PLA Ground Forces news, pics and videos
- Thread starter Jeff Head
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They seem reasonably equipped. Although the regular ground forces not operating close to the border seem to have slightly older equipment as you would expect. But what I find surprising is the lack of individual radios. You would assume with China's great civilian industry making quality HF radios that these would be prevalent.
Doesn’t make much sense to give every soldier a radio, only the CO in the unit or his NCOs should be needing it, to talk to other sections, platoons, etc. to coordinate actions. you cant have a million people on a radio net, too busy and confusing.
You could still funnel the radio chatter just one or two levels up in the hierarchy to reduce the noise.
You could easily process and datamine all the communications at a central level if you wanted to with modern technology. You could easily compress the audio to store all the communications, do AI speech to text, and then AI analyze the text. It is also much easier for humans to process high amount of concurrent text streams than audio streams as anyone who used Discord would know. So you could have humans analyzing and processing the text generated by the speech to text algorithms.
Why would it matter what one soldier is doing? The small unit should be able to stay together and do its job, without every individual talking to a higher chain. The officer in charge of the small unit is the one making the decisions, and passing on relevant info. That much info would just overwhelm anyone needing to plan. Commanders don’t need to know every little detail, they need to know what the small teams under them are doing as independent units, not as individual soldiers.
I noticed from watching CCTV7 that there are three soliers in each squad that have radios, probably due to PLA’s 3-3-3 combat configuration.
The new combat system with the digital NVGs, new helmet, radio and scoped rifles seem to have been only given to SOF or tibet frontline troops. Is it the case that they decided against issuing the new combat equipment system to regular army troops? Or could they be waiting for a new, better system for the entire army?
Right now what I'm seeing from these videos is that SOF is fairly well equipped, but regular army is still at:
>iron sight rifle (no attachments)
>basic helmet, no mounting for NVGs, rails, or for earpro
>basic vest for body armor
>new camo pattern completely adopted
It's been 5 years since the 2019 parade showcasing the new systems, I'm inclined to believe they have just chosen not to issue the equipment to regular army, or is there another reason for the lack of progress in combat equipment?
Right now what I'm seeing from these videos is that SOF is fairly well equipped, but regular army is still at:
>iron sight rifle (no attachments)
>basic helmet, no mounting for NVGs, rails, or for earpro
>basic vest for body armor
>new camo pattern completely adopted
It's been 5 years since the 2019 parade showcasing the new systems, I'm inclined to believe they have just chosen not to issue the equipment to regular army, or is there another reason for the lack of progress in combat equipment?
Things don't work that way.
Reading text ... maybe. At certain levels. Higher level HQs which are static and can afford to sit down in front of a screen, sure, speech to text can work. The guys aggregating the info for the BMS already do that. At the lower level ... at the point of contact. Guys are running around trying to make sense of incoming and outgoing fire, trying to maintain situational awareness and trying not to trip ... have to stop and read a text? No way.
Don't understand what you mean by funneling radio chatter up the hierachy.
But your previous post - radio channels are 1 person talk, everybody else listens. The larger your net, the more likely someone is talking and someone else having a bad day has to wait patiently to pass on his info. Every layer is kept small and every layer is one channel - one signal set. Your PLT HQ that has to communicate one layer down has 1 set for the squad net and 1 set for comms one layer up to COY HQ. You could switch channels to access more nets but it also means you are uncontactable from the other (main) channel for the duration you are switched out. Which is why your Coy and above HQs start to become a veritable walking forest of antennas as they maintain one set for every net they have to be part of. That's why there exists the vocation of Signaller. They are trained not just on the technical aspects of maintaining connections using the appropriate antennas and etc. They are also trained to communicate appropriately and with discipline under duress. It's harder than a lot of people think. There are standard templates in which info is relayed and we are conditioned to accept info in that format. It's faster that way and anybody doing it different just confuses everybody else. Almost every fieldex I've been part of has someone getting chewed out int he debrief for poor comms.
Bottom line. Nets are kept small for a reason. Conference calls don't work in a heated situation cos people trying to talk over each other just results in a garbage of voices.