A month ago, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) made a sudden and major adjustment, which gave India a premonition of the crisis of defeat.
After many days of major readjustments made by the PLA, some people in India have finally realized that the gap between the Chinese and Indian armed forces in the field of information warfare and other fields is gradually widening, and India must not only step up its actions in the relevant technical fields, but also follow the example of the PLA, carry out a "military reform" in a timely manner, and make adjustments to the army's operational command system.
[In April this year, the People's Liberation Army made a major adjustment, and the original strategic support force was divided into three]
A few days ago, India's independent think tank "Observer Research Foundation" released a report, from India's point of view, discussing the impact that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) will have on India by dividing the original strategic support force into three and forming military aerospace, cyberspace, and information support forces to form a "4+4" new military service and arms system a month ago.
The Indian side believes that the PLA was able to make up its mind to make this major adjustment to a large extent because the PLA has realized that only by more flexibly deploying network information, electronic warfare, and space resources can it effectively deal with information warfare in the new era after summing up the actual operation of the war support units in the past few years and analyzing the lessons and lessons of the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield.
With the completion of this readjustment, the PLA will inevitably further increase its investment in electronic countermeasures, information warfare, and other fields, and establish a more complete joint command and combat system, and this system will not only be used for operations in the western Pacific direction, but will also enable the PLA's western theater, which is responsible for the defense of the Indian direction, to have a stronger combat capability.
[The People's Liberation Army now has four major branches of the armed forces and four independent arms]
In the future, not only will it be difficult for the United States to maintain its superiority over China in the fields of cyber and space warfare, but India, which is already at a disadvantage in electronic warfare and space-based reconnaissance, will also be in an even more disadvantageous position.
The views of Indian think tanks show that Indian academics have a relatively clear understanding of the huge gap between China and India in terms of comprehensive strength.
Taking the space field as an example, China is the world's leading space power, and has deployed a large number of satellites in space for many years to carry out many tasks such as communications, many of which are military satellites used by the People's Liberation Army.
With the development of China's civil aerospace industry, many private enterprises are now also capable of participating in space exploration. Under China's national defense mobilization system, which combines the military with the people, the satellites of these private enterprises can also cooperate with professional military satellites when needed to improve the reconnaissance and command system of the PLA.
Previously, a remote sensing satellite developed by a Chinese technology company took high-definition images of many US military facilities, including the Norfolk naval base in the United States. In wartime, these images will be transmitted to the information support forces and eventually handed over to the front-line combat units.
[Images of other countries' naval bases taken by Chinese commercial satellites]
India, on the other hand, obviously lacks space assets such as reconnaissance satellites, and in many cases needs to turn to other countries to obtain critical information. During the physical clash between the Chinese and Indian border guards in December 2022, the Indian border guards were able to illegally cross the border to provoke only after receiving satellite intelligence support from the United States.
At the same time, experts from Indian think tanks called on the Indian military to seriously consider how the Indian military should be equipped with space, cyber, electronic warfare and other resources while improving its technological level, so that these new combat forces can truly become force multipliers in India's conventional military operations.
At the end of the report, the Indian experts also mentioned a key point: China's reform of the military organization system is also of guiding significance for India's strategic decision-making level, and the Indian side should learn from this experience, realize that the organizational structure should be flexibly adjusted, and bold experiments should be carried out so that the national defense system can meet the needs of reality.
[The PLA's military reform is not only the innovation of technology and equipment]
In fact, this is also an important reason why China is still making major adjustments many years after the start of military reform.
To put it simply, the differences in national defense strategies and military technology levels of various countries determine that in the exploration of military reform in the information age, most countries are crossing the river by feeling the stones, and they can learn from the experience of other countries in part, but they must not completely copy it. As a result, in the process of building a modern army, there are often situations in which the previous adjustments do not achieve the expected results, or new changes appear and need to be readjusted.
Let's take the division of the army into three as an example. In the previous "above the neck" reform, the PLA organized combat support units to a certain extent in order to integrate the technical reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, intelligence analysis, information and communications forces under the four general departments and the various services and arms systems, and to avoid duplication of the construction of directly subordinate units.
However, with the progress of reform, in order to give better play to the new quality of combat effectiveness, new units directly under the army, such as the theater army's information support brigade, have still been formed, and this requires the PLA to readjust its structure in light of the changes in the new situation.
[Electronic reconnaissance ship of the Chinese Navy]
To a certain extent, the establishment of an information support force and the reintegration of information support units are aimed at achieving this goal. The military aerospace and network security forces, which were originally under the war support system, operated relatively independently, have also become independent.
Therefore, through this largest-scale military reform in history, the PLA is taking the initiative to discover and solve problems, and then continue to check and fill in the gaps, and continue to improve its comprehensive combat effectiveness. In the midst of such constant adjustments, the PLA will naturally be able to find an information-based combat system that is different from that of other countries but absolutely suits its own actual conditions, so as to prepare for possible conflicts in the Taiwan Strait and other directions in the future.