China's Defense/Military Breaking News Thread

[nelsa]

Scyth Re: Chinese Military & Defense News Thread
(I've also posted this entry in the European armed forces topic.)

I just read in a Dutch newspaper that the Dutch units that will be deployed to Mali next year will be protected by units of the PLA.

Here's a short translation:
It says that in the last week, the Dutch commander of the armed forces had a meeting with its counterpart Fang Fenghui in which they talked about cooperation in medical, logistical areas and also talked about "force protection". The article points out that the Chinese are new to combat duties as past deployments of the PLA mainly consisted of engineers and other support personel.

The Dutch will share a camp with the Chinese in Gao where the Dutch will deploy 4

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.

The article also says that the Dutch will exchange personel with China with regards to training and already are cooperating with China on maritime field to combat piracy in the Indian Ocean.

Source:

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Do you know how many troops PLA has there,thanks.

 

[Scyth]

Do you know how many troops PLA has there,thanks.

Unfortunately, I don't. I was hoping that some members whose Chinese is better could provide a statement of the Chinese ministery of Defense.

 

[kwaigonegin]

Do you know how many troops PLA has there,thanks.

I think a fair number is about 2-2.5 million active duty troops. If you count reserves or militia than about 4 million and if SHTF they can surge up to 20 million. Basically you don't want to get into a land war with China but I don't think anyone plans on that anytime soon.
A lot of folks like to compare the PLA of today to those during the Korean/Vietnam war. They are not the same. Back then China was basically a 3rd world 3rd rate army with starving troops and severely outdated or no equipment. They have a very different military today as we know in this forum.

 

[jobjed]

I think a fair number is about 2-2.5 million active duty troops. If you count reserves or militia than about 4 million and if SHTF they can surge up to 20 million. Basically you don't want to get into a land war with China but I don't think anyone plans on that anytime soon.
A lot of folks like to compare the PLA of today to those during the Korean/Vietnam war. They are not the same. Back then China was basically a 3rd world 3rd rate army with starving troops and severely outdated or no equipment. They have a very different military today as we know in this forum.

I think he was asking how many troops China has "there", in reference to Mali, not asking how many troops China has in total. But regardless, your information is appreciated nonetheless.

 

[nelsa]

Yes i was asking about PLA in Mali,.Thanks.

 

[joshuatree]

Not sure how reliable, especially the carrier part.

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China is planning to reorganize the People’s Liberation Army by transforming the current seven military regions into five “military areas,” which would allow the military to immediately respond to emergency situations, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.

According to China’s senior military officials and other sources, each of the five areas will have a joint operations command for ground, naval and air forces, and the second artillery corps (the strategic missile corps).

The reform aims to enhance the PLA’s offensive capability to secure air and naval supremacy in the East China Sea—which includes the Senkaku Islands in Okinawa Prefecture—and the South China Sea by transforming itself from a defense-oriented military mainly dependent on the ground force into one with more mobile, coordinated operations of the ground, naval and air forces and strategic missile units.

In addition to reinforcing new military equipment, the envisaged operational modernization will, if realized, pose a threat to Japan and the United States.

As a centerpiece of the reform plan, China will transform the three military regions along its coastline—Jinan, Nanjing and Guangzhou—among the seven military regions into three military areas within five years while establishing a joint operations command in each military area, which will cover the Yellow Sea, East China Sea and South China Sea. The move is coupled with China’s declaration of a new air defense identification zone in the East China Sea.

A senior Chinese military official said, “It is an advance move anticipating inevitable competition against the Japan-U.S. alliance to enhance China’s sea power.”

The plan envisages the four other inland military regions to be later transformed into two “military areas.” The term, which generally means a unit for organizing military operations, is being temporarily used to describe military drills, among other actions. By reorganizing the current military regions into military areas, China plans to enhance its military’s immediate operational readiness.

Chinese President Xi Jinping presented last autumn a policy to streamline joint operations command in the military regions in a decision approved at the third plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party.

