Re: Are China's military equipments 20 years behind the US' army ?
@plawolf, you make some good points but I will have to agree to disagree as to what the outcome would be in a similar conflict in the present day. Especially since I don't think it's realistic to expect China to get the same kind of international military co-operation that the US got.
There is one detail highlighted by Operation Desert Storm which I want to mention. Which is that Chinese armored vehicles seem to be less well armored than their Western counterparts, even the most recent IFVs and MBTs as implied by their comparative weights.
Shifting the goal posts now are we?
You said the Chinese military would 'utterly fail' to do a similar job as the US military.
I have shown all your examples to have a marginal impact at best, which would hardly have a decisive impact on the overall campaign if China was in America's shoes at that time. Now that you seem to realize how wrong your original statement was, you are trying to change the parameters to make it harder for China. And using politics is a pretty weak and questionable way to do it, since we are taking about a purely hypothetical situation here, how you would even begin to think the political context would apply is beyond me. Especially given the poor image America has, especially in Muslim countries right now.
Your highlighted example from desert storm is also highly peculiar, and looks very forced.
The biggest lessons militaries around the world learnt from desert storm was
- The importance of modern air power and precision munitions
- The importance of stealth technologies
- The importance of good night vision and fire control equipment on tanks
How well armored tanks were was not really all that important, since in the vast majority of cases, the Iraqi forces were all but wiped out before they even saw coalition forces coming in.
Night and thermal vision is standard on all elite PLA front line units, and there are easily more than enough of such forces to comfortably defeat the Iraqi army of 91.
What more, the night vision/thermal gear, as well as the FCS on the likes of the Type 96G and Type 99 are at the very least on par to what the M1A1 had, and probably superior, especially in terms of the FCS, as the Type 99 has a hunter killer capability that was not introduced until the M1A2 on Abrams after the Gulf war. But that is hair split, since the main point is that current main front line PLA MBTs are undisputedly superior to the very best the Iraqis have in 91.
The lighter weight of Chinese armored vehicles is because of a stronger focus on range and mobility by the PLA compared to the US and allies because the two were gearing up to fight in very different battlefields.
In open desert warfare, the PLA's preference for mobility and range could easily prove decisive since that battlefield would give their armor the space to fully exploit their mobility and range against the notoriously gas hungry Abrams and the smaller numbers of heavier opfor tanks to conduct outflanking maneuvers.
As the Germans found out in WWII, having the biggest, baddest, most powerful tanks in the world counts for nothing if those tanks run out of fuel. But this is getting off topic.
You have so far shown nothing that would give any credibility to your claim that the PLA of today would 'utterly fail' against the Iraqi military of 91. That is not because of fancy 'spinning' by me, but because there is absolutely no support for such a far fetch claim.
In terms of quality of equipment, there is precious little America had in 91 that China does not have an equivalent deployed today, what more, there are plenty of things China has deployed today which America and allies did not have in 91. The only significant difference between the PLA of today and the US military of 91 was the fact that the US had more of most weapons systems then than China does now.
However, we are not discussing if the PLA of today could have taken on the American military of 91 and won. What China has available to deploy now is more than enough to match gulf war US deployments at the minimum, and with superior systems and weapons in a great many cases, it would take a real spin doctor to come up with a remotely convincing case for how the PLA would have 'utterly failed' to beat Saddam's forces had they been given the same support as the US enjoyed. Even without coalition partners, the PLA could still have prevailed if they were allowed to use the same bases as the US used even if no-one else got involved in the actual fighting. It might not have been as decisive or one-sided, but then the same thing could have been said if the US went in alone without help.
