PLA News, Pics, and Discussion

plawolf

Lieutenant General
Please don’t make false claims.

The Center for Civilians in Conflict is NOT an UN body. It is an American NPO, with all the implications and baggage that comes with that.

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Reports by the actual UN on the events were not at all enlightening, but laid the blame squarely at the feed of UN senior commanders (not PLA) who placed the Chinese battalion commander in charge of the incident, but crippled his ability to command with explicit orders to run a command link to a separate, cut-off headquarters.

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Because of the lack of clarity from the UN report, you really need to read between the lines to get a clear picture of what happened.

The PLA incident commander was massively undermined by the other contingent commanders, who often played games and refused to follow orders, that resulted in the Chinese battalion commander replying overwhelmingly on his own battalion as the only troops he could rely upon.


Furthermore, it was the Indian and Rwandan commanders who were formally disciplined by the UN through repatriations, while the entire Ethiopian continent was repatriated due to poor performance.

It was the Ethiopians who abandoned their positions when armed troops advanced on them.

If you bother to look through the American report, you can see how ridiculous the basis for their charges against the Chinese contingent really is.

It cited an unnamed student, who saw PLA troopers climb down from their unprotected guard towers to take better cover below and cited that as ‘abandoning their posts’.

This theme follows as the American report base their findings almost exclusively on unnamed civilian accounts when dealing with the PLA’s performance. Anyone remotely familiar with military deployments can immediately see how problematic and nonsensical that approach is. To a terrified civilian, if a soldier isn’t running headlong into enemy fire, they are ‘fleeing’ or running away. While anyone with even the most basic military experience or knowledge will know that only idiots run into enemy fire in bad Hollywood war movies. In real life, real soldiers are trained to flank and outmanoeuvre the enemy, and to seek better cover if your position is compromised. Sitting on a compromised, untenable position and getting wiped out as a result won’t do the civilians you are trying to protect any good, moving to better positions where you can engage the enemy from a position of strength is far more important. That’s assuming the soldiers weren’t being redeployed per orders, which civilians would know nothing about.

There are no satisfactory reports to give any credible insight into what actually happened, so the best we can do is look at the results.

No civilians were massacred or raped as a result of the charges of Chinese troops ‘abandoning’ their positions, those positions were never even occupied by enemy forces. That to my eyes massively discredits the original charge. If the PLA troops were indeed fleeing from the enemy, as was charged, surely the enemy would have taken full advantage to pour into the compound to rape and pillage?

The fact that no PLA personnel were punished or reprimanded in any way in the aftermath, while commanders and whole contingents from other countries were, would point who where the fault truly lay.
 

The Observer

Junior Member
Registered Member
One concern I've always had about the PLA is lack of training or preparation for war.

I watched this video in which Chinese peacekeepers were killed in South Sudan:

It looks like they performed fairly poorly. A
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:



Thoughts? From what I've seen, it seems like the PLA still has work to do.

Looks like a Type 92 IFV with a one-man turret that got nailed by something (a mortar round or RPG?) from the roof. The troopers probably would love to have bar armor fitted just like Strykers in Iraq. I'm unsure what they could do against something from the roof though.
 

Equation

Lieutenant General
One concern I've always had about the PLA is lack of training or preparation for war.

I watched this video in which Chinese peacekeepers were killed in South Sudan:

It looks like they performed fairly poorly. A
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
:



Thoughts? From what I've seen, it seems like the PLA still has work to do.

It looks like you only highlighted the section of report to support your narrative about the PLA "still has work to do".
You do know that the commander of that UN forces was led by a Non PLA officers right?
 

Hadoren

Junior Member
Registered Member
Please don’t make false claims.

The Center for Civilians in Conflict is NOT an UN body. It is an American NPO, with all the implications and baggage that comes with that.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Reports by the actual UN on the events were not at all enlightening, but laid the blame squarely at the feed of UN senior commanders (not PLA) who placed the Chinese battalion commander in charge of the incident, but crippled his ability to command with explicit orders to run a command link to a separate, cut-off headquarters.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Because of the lack of clarity from the UN report, you really need to read between the lines to get a clear picture of what happened.

The PLA incident commander was massively undermined by the other contingent commanders, who often played games and refused to follow orders, that resulted in the Chinese battalion commander replying overwhelmingly on his own battalion as the only troops he could rely upon.


Furthermore, it was the Indian and Rwandan commanders who were formally disciplined by the UN through repatriations, while the entire Ethiopian continent was repatriated due to poor performance.

It was the Ethiopians who abandoned their positions when armed troops advanced on them.

If you bother to look through the American report, you can see how ridiculous the basis for their charges against the Chinese contingent really is.

It cited an unnamed student, who saw PLA troopers climb down from their unprotected guard towers to take better cover below and cited that as ‘abandoning their posts’.

This theme follows as the American report base their findings almost exclusively on unnamed civilian accounts when dealing with the PLA’s performance. Anyone remotely familiar with military deployments can immediately see how problematic and nonsensical that approach is. To a terrified civilian, if a soldier isn’t running headlong into enemy fire, they are ‘fleeing’ or running away. While anyone with even the most basic military experience or knowledge will know that only idiots run into enemy fire in bad Hollywood war movies. In real life, real soldiers are trained to flank and outmanoeuvre the enemy, and to seek better cover if your position is compromised. Sitting on a compromised, untenable position and getting wiped out as a result won’t do the civilians you are trying to protect any good, moving to better positions where you can engage the enemy from a position of strength is far more important. That’s assuming the soldiers weren’t being redeployed per orders, which civilians would know nothing about.