The planned revamp also aims to establish three carrier battle groups by 2020 with aircraft carriers, including China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning—which was purchased from the former Soviet republic of Ukraine and refurbished—and China’s first domestically built aircraft carrier, which is currently under construction. In the future, one of the three vessels will be deployed in the East China Sea, while two vessels will be deployed in the South China Sea.

The plan also includes a possible personnel reduction of about 300,000 from the current 2.3 million, mainly from the ground force’s noncombatants, to allow diverting military funds to the naval, air and strategic missile forces, which require high-tech weapons. The personnel reduction is planned to be completed during the term of Xi’s administration, ending in 2022.

However, whether the envisaged streamlining and personnel reduction will be smoothly carried out remains to be seen, as reform of the military regions means sticking a knife into vested interests of the army established in those regions.

 

[Jeff Head]

Not sure how reliable, especially the carrier part.

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Very interesting.

Realigning their defense regions and optimizing them for Joint Operations and combined arms.

Very smart move...and they are developing the systems that will make that far more possible now than it has ever been before for the PLA.

 

[A.Man]

Exclusive: U.S. waived laws to keep F-35 on track with China-made parts
The flight deck crew secures an F-35B Lighting II aircraft aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp following testing in this handout photo taken off the coast of North Carolina August 24, 2013.
CREDIT: REUTERS/U.S. NAVY/HANDOUT
(Reuters) - The Pentagon repeatedly waived laws banning Chinese-built components on U.S. weapons in order to keep the $392 billion Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter program on track in 2012 and 2013, even as U.S. officials were voicing concern about China's espionage and military buildup.

According to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters, chief U.S. arms buyer Frank Kendall allowed two F-35 suppliers, Northrop Grumman Corp and Honeywell International Inc, to use Chinese magnets for the new warplane's radar system, landing gears and other hardware. Without the waivers, both companies could have faced sanctions for violating federal law and the F-35 program could have faced further delays.

"It was a pretty big deal and an unusual situation because there's a prohibition on doing defense work in China, even if it's inadvertent," said Frank Kenlon, who recently retired as a senior Pentagon procurement official and now teaches at American University. "I'd never seen this happen before."

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is examining three such cases involving the F-35, the U.S. military's next generation fighter, the documents show.

The GAO report, due March 1, was ordered by U.S. lawmakers, who say they are concerned that Americans firms are being shut out of the specialty metals market, and that a U.S. weapon system may become dependent on parts made by a potential future adversary.

The waivers apply to inexpensive parts, including $2 magnets, installed on 115 F-35 test, training and production aircraft, the last of which are due to be delivered in May 2014. Lawmakers noted that several U.S. companies make similar magnets.

Kendall said the waivers were needed to keep production, testing and training of the Pentagon's newest warplane on track; avert millions of dollars in retrofit costs; and prevent delays in the Marine Corps' plan to start using the jets in combat from mid-2015, according to the documents. In one case, it would cost $10.8 million and take about 25,000 man-hours to remove the Chinese-made magnets and replace them with American ones, the documents indicate.

Lockheed is developing the F-35, the Pentagon's costliest arms program, for the United States and eight countries that helped fund its development: Britain, Canada, Australia, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Denmark and the Netherlands. Israel and Japan have also placed orders for the jet.

The program is already years behind schedule and 70 percent over initial cost estimates. At the time Kendall was granting the waivers, officials were acutely worried that further delays and cost increases would erode the foreign orders needed to drive down the future cost of each warplane.

In the documents, Kendall underscored the importance of the F-35 program to ensure continued U.S. military superiority and counter potential emerging threats from nations developing their own stealth fighter jets, including Russia and China.

He said additional delays would force the United States and its allies to keep its legacy fighters flying longer, which would result in higher maintenance costs. It would also leave them with older jets, which Kendall said "cannot match the offensive and defensive capabilities provided by F-35."

The Pentagon first disclosed problems with non-U.S. magnets in a little-noticed written statement to Congress in the spring of 2013. But the statement did not name companies involved and did not disclose that some of the parts came from China.

Officials at Northrop, Honeywell and Lockheed declined to comment on the issue, referring queries to the Pentagon.

Joe DellaVedova, spokesman for the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) at the Pentagon, said the office was committed to ensuring that federal defense acquisition laws were strictly followed.

