Well shit, I can only hope this goes away one day, surely...
QBZ-191 service rifle family
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
That's not a new Handguard unfortunately it's an modification to the already existing handguard.
Not till the army head puts more priority on the soldiers, which is not expected to happen anytime soon. There are just more important and better things to buy than a rifle.
I guess that they will wait until it becomes so rich that even with a minimum budget, it can splurge on the troops—maybe next decade.
by78
General
The PLAGF has this ingrained habit of saving a few bucks upfront at the cost of producing subpar equipment that can compromise combat effectiveness. Thankfully, it appears the top leadership is aware of this problem. As a matter of fact, a very pointedly criticized this short-sighted practice. I think the quickest way to correct the problem is by purging the ranks of old peasants whose way of thinking and habits were formed when the PLAGF was still a peasant army. It's not like the Chinese military hasn't done this before. Both the PLAAF and PLAN have successfully transformed themselves, so the Army can readily borrow their experience and playbook to speed the process along.
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Were the recent purges ever targeted PLAGF?
Interesting, I'm not sure how long it would take for the PLA to reform. But considering the past decade, it might take 5 to 10 years, or maybe even less.
Infantry gear is almost always subpar - it's doctrinal even.
Very few infantry forces view the individual infantryman as important. Unless you go down that route, where every grunt is a gun fighter (only really makes sense for Tier 1 and maybe Tier 2 SFOR), then normatively, your average grunt is just there to provide perimeter and screens for the really important stuff - crew served weapons and people with higher echelon comms.
Even if doctrine doesn't already compromise the general insipidness of generic infantry gear - the fit-as-many-as-possible design parameters along with manufacture to the lowest bidder almost always results in a inherent level of suckiness to GI gear. That's handled by Basic Military Training which will hammer into you that you shall treasure what you have and not want what you don't.
Ultimately, have gear commiserate to the role of the trooper isn't a fail. Even if many here misunderstand the role of the GI and their correct levels of TOE and conflate the two.
The article, if I read it correctly, doesn't really outright criticise cost prudence per se. It is simply citing historical examples of failures as a warning against losing sight of the forest for the trees - overly zealous cost cutting. In it's words performance and systems must be matched so that "good horses" can be matched with "good saddles".
Herein lies the rub. Some people here are trying to put good saddles on ... "normal" horses.
It sounds politically incorrect and flies in the face of modern attitudes that every individual is a star waiting to be discovered but that is the truth of the matter - in most militaries, your average grunt is not a "good horse".
The GWOT, due to the limitations imposed on other military branches, YouTube and GoPro provide first-hand images of the scene to the public, led an entire generation to believe that war would forever revolve around skirmishes between infantry and infantry, giving rise to the “infantry/rifle supremacy” ideology.
The PLA was to some extent influenced by this, resulting in the formation of special operations brigades that concentrate elite infantry units, as well as the 21-style system that aims to distribute phones and radios to every ordinary infantry.
The Russia-Ukraine war and the escalation of tensions in the Pacific have awakened many: The specialization of infantry is correct, and the integration of firepower and information technology is also correct. However, firepower and information technology have now developed to the point where even infantry can hardly survive, so the kill chain cannot be overly reliant on infantry. But unfortunately, many still have not...
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Cringe, should've sent reporter with basic firearm knowledge. Seeing her bungling every few second looks bad.