Quake-response by PLA not impressive

ARTICLE: “Quake Revealed Deficiencies of China’s Military: Chinese troops were eager, but they were unprepared to save lives,” by Jake Hooker, New York Times, 2 July 2008, p. A6.

James Mulvenon, an expert on the PLA for DC beltway bandit:

You basically had a bunch of guys humping through the mountains on foot and digging out people with their hands. It was not a stellar example of a modern military.

Exercises and think tank papers are nice to cite, but better to look at actual, unplanned operations to see what a military is capable of.

China’s air force took 44 hours to drop some bodies in one stricken region, and this from a military whose whole philosophy is still to dump bodies into war zones.

The upside? All the mil-mil cooperation that the PLA sought with national military establishments like ours and Japan’s.

Comments

[Hope is Not A Foreign Policy]

This is a good intelligence-gathering opportunity for Washington and Tokyo. Still, in terms of military effectiveness--humanitarian operations are different from offensive or defensive military operations. Granted, some of the tasks are the same, but I don't think this experience means that the PLA are a bunch of hacks. The PLA's defense budget has been rising steadily and it has not been geared toward acquisitions for humanitarian operations.

[William R. Cumming.]

It will be another six months before the PLA response can be fully and adquately assessed. The fall-out in the Soviet Union from the Armenian Earthquake where the Soviet Army was unable to deploy with even shovels led in part to its end and after three weeks standing around (about the time it takes to make sure all buried by the quake are really dead and bring in heavy earthmoving equipment) the soldiers involved knew that military logistics was simply a joke in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, a large-scale "Big-One" in Southern California could result in no food and no water for up to 10M people and as many as 250,000 dead and injured. How would our National Guard and Reserve and Active forces respond? Do they even have the PLA's shovels? Check out the lifelines running through the passes in S. CA.? Rail, water, highways, all packed into a few narrow corridors all subject to quake damage. I do hope the Chinese performance ends up with more than this quick take which does sound accurate.

[C. Vadnais]

I was assigned to travel on one of the C-17 relief missions to China (as a photographer). We were carrying food and shelter supplies from Hawaii to Chengdu. Video and photos here:

http://www.pacom.mil/special/china/