"There was never any risk of technology transfer or other security breach associated with these manufacturing compliance issues," he said. "The JPO is working with industry to put in place long-term solutions to avoid the need for future waivers."

In his statement to Congress, Kendall said he took the matter "extremely seriously" and said Lockheed was told to take aggressive steps to identify any further cases, and correct its compliance process.

Bill Greenwalt, a former senior defense official and now an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute think tank, said the risk to national security appeared low since the magnets in question had no programmable hardware.

However, he added: "This is an area that will need considerable due diligence in the future to ensure that components for more high-risk applications are safe from potential tampering and foreign mischief."

SPECIALTY METALS

Since 1973, U.S. laws have banned the procurement of specialty metals produced outside the United States for use on U.S. weapons. A separate 2006 law also bans the purchase of end-use items and components that include such specialty metals.

The documents reviewed by Reuters show that Northrop first discovered the use of non-compliant Japanese magnets on the Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar it builds for the F-35 in August 2012, alerting the prime contractor, Lockheed, which then told the Pentagon.

A subsequent investigation of all parts on the F-35 turned up two more cases in which non-U.S. specialty metals were used on the F-35's radar, and on target assemblies built by Honeywell that are used for positioning doors and landing gear.

Northrop's radar was also found to contain $2 magnets made by Chengdu Magnetic Material Science & Technology Co, in China's Sichuan region, according to the documents.

The magnets used on the Honeywell target assemblies were acquired through Illinois-based Dexter Magnetic Technologies Inc.

Dexter and Chengdu Magnetic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

KNOWING AND WILLFUL?

In June, the House Armed Services Committee asked the GAO to determine whether the companies involved "knowingly and willfully" supplied non-compliant magnets, and how the Pentagon investigated that question. The committee also asked GAO for recommendations on potential changes, such as fines or penalties for non-compliance to deter future problems, as well as sug-gestions for beefing up Pentagon supply chain management procedures.

In a document approving use of Chinese magnets on the batch of 32 F-35 fighter planes now being built, Kendall said neither Lockheed nor Northrop knowingly allowed the parts to be used.

In his waiver, Kendall wrote that Northrop's initial mistake, involving magnets built in Japan, was an "administrative oversight" and noted the firm quickly reported the matter when it was discovered in August 2012. It led to the comprehensive review that found two additional issues involving Chinese-built magnets.

It is not clear from the waiver documents whether Kendall determined that Honeywell's use of Chinese-built magnets involved a similar mistake.

(Editing by Michael Williams, Tiffany Wu and Grant McCool)

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[indochina]

Where the picture of HQ-19 missile ?

 

[AssassinsMace]

This article seems to suggest China helped Saudi Arabia get nukes to go along with DF-21s they bought secretly okayed by the US.

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Exclusive: CIA Helped Saudis in Chinese Missile Deal

By Jeff Stein / January 29, 2014 12:44 PM EST

Saudi Arabia has long been a back-room player in the Middle East's nuclear game of thrones, apparently content to bankroll the ambitions of Pakistan and Iraq (under Saddam Hussein) to counter the rise of its mortal enemy, Iran.

But as the West and Iran have moved closer to a nuclear accommodation, signs are emerging that the monarchy is ready to give the world a peek at a new missile strike-force of its own-which has been upgraded with Washington's careful connivence.

According to a well-placed intelligence source, Saudi Arabia bought ballistic missiles from China in 2007 in a hitherto unreported deal that won Washington's quiet approval on condition that CIA technical experts could verify they were not designed to carry nuclear warheads.

The solid-fueled, medium range DF-21 East Wind missiles are an improvement over the DF-3s the Saudis clandestinely acquired from China in 1988, experts say, although they differ on how much of an upgrade they were.

The newer missiles, known as CSS-5s in NATO parlance, have a shorter range but greater accuracy, making them more useful against "high-value targets in Tehran, like presidential palaces or supreme-leader palaces," Jeffrey Lewis, director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, tells Newsweek. They can also be fired much more quickly.

