practice makes perfect

Over the past several years american fighter pilots have racked up more than a million hours of combat flight time evading radars and missiles from serbia to Iraq. The ground forces of the U.S have gone through many engagments and many of the Officer and NCO corp can now be considered tested and battle hardend. In looking at this I think the PRC could look at a "tune up" operation before its attempt at a large undertaking such as taiwan.

What could or would be a operation that the PLA could launch that would not be politacl hurtfull but at the same time offer a chance to test its military might and gain experience?......cheers ute.

A real combat situation? thats tough to say. it would have to be agaist terrorist or seperatist groups, not another nation. the most the enemy could be armed with would be manpads and AAA, not extensive sam and radar complex's.

Possible locations:
Chechnya. Russia would greatly appreciated. but the chechnyans, again, at most would have some hand held anti aircraft weapons.

Liberia, in a u.n peace mission. onec again, enemy air defence is limited.

i say the best way is for china to conduct aircraft attack exercises with pakistan, india, and russia.

Forget Checnya. The last thing China needs is to make their own Muslim population angry. Bin Laden has been trying to get the Muslims in China to revolt, but that hasn't happened. If China conducts operations in Checnya, that can really make the Muslims in China unhappy and China will also strain its relations with Pakistan (there are several groups in Pakistan that support the the independence movement).

I doubt China can get any actual military experience by conducting peace keeping activities. However, there still isn't a reason not to think highly of China's armed forces. China had fought against Japan and later against the Americans in Korea. Those two conflicts alone can tell you that China is quite a formidable opponent.

I think the only way to practice is play war games with your neighbours, like pakistan and india. Of course you have to held 2 war games because you don't want to damage realtion with the 2 countries.

The other way is to simulate fighting with your own force and try to create some tactics for evading lockons.

going in Chechnya will be like a suicide.

However, China can certainly devise near combat like excersices (something on the scale of Red flag) involving several nations with western as well as russian hardware.

maglomanic said:

going in Chechnya will be like a suicide.
However, China can certainly devise near combat like excersices (something on the scale of Red flag) involving several nations with western as well as russian hardware.

Click to expand...

I don't see how or why the PRC would want to engage in Chechnya, but in a hypothetical situation where the PLA is deployed, the entire Chechn population is only 1.1 million. The PLA could deploy sufficient manpower to... out-number the local population. Talk about a scary thought, for every family of 6 Chechns, you could have 6 PLA guys camping out by their front door eyeing them. -_- Hardly a suicidal scenario for the PLA.

The Russians did poorly in the first Chechen war, because Yeltson had bad advisors who gave him bogus intel and he only sent 40,000 men into Grozney with little or no preparation.

If the PLA wants to gain some operational experience, I think it'd be cheaper and easier to just do joint exercises with neighbors.

a PRC operation in Chechnya would never happen. I think first would be operations in western china or the ex-soviet states along the border. I think next would be large scale "peace keeping" operations in various parts of subsahara africa.