There are no satisfactory reports to give any credible insight into what actually happened, so the best we can do is look at the results.

No civilians were massacred or raped as a result of the charges of Chinese troops ‘abandoning’ their positions, those positions were never even occupied by enemy forces. That to my eyes massively discredits the original charge. If the PLA troops were indeed fleeing from the enemy, as was charged, surely the enemy would have taken full advantage to pour into the compound to rape and pillage?

The fact that no PLA personnel were punished or reprimanded in any way in the aftermath, while commanders and whole contingents from other countries were, would point who where the fault truly lay.

It looks like you only highlighted the section of report to support your narrative about the PLA "still has work to do".
You do know that the commander of that UN forces was led by a Non PLA officers right?
I didn’t know the report was by an American NGO, so thanks for clarifying that.

I’m still concerned about the video (much more than the report itself).

It seems like the troops were scared and performed poorly in combat. Doesn’t look promising for any fight against America.

Would love any convincing refutation calming my fears, but I’m just not seeing it.
 

Hadoren

Junior Member
Registered Member
These are the Reddit comments that originally lead me to this video:

1:13 is particularly bad, clumping up around a casualty. They’re scared and disorganized the entire time. Not to mention bunching up around the machine gun early in the video.

They are trying to modernize but they’re really, really bad.

Holy cow...it’s clear they have not been in a shooting war in a while. I’ve only seen Syrian conscripts bunch up like that

I know these are by biased Americans, so I’d like to understand what the experts here say of those allegations.
 

Blitzo

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
Registered Member
These are the Reddit comments that originally lead me to this video:





I know these are by biased Americans, so I’d like to understand what the experts here say of those allegations.

I noticed that Reddit thread when it was posted, and frankly the idea that you're able to surmise the surrounding tactical situation and the degree of danger or threat that unit was in at the time from that short clip is impressive :rolleyes:
 

SoupDumplings

Junior Member
Registered Member
I think I read somewhere in a DIA report that the PLA is starting to give their soldiers more realistic training. But I'm not sure if this is mostly for the PLAAF and PLAN. Does anyone have any resources on how far the PLAGF reforms have gone last few years? Like, how do their soldiers and officers compare to other regional countries? Especially India and Russia. Taiwan would be nice too. Thanks.
 

plawolf

Lieutenant General
I didn’t know the report was by an American NGO, so thanks for clarifying that.

I’m still concerned about the video (much more than the report itself).

It seems like the troops were scared and performed poorly in combat. Doesn’t look promising for any fight against America.

Would love any convincing refutation calming my fears, but I’m just not seeing it.

That video just shows them treating the injured. They weren’t taking or giving fire, so it’s not a active combat situation.

It’s no different from countless similar videos online of US and coalition troops in the immediate aftermath of a casualty event. In plenty of those videos, US troops were clumping around their casualties as well while they are taking direct fire.

There is zero subjectively evidence to make any judgment on the performance or capabilities of the PLA troops in question.

The amount of nationalism and hatred of all things Chinese is notorious on Reddit, any opinion posted there can be pretty much disregarded on general principle.
 

ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
People are afraid of death. What's new. There are literally dozens of videos of American soldiers in combat showing them taking defensive positions and sometimes you can see the fear in their faces. I remember watching one where a few are huddled in a hut taking fire and one of them started crying. However the US troops are certainly going to be more battle hardened and better at war than Chinese troops. Chinese of today are going to be much softer than those who fought in Korea. Different eras and generations of spoilt princelings will do that. Plus watching Chinese videos on training missions leaves me feeling the training isn't quite on the level of western military training. We're still training with an obsolete mindset. But this is just personal opinion on videos available. Need a couple of wars to get back in shape. Maybe one with India can do the PLA some good while limiting other countries getting involved. It's better to do it now when their nuclear capability to hit important sites is actually almost non-existent. Also means if they try, Chinese BMDs can be tested against their roided up V-2 technologies. If China takes a single hit, it can be justified in retaliation. This frees up a lot of useless land and sorts out border disputes for good lol.
 
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plawolf

Lieutenant General
While there is no doubt that American infantry soldiers, especially special forces units, are much more experienced in light infantry tactics of room clearing and called in air strikes and artillery,
there is also a danger in that experience if they ever have to fight a near-peer adversary.

Tactics that are amazingly effective against half-blind farmers with antiquated small arms might be suicide if employed against a modern foe with the same weapons as yourself.

Similarly, troops who are completely used to, and are massively reliant on the near constant and near instantly availability of friendly air and artillery strike support might really struggle if said air and artillery support is suddenly denial, and they themselves start being on the receiving end of enemy precision air and artillery strikes.

USN air crews who are deployed to combat zones need months to re-train after they are rotated back because who deployed, they spend all their time dropping bombs, and so become rusty in air combat.

As the saying goes, you are only truly prepared to fight the last war, not the next war. In that respects, China and America are in the same boat.

Neither have any experience fighting a modern military force like each other, and if ever called to do so, I think both will have a lot of harsh and painful lessons to learn fast.

The only military that can be said to have experience fighting a modern, near-peer adversary would be the Russians with their experiences in Georgia and Ukraine, but even those are also limited by the scale and duration of the conflicts. But I would rate the experience and lessons the Russians learned from both conflicts to be significantly more relevant than what America and its coalition partners managed to learn in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of preparing them to fight a near-peer adversary.
 
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