I have a question about the PLA Rocket Force.
I don't know much about these matters, and I was interested in finding out more. One thing I was interested in finding out was how many launchers and missiles are in a road-mobile ICBM brigade. It seems people usually say a DF-31A(G) brigade has twelve launchers and twelve missiles, and a DF-41 brigade as six to twelve launchers and missiles. I wondered where these numbers came from.
One text on this matter that I found was this 2023 paper by Decker Eveleth.
He says DF-31AG brigades have twelve launchers, and DF-41 brigades have six to twelve launchers. His basis for this seems to be the number of launcher garage spaces at the brigade's base. If the base has twelve garage spaces for launchers, he lists the number of launchers as twelve. If the base has less than twelve garage spaces for launchers, he instead lists the number of garage spaces.
Eveleth illustrates with the example of brigade 621, a DF-31AG brigade, whose base (28.761, 104.790) has twelve twenty-five meter long drive-through garage spaces, which he identifies as being the ones meant for launchers. He also illustrates with brigade 652, which Eveleth says likely operates DF-41. Its recently constructed base (43.939, 126.449) has eight such drive-through garage spaces.
The bases do not seem designed to be resistant to attack, so they do not seem like sensible places to store hardware intended for combat use, since it would be very vulnerable to a surprise attack. The bases don't really seem designed with the safe storage of large amounts of explosive material in mind either. The base of brigade 621 seems to have one shallow storage tunnel (28.7676, 104.7888), but it is very small and not well protected from attack. The base of brigade 652 has one munitions storage igloo (43.9363, 126.4470), but it's very small, barely long enough to fit a DF-41 missile, and it doesn't look like there is any good way to move a DF-41 sized munition in or out of it.
In a valley about 60km east of brigade 652's base, there is another base that was built around the same time (44.097, 127.215). There is what looks like a missile maintenance building, which is tall enough to fit a gantry crane, is surrounded by lightning towers, is far away from most other buildings, and is connected by rail to one of many tunnel entrances that lead into the mountain.
I would presume the eastern base is the combat base of brigade 652, where the brigade keeps hardware intended for combat use, whereas the western base is an auxiliary base, mainly intended for non-essential functions, such as administrative paperwork, housing of soldiers who are not on combat duty, training using inert rounds, storing spare bootlaces, etc. Launchers stored on the western base would then mostly be for training purposes, and the number of garage spaces would not be indicative of the actual combat strength of the brigade. Launchers intended for combat use would mostly be stored underground at the eastern base.
All this is to say, to me it seems a bit questionable to assume that the number of launchers in a brigade is exactly equal to the number of launcher garage spaces at an auxiliary base.
It seems to often be assumed or implied by people that ICBMs and launchers are essentially synonymous, in the sense that the number of ICBMs exactly matches the number of launchers. I don't see why it would. On one hand, you would have launchers for training and decoy purposes, so the number of launchers might exceed the number of missiles. On the other hand, you might have reload rounds, so the number of missiles could exceed the number of launchers. So it seems to me that the number of launchers doesn't really say much about the number of missiles.
Is there any solid confirmation of how many launchers and missiles there are in each ICBM brigade?
