Daily Times

After talks with India’s 14 Corps commander  Lieutenant General Harinder Singh  on Saturday, The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has organized a large-scale maneuver operation featuring thousands of paratroopers plus armored vehicles to the country’s high-altitude northwestern region over a long distance from Central China’s Hubei Province amid border tensions. China and India share borders at the high altitude area, and incidents have recently occurred between the two countries’ troops, and both sides reportedly reinforced deployments.

The entire process was completed in just a few hours, demonstrating China’s capability of quickly reinforcing border defenses when necessary, experts said on Sunday.

Using civilian airlines, logistical transportation channels and railways, several thousand paratroopers under a PLA Air Force airborne brigade recently maneuvered from Hubei to an undisclosed location in the plateaus of northwestern China thousands of kilometers away, China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Saturday.

Several hundred pieces of military equipment including armored vehicles and huge batches of supplies were also involved in the operation, which ended successfully in just a few hours.

“This maneuver mission saw significant breakthroughs not only in the scale of mobilized troops but also means of transportation. [Using civilian transportation] substantially expanded our means of transporting forces and increased efficiency in maneuvering an entire organization of troops,” Major Colonel Mao Lei, head of the training department at the airborne brigade, said on CCTV.

The scale and short time it took to finish the mobilization showed the PLA has the capability to project its power anywhere in China very quickly and send reinforcements to remote locations with harsh environments, including high elevation. Earlier this week PLA sent troops to a high-altitude region at an elevation of 4,700 meters at night for infiltration exercises behind enemy lines and tested their combat capability under a harsh environment.

At 1:00 am at an undisclosed date, a PLA scout unit began to mobilize toward its target in the Tanggula Mountains. During the march, vehicles turned off their lights and used night vision devices to avoid hostile drone reconnaissance, China Central Television (CCTV) reported.

After encountering defensive obstacles built by the enemy, the scouts sent drones and dropped explosives to clear them.

They engaged in combat when approaching the target, for which they sent a sniper unit to crack enemy spotlights and a fire strike team to destroy enemy light armored vehicles with anti-tank rockets.

After neutralizing the defenses, the scout unit successfully launched the final assault on the enemy headquarters, in which commanders used a vehicle-mounted infrared reconnaissance system and guided the troops to lock in on targets and deliver fire strikes.

More than 2,000 munitions, including mortar shells, rifle grenades and rockets were fired during the mock battle, Ma Qian, commander of the scout battalion involved in the drills, told CCTV. Infiltrating behind enemy lines and launching an attack at a hostile command center at night can effectively win a small-scale conflict with only one battle, noting that the surprise factor would play a significant role.

The exercises not only tested the results of the troops’ training with newly commissioned equipment, but also placed them in an extremely complicated situation, nights in plateaus are very cold and the lack of oxygen at high elevations can cause problems for troops and hardware Ma said.

The mobilization operation came at a time when China and India face a new wave of tensions due to high altitude border issues, as reports say both sides have reinforced their border defenses.

Senior military officers from both sides, namely China’s Southern Xinjiang Military District chief and India’s 14 Corps commander, on Saturday held a first round of talks, which ended with a “positive trajectory,” Indian media outlet The Times of India reported on Sunday.

China’s Foreign Ministry has stressed at the recent regular press briefings that the situation on the China-India border is stable and controllable, and diplomatic and military channels of communication between the two sides are unimpeded.