The poor accuracy of the old DF-3s rendered them impotent during the first Gulf War as a counter-strike to Saddam Hussein's Scuds, according to a 1996 memoir by Saudi Prince Khaled bin Sultan, then-commander of the Riyadh's Air Defense Forces. King Fahd declined to fling them at Iraq because the likely result would have been mass civilian casualties, and "the Coalition's air campaign being waged against Iraq was sufficient retaliation," Khaled wrote in Desert Warrior.

When that war ended, the Saudis went looking for something better. In China, they likely found it. But unlike in 1988, when they royally annoyed Washington with their secret acquisition of DF-3s, this time they decided to play nice. And the CIA was their assigned playmate.

CIA and Saudi air force officers hammered out the ways and means for acquiring the new Chinese missiles during a series of secretive meetings at the spy agency's Langley headquarters and over dinners at restaurants in Northern Virginia during the spring and summer of 2007, a well-informed source tells Newsweek. The arrangements were so sensitive that then-Deputy CIA Director Stephen Kappes ordered the CIA's logistical costs, estimated at $600,000-$700,000 buried under a vague "ops support" heading in internal budget documents-prompting loud complaints from the head of the agency's support staff.

Aside from technical personnel, among the few CIA officials let in on the deal were the agency's then-number three, Associate Deputy Director Michael Morrell, a longtime Asia hand; John Kringen, then-head of the agency's intelligence directorate; and the CIA's Riyadh station chief, who Newsweek is not identifying because he remains undercover. Two analysts subsequently traveled to Saudi Arabia, inspected the crates and returned satisfied that the missiles were not designed to carry nukes, says the source, who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing the still-secret deal.

The CIA declined to comment, as did current and former White House officials. The Chinese and Saudi embassies in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Reports that the Saudis have upgraded their missile fleet, however, are not new. Former CIA analyst Jonathan Scherck, for example, who managed intelligence reports on Saudi Arabia as a contractor from 2005 to 2007, claimed in an unauthorized 2010 book that China began supplying a "turn-key nuclear ballistic missile system" to the kingdom with the covert approval of the George W. Bush administration, "no later than December 2003."

Lewis discounts Scherk's "nuclear" claim, which Scherck says he based on reports he saw from CIA spies and technical collection systems.

Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA and White House National Security Council expert on the Middle East, also dismisses Scherk's nuclear scenario, as well as recent claims by the BBC and Time magazine--citing a former head of Israeli military intelligence--that the Saudis had placed Pakistani nuclear warheads "on order."

"Nonsense and disinformation," he told Newsweek.

But Lewis says that other small but important details in Scherck's book, Patriot Lost, checked out. "One can raise a number of questions about the logic in Scherck's book-particularly when he starts imagining Pakistani warheads on those Chinese missiles or accusing Bush Administration officials of various crimes," Lewis explains, "but when Scherck sticks to the details about monitoring foreign missile shipments and deployments, he's believable."

An engineer on a U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser before joining the CIA, Scherck was fired in 2008 for pursuing details out of channels at the National Geospatial Agency, the satellite imagery service helmed then by James Clapper, now director of National Intelligence. Then the Justice Department pounced on him, seizing the modest revenues from his unauthorized, self-published book and prohibiting him from writing or talking further about the matter. Now 39, Scherck works as a night manager of a hotel in Southern California while he works on a screenplay.

Meanwhile, the Saudis have been acting like they want people to take notice of their previously furtive missile program.

"Over the past few years, Saudi Arabia has started talking a lot about its Strategic Missile Forces," Lewis writes in the draft of an upcoming piece for Foreign Policy that he showed Newsweek. "And, in the course of doing so, Riyadh seems to be hinting that it has bought at least two new types of ballistic missiles."

"For example," Lewis writes, "on 2010, Khaled - by then Deputy Defense Minister -- cut the ribbon on a new headquarters building in Riyadh for the Strategic Missile Forces. They released a number of images of the building, both inside and out. Moreover, since about 2007, the Saudi press has covered graduation ceremonies from the Strategic Missile Forces school in Wadi ad-Dawasir -- especially if the commencement speaker is a person of importance.

