviet designed Antonov An-12 military cargo
aircraft for ELINT (electronic intelligence) missions, ASW (anti-submarine
warfare) missions, geological survey missions, and airborne early warning
missions. It also has an An-12 variant specially modified for transporting
livestock, allowing sheep and goats access to remote seasonal pastures.
But if China’s lack of decent hardware is somewhat surprising given all the
hype surrounding Beijing’s massive military modernization program, the
state of “software” (military training and readiness) is truly astounding.
At one military exercise in the summer of 2012, a strategic PLA unit,
stressed out by the hard work of handling warheads in an underground bunker
complex, actually had to take time out of a 15-day wartime simulation for
movie nights and karaoke parties. In fact, by day nine of the exercise, a “
cultural performance troupe” (common PLA euphemism for song-and-dance girls
) had to be brought into the otherwise sealed facility to entertain the
homesick soldiers.
Apparently becoming suspicious that men might not have the emotional
fortitude to hack it in high-pressure situations, an experimental all-female
unit was then brought in for the 2013 iteration of the war games, held in
May, for an abbreviated 72-hour trial run. Unfortunately for the PLA, the
results were even worse. By the end of the second day of the exercise, the
hardened tunnel facility’s psychological counseling office was overrun with
patients, many reportedly too upset to eat and one even suffering with
severe nausea because of the unpleasant conditions.
While recent years have witnessed a tremendous Chinese propaganda effort
aimed at convincing the world that the PRC is a serious military player that
is owed respect, outsiders often forget that China does not even have a
professional military. The PLA, unlike the armed forces of the United States
, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other regional heavyweights, is by
definition not a professional fighting force. Rather, it is a “party army,
” the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Indeed, all career
officers in the PLA are members of the CCP and all units at the company
level and above have political officers assigned to enforce party control.
Likewise, all important decisions in the PLA are made by Communist Party
committees that are dominated by political officers, not by operators. This
system ensures that the interests of the party’s civilian and military
leaders are merged, and for this reason new Chinese soldiers entering into
the PLA swear their allegiance to the CCP, not to the PRC constitution or
the people of China.
This may be one reason why China’s marines (or “naval infantry” in PLA
parlance) and other amphibious warfare units train by landing on big white
sandy beaches that look nothing like the west coast of Taiwan (or for that
matter anyplace else they could conceivably be sent in the East China Sea or
South China Sea). It could also be why PLA Air Force pilots still typically
get less than ten hours of flight time a month (well below regional
standards), and only in 2012 began to have the ability to submit their own
flight plans (previously, overbearing staff officers assigned pilots their
flight plans and would not even allow them to taxi and take-off on the
runways by themselves).
Intense and realistic training is dangerous business, and the American maxim
that the more you bleed during training the less you bleed during combat
doesn’t translate well in a Leninist military system. Just the opposite.
China’s military is intentionally organized to bureaucratically enforce
risk-averse behavior, because an army that spends too much time training is
an army that is not engaging in enough political indoctrination. Beijing’s
worst nightmare is that the PLA could one day forget that its number one
mission is protecting the Communist Party’s civilian leaders against all
its enemies – especially when the CCP’s “enemies” are domestic student
or religious groups campaigning for democratic rights, as happened in 1989
and 1999, respectively.
For that reason, the PLA has to engage in constant “political work” at the
expense of training for combat. This means that 30 to 40 percent of an
officer’s career (or roughly 15 hours per 40-hour work week) is wasted
studying CCP propaganda, singing patriotic songs, and conducting small group
discussions on Marxist-Leninist theory. And when PLA officers do train, it
is almost always a cautious affair that rarely involves risky (i.e.,
realistic) training scenarios.
Abraham Lincoln once observed that if he had six hours to chop down a tree
he would spend the first four hours sharpening his axe. Clearly the PLA is
not sharpening its proverbial axe. Nor can it. Rather, it has opted to
invest in a bigger axe, albeit one that is still dull. Ironically, this
undermines Beijing’s own aspirations for building a truly powerful 21st
century military.
Yet none of this should be comforting to China’s potential military
adversaries. It is precisely China’s military weakness that makes it so
dangerous. Take the PLA’s lack of combat experience, for example. A few
minor border scraps aside, the PLA hasn’t seen real combat since the Korean
War. This appears to be a major factor leading it to act so brazenly in the
East and South China Seas. Indeed, China’s navy now appears to be itching
for a fight anywhere it can find one. Experienced combat veterans almost
never act this way. Indeed, history shows that military commanders that have
gone to war are significantly less hawkish than their inexperienced
counterparts. Lacking the somber wisdom that comes from combat experience,
today’s PLA is all hawk and no dove.
