Ladakh Flash Point

Mohsin77 said:

Because the Indian Army is just sitting there, hunkered down. While the PLA is continually probing and expanding its operational capabilities in the area. That carries risks.



I doubt it, nothing is done 'solo' in the Army, not even recon. Most likely this guy just got split off from his patrol at night and wandered into enemy territory. Comms don't work well in mountainous terrain, it's easy to lose contact.

There's not much intel to be gained by India from this. They can't torture him or force him to reveal anything besides his serial number. Nor would he know much about operations, and whatever he knows (comms frequencies etc.) would have already been changed by now.

With that said, the PLA's high command is not going to be happy with this. A lot of people are gonna get yelled at.

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That said we are not Bahkts. I don’t want to white wash this incident. Like Figaro said, this kind of things shouldn’t have happened twice and there should be improvement in situation awareness for PLA troops in the area. Imagine if there really was war. He would have stumbled into an ambush.

The only silver lining to the fiasco is that it dispels the Indian myth that PLA troops have inadequate clothing for the terrain. You don’t wander around at night in the middle of the winter if you are inadequately dressed and supplied.

Mohsin77 said:

Because the Indian Army is just sitting there, hunkered down. While the PLA is continually probing and expanding its operational capabilities in the area. That carries risks.



I doubt it, nothing is done 'solo' in the Army, not even recon. Most likely this guy just got split off from his patrol at night and wandered into enemy territory. Comms don't work well in mountainous terrain, it's easy to lose contact.

There's not much intel to be gained by India from this. They can't torture him or force him to reveal anything besides his serial number. Nor would he know much about operations, and whatever he knows (comms frequencies etc.) would have already been changed by now.

With that said, the PLA's high command is not going to be happy with this. A lot of people are gonna get yelled at.

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If this was the 1980s your reasoning would've worked, but not in todays time. There is a vast array of tech available to track every unit and its soldiers. This was simply incompetence at the local level. Also do remember, this isn't exactly peace time, a clash took place not too long back .Soldiers and their unit are supposed to be in a heightened state of positional awareness.
Twice in 4 months is simply embarrassing. Heads need to roll.

According to India Today. The Chinese soldier was captured near Gurung Hill in the Chushul sector. And the soldier will be returned either later today or on Sunday. That is if this news outlet can be believed at all.

The Indian Army apprehended a Chinese soldier near Gurung hill in the Chushul sector of eastern Ladakh on Friday morning. According to the inputs, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldier apparently lost his way and entered the Indian territory inadvertently.


The Chinese soldier will either be returned later today or on Sunday after investigating the circumstances under which the PLA soldier strayed across the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Formalities are underway to return the Chinese soldier at a border meeting point.

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Looks likely nothing crazy is going to happen. And why should it? Nevertheless, a second PLA soldier getting caught by Indian troops in 3 months is getting embarrassing. Hopefully, they start to address this 'lost soldier' issue more seriously. Most likely this is an issue of navigational error by a regular soldier. I doubt its a recon or spying mission gone wrong. If it was, then its quite embarrassing.

First thing that occurred to me was getting caught was in fact part of the recon plan itself. He's going to see a lot of things while there that you can't see via satellite.

The last guy was particularly obvious. Don't mind me, I'm just trying to find a yak for a local villager alone at night while carrying critical and highly classified documents to make sure I get questioned by someone important. Nothing suspicious at all.

Kaeshmiri said:

If this was the 1980s your reasoning would've worked, but not in todays time. There is a vast array of tech available to track every unit and its soldiers. This was simply incompetence at the local level. Also do remember, this isn't exactly peace time, a clash took place not too long back .Soldiers and their unit are supposed to be in a heightened state of positional awareness.
Twice in 4 months is simply embarrassing. Heads need to roll.

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This "tech" you're referring to, do you actually know how it works? It's not magic. In order to maintain comms with a person on the other side of a mountain, you need a relay array, composed of multiple UAVs overhead constantly. Satellites don't work in this terrain, they are easily blocked by the mountains. The same goes for navigational data. GPS barely works in Manhattan, let alone the Himalayas.

Even the US doesn't have this "vast array of tech" that you think magically exists everywhere. This is why the US Army was so conservative with its patrolling in Afghanistan, for this exact reason. They weren't even dealing with a professional army with modern jamming capabilities, and yet, look at how defensive their posture was in this type of terrain. They would literally just sit in their outposts and do nothing, not even go out on patrol, for fear of capture or ambush by the Taliban. Because if a patrol is on the other side of a mountain, it might as well be on Mars. Forget about "tracking," you can't even contact them on radio without that relay chain of UAVs, which aren't infinite in number and not always available on station. I was recently reading about a new US Army program to build a more redundant relay array, using a new line of UAVs. But there will always be gaps because you never have enough UAVs.

As I said before, the PLA high command is not gonna be happy about this. A lot of people are gonna get chewed up. But the reason why this has happened is not simply because of "incompetence", but because the PLA is maintaining a forward posture in difficult terrain. Can they do better? Sure. But no matter what they do, unless they change their posture to a purely defensive one and hunker down, they will incur higher risks. The trade-off for that risk is a much higher operational capability in time of actual war. You can't have both. Either be super cautious and safe, or incur higher risks and be better prepared for war.

Temstar said:

First thing that occurred to me was getting caught was in fact part of the recon plan itself. He's going to see a lot of things while there that you can't see via satellite.

The last guy was particularly obvious. Don't mind me, I'm just trying to find a yak for a local villager alone at night while carrying critical and highly classified documents to make sure I get questioned by someone important. Nothing suspicious at all.

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I don’t think this is intentional, if you consider how this would look for public consumption.

Unless this ‘test’ was really actually important, I don’t think they would get approval from the CPC for it since it would look to everyone else like sheer incompetence, happening twice in 3 months.

Or likely that Indian soldiers are ganging up on normal PLA recon missions. Looking out for any who had broken off from the pack and seizing him.

A capture and release tactic. Serves the psy - ops and propaganda.

It doesn't need Indians spread out too much. But forces PLA to be spread out thin as they don't know which part will be targeted.


I don't think China can do much /needs to do much other than increase the size of recon missions (4 person group etc).

Mohsin77 said:

... Satellites don't work in this terrain, they are easily blocked by the mountains. The same goes for navigational data. GPS barely works in Manhattan, let alone the Himalayas.

Even the US doesn't have this "vast array of tech" ...

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While GPS doesn't work in Manhattan, it DOES work in the mountains. I found this good article on how GPS works.


GPS works by triangulating user's location from signals (since we know satellite's exact locations). This requires at least 3 satellites to bounce signals off of. It doesn't work in cities like New York because it is an "urban canyon" environment, where a person on the ground has a low field of view to the sky, and the surrounding concrete skyscrapers will interfere with the satellites L band radio signals. Instead, location services is done through cell signals triangulation cities.

So GPS will have problems in either natural or manmade canyons like this:




As far as I know, Ladakh points of conflict have few canyon. And if a soldier does walk into a canyon, he can just walk out, or get onto a high ground.

So, it's more likely that personal GPS equipment is not widely deployed (are PLA soldiers allowed to have cell phones?); soldiers are not familiar with terrain (they might be on frequent rotations); or this one particular soldier was overly confident he can find his way in the dark.

That's not an "article", it's a quora answer... But in any case, getting a hit on GPS/BeiDou constellation in the Himalayas is only part of the problem.

Armored vehicle confrontation at Rezhen La.