Soft Recruits Hinder China’s Military Modernization

 

Soft Recruits Hinder China’s Military Modernization

By JANE PERLEZ

China's future soldiers

Many armies have trouble molding capable soldiers from fresh-out-of-school 18-year-olds. 

China is no exception and, it turns out, has a particular problem with soft recruits.
Senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army recognize that many of their volunteers and conscripts have been raised as spoiled children and that as products of the one-child policy, many of them need toughening up, says a lengthy report by the RAND Corporation on the modernization of the army.
“After 30 years of the one-child policy, kids come into the army who are used to being coddled and the apple of their parents’ eyes,” said Scott W. Harold, the deputy director of the Center for Asia-Pacific at RAND, and one of the seven authors of the report released last week.
Newspapers published by the People’s Liberation Army have carried reports about half the young men in a unit crying, and many wanting to wash out, he said. 

Some were reported to have violated discipline by sending texts to their girlfriends. 

“While this is a weakness, it is not clear how much of a weakness,” he added.
About 70 percent of People’s Liberation Army soldiers come from one-child families, and among combat troops, about 80 percent have been raised as only children, Maj. Gen. Liu Mingfu, a professor at the National Defense University in Beijing, said in a telephone interview.
Even Xi Jinping, who as chairman of the Central Military Commission is the head of the People’s Liberation Army, has alluded to the problem of insufficiently hardened soldiers. “We must not make our soldiers soft during the peace era, the mighty troops have to be mighty, soldiers must have guts and courage,” he said last month, according to a report in PLA Daily.
The RAND report, titled “China’s Incomplete Military Transformation,” is unusual because rather than stressing the rapid gains by the People’s Liberation Army, the authors focus on the weaknesses.
The idea for the study came from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a body created by Congress in 2000 to study the strategic relationship between the United States and China. 

The task for RAND: to look at the shortcomings of the People’s Liberation Army as a way of better understanding what Chinese commanders would be attempting to improve.
Top commanders in the People’s Liberation Army were aware of an array of problems and were aggressively trying to fix them, the report says.
The People’s Liberation Army has not fought a war since 1979, when it performed miserably against its neighbor Vietnam in a short, extremely bloody battle. 

Combat weaknesses persist, the report says, including insufficient strategic airlift capabilities, a limited number of special mission aircraft and deficiencies in antisubmarine warfare.
“Knowing the weaknesses — and particularly what P.L.A. officers themselves see as the most important shortcomings — is critical to understanding what areas the P.L.A. will emphasize as it continues to modernize,” said Michael S. Chase, a senior political scientist at RAND, and one of the authors. 

“We are not trying to say the P.L.A. is unprofessional, nor are we trying to say there is nothing for people in the U.S. and other countries to worry about.”
On the contrary, the People’s Liberation Army has made impressive progress over the last few decades and is capable of causing serious problems for the United States and its allies, he said. 

Still, along with shortfalls in certain combat capabilities, the People’s Liberation Army suffered from corruption and had yet to transform its antiquated organizational structure into the joint command and control systems of well-run armies.
The catalog of weaknesses that revolve around personnel and training make fascinating reading because they are not often talked about in public. 

Buried in the newspapers published by the commands of China’s seven military regions, the authors found quite a bit of candor.
The authors quote one article that says, “The overall level of talented personnel in our army does not meet the requirement for fulfilling its historic mission in the new century.”
And some of the assessments by the Chinese commanders of the People’s Liberation Army’s capabilities, garnered from more than 300 Chinese-language articles, books and studies, are scathing. “According to the CMC (Central Military Commission) Vice Chairman Xu Qiliang, although the PLA seeks to become an informatized force, it is not (even) fully mechanized,” the report says.
Training often emphasizes form and process rather than the pursuit of better performance, the study says. 

Exercises were often overly scripted, and in many cases, completely unrealistic.
The People’s Liberation Army lacked enough technical expertise within its own ranks to properly maintain advanced equipment, Mr. Harold said. 

Often, experts from technology companies or from firms that supplied weapons were brought in for maintenance and repairs, he said.
The report makes clear that the People’s Liberation Army has difficulty attracting first-rate recruits because of higher salaries and easier lifestyles in the civilian economy. 

It was possible that starting pay for a recruit was well below 1,000 renminbi a month, about $160, even as low perhaps as 600 renminbi, said Dennis J. Blasko, a former military attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing and the author of the “The Chinese Army Today.”
Last month, PLA Daily reported that an officer who had served for 30 years received a monthly salary of 8,000 to 9,000 renminbi, about $1,280 to $1,440. 

Officer salaries were often topped up with allowances and subsidies from a unit’s business dealings, for example from rents on buildings owned by a unit.
But in December, as part of his anticorruption drive, Xi announced an end to such allowances and said soldiers would have to learn to live on their salaries, a painful requirement if military salaries are not raised.