"The process of recruiting Saudis has also resulted in fair amount of information appearing in print, right down to the pay schedule," he added. "For a while, the Strategic Missile Force even had a website, although it is no longer active."

The most intriguing photo to appear so far, showed "Khaled's replacement-the recently removed Deputy Minister of Defense Prince Fahd-visiting the Strategic Missile Forces Headquarters in Riyadh," Lewis writes. Instead of gifting him with the usual "solid gold falcon in a glass case... the stuff dreams are made of," Lewis cracks, officials are shown posing with a glass-enclosed case of three missile models.

"The missile on the far left is, obviously, a DF-3 of the sort that Saudi Arabia purchased from China in the late 1980s," Lewis writes. "But the other two? They could any one of Chinese or Pakistani missiles. All the missiles Lewis mentions are nuclear-capable.

Again, the unprecedented missiles-and-pony show could be a deception. In any case, the Saudis are banging the drums around their missile bases-without any apparent notice here, Lewis says, probably because it's all in Arabic.

The local Saudi press has been covering blood drives and disaster relief efforts by personnel at known missile bases, Lewis tells Newsweek. And while officials have been secretive about another missile base, he's discovered that "people on Arabic bulletin boards have big mouths.

"Turns out, if you're a Saudi assigned to a launch unit," he says, "the most natural thing in the world is to announce on a bulletin board, 'Hi, I work for the Saudi missile forces and I've been assigned to this place and where can I get an apartment?' And people openly talk about their deployments in a way that Saudi officials would freak if they realized it."

Maybe. But you can't scare people if nobody knows what you got. Maybe the Saudis are suddenly trying to get attention. They've faced the deterrence dilemma before.

In late 1988, Prince Khaled recalled in his memoir, he worried that nobody had detected the deployment of the secretly acquired Chinese DF-3s. What good was having them if nobody was afraid of them? He suggested leaking their existence, "as the object of acquiring the weapon would not have been achieved" unless the world (read: Iranians and Israelis) knew about it. "As it happened," he wrote in Desert Warrior, "we had no need to do so, because the Americans broke the news first." And they were in a king's rage about it.

But what about the 2007 Chinese missile deal Newsweek was told about? No one seems to have noticed that, either.

But they may now.

Important note:Those DF-21s-or whatever they are-don't dramatically tilt the Middle East map in the Saudis' favor.

"Even if it is the case that Saudi Arabia received DF-21 missiles, unless they also received nuclear warheads for the missiles, it has little meaning for the regional military balance," Pollack told Newsweek.

"Saudi Arabia has had Chinese ballistic missiles since the 1980s, and the DF-21 has a shorter range than the CSS-2s they originally bought. A conventional warhead on the DF-21 would be too small to cause the kind of damage that would have a strategic impact. Even if the Chinese had sold Saudis the mod-4 warhead for the DF-21-which theoretically can cripple an aircraft carrier-the Saudis lack the sensor technology to find an aircraft carrier, except when one is docked at Port Jebel Ali in the UAE, Saudi Arabia's close ally."

Lewis agrees-with caveats. When you're talking nukes and missiles, you always have to factor in the weird stuff, like Kissinger whispering to Hanoi that Nixon was bonkers over Vietnam and would slap the armageddon button if pushed too far-the so-called "madman theory."

"It has its advantages, it definitely has its advantages," Lewis says of the new Saudi missiles deal, if only because some of those missiles could have been modified to carry nuclear warheads after CIA technicians left. "But I don't know if I were an Iranian I would feel fundamentally different about the DF 21s than I did about the DF-3..."

He adds, "Maybe there's a whole gut, or visceral, thing, where they"-the Iranians- "say, 'Hey, these guys spent a lot of money, they're serious.' So maybe it just conveys the Saudis' will in a way that is unsettling, in a way that the fine old missile system wasn't.

"It's a weird thing. It has its own, strange logic. So yeah, it makes a difference. But it's not a difference-maker."

Newsweek Contributing Editor Jeff Stein writes the SpyTalk column from Washington.

Ten years from now we'll probably here this story again minus the part it was okayed by the US.