The Chinese military is dangerous in another way as well. Recognizing that
it will never be able to compete with the U.S. and its allies using
traditional methods of war fighting, the PLA has turned to unconventional “
asymmetric” first-strike weapons and capabilities to make up for its lack
of conventional firepower, professionalism and experience. These weapons
include more than 1,600 offensive ballistic and cruise missiles, whose very
nature is so strategically destabilizing that the U.S. and Russia decided to
outlaw them with the INF Treaty some 25 years ago.
In concert with its strategic missile forces, China has also developed a
broad array of space weapons designed to destroy satellites used to verify
arms control treaties, provide military communications, and warn of enemy
attacks. China has also built the world’s largest army of cyber warriors,
and the planet’s second largest fleet of drones, to exploit areas where the
U.S. and its allies are under-defended. All of these capabilities make it
more likely that China could one day be tempted to start a war, and none
come with any built in escalation control.
Yet while there is ample and growing evidence to suggest China could,
through malice or mistake, start a devastating war in the Pacific, it is
highly improbable that the PLA’s strategy could actually win a war. Take a
Taiwan invasion scenario, which is the PLA’s top operational planning
priority. While much hand-wringing has been done in recent years about the
shifting military balance in the Taiwan Strait, so far no one has been able
to explain how any invading PLA force would be able to cross over 100
nautical miles of exceedingly rough water and successfully land on the world
’s most inhospitable beaches, let alone capture the capital and pacify the
rest of the rugged island.
The PLA simply does not have enough transport ships to make the crossing,
and those it does have are remarkably vulnerable to Taiwanese anti-ship
cruise missiles, guided rockets, smart cluster munitions, mobile artillery
and advanced sea mines – not to mention its elite corps of American-trained
fighter and helicopter pilots. Even if some lucky PLA units could survive
the trip (not at all a safe assumption), they would be rapidly overwhelmed
by a small but professional Taiwan military that has been thinking about and
preparing for this fight for decades.
Going forward it will be important for the U.S. and its allies to recognize
that China’s military is in many ways much weaker than it looks. However,
it is also growing more capable of inflicting destruction on its enemies
through the use of first-strike weapons. To mitigate the destabilizing
effects of the PLA’s strategy, the U.S. and its allies should try harder to
maintain their current (if eroding) leads in military hardware. But more
importantly, they must continue investing in the training that makes them
true professionals. While manpower numbers are likely to come down in the
years ahead due to defense budget cuts, regional democracies will have less
to fear from China’s weak but dangerous military if their axes stay sharp.
Ian Easton is a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute in Arlington,
VA. He was also a recent visiting fellow at the Japan Institute of
International Affairs in Tokyo. Previously, he was a China analyst at the
Center for Naval Analyses. | P******0
发帖数: 9787 | 2 日本人出钱写的文章，一点也不奇怪。
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from
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【在 v*****s 的大作中提到】
: http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/chinas-deceptively-weak-and-dang
: In April 2003, the Chinese Navy decided to put a large group of its best
: submarine talent on the same boat as part of an experiment to synergize its
: naval elite. The result? Within hours of leaving port, the Type 035 Ming III
: class submarine sank with all hands lost. Never having fully recovered from
: this maritime disaster, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is still the
: only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council never to have
: conducted an operational patrol with a nuclear missile submarine.
: China is also the only member of the UN’s “Big Five” never to have built
: and operated an aircraft carrier. While it launched a refurbished Ukrainian
| m********5
发帖数: 17667 | 3 总结:
1.中共军队没有战力, 完全是中古的硬件和软件, 所谓高科技只是西方的误读和军火贩
子的叫卖
2.军队管理和清朝一样腐败不堪
3.在任何战场上, 世界上任何一个发达国家都可以毫无悬念得战胜中共
4.现在中共和当年的清朝一样是一头肥得流油的猪, 现在是该宰猪的时候了 | n*********a
发帖数: 1956 | 4 少了一点：有些杀手锏武器，但处于实验阶段，而且这实验阶段可能持续十几年甚至几
十年，因为体制里的垄断问题，都是做一点八字一撇还没写完就得嗷嗷叫出来以便骗下
一阶段的钱的，不像老美是私企投标，拿个八字一撇的半成品出来一般会很没把握中标
的。
其他确实差不多，看中国高校的腐败、投入和产出之严重不成比例就知道中国的科研实
力其实还是上不去的。
【在 m********5 的大作中提到】
: 总结:
: 1.中共军队没有战力, 完全是中古的硬件和软件, 所谓高科技只是西方的误读和军火贩
: 子的叫卖
: 2.军队管理和清朝一样腐败不堪
: 3.在任何战场上, 世界上任何一个发达国家都可以毫无悬念得战胜中共
: 4.现在中共和当年的清朝一样是一头肥得流油的猪, 现在是该宰猪的时候了
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