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Show of Might
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Uncomfortable presence of PLA-PLAAF exercising teams at Qinghai-Tibet Plateau |
PHL-05 MBRL
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Prasun K. Sengupta
Should a limited but high-intensity border conflict break out between China and India over the next five years, how exactly will the battles be fought? And where? The most likely answers to these two questions came from none other than Beijing’s People’s Daily Online, which on November 15 last year, while commenting on the Indian Army’s China-centric future force modernisation-cum-expansion plans due for implementation in the 12th Defence Plan (see FORCE January 2012, pages 32-36), stated: ‘In an era when precision-guided weapons are developing rapidly, everyone with common sense knows that concentrated troops could be eliminated easily’.
Translated for the layman, it means that a) the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
will realise its tactical objectives on the ground by resorting to
massed fire-assaults delivered by a numerically superior
deployed force comprising tactical non-line-of-sight battlefield |
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support missiles (NLOS-BSM)
and long-range multi-barrel rocket launchers (MBRL) capable of firing rockets
equipped with sensor-fuzed munitions (SGM), and b) such rocket artillery-based
weapons would be employed in tactical areas that are ideally suited for
deployment of such weapons, i.e. the flat, locational deserts around eastern
Ladakh and the foothills opposite Uttarakhand State. And it is exactly in these
areas that, for the second year in a row, the PLA Army and the PLA Air Force
(PLAAF) last year, conducted Brigade-level live-fire exercises on the foot of
the snowcapped mountains on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau at an altitude of more
than 5,000 metres. Though the exercises, dubbed as Integrated Joint Operations
(IJO), were conducted under the command of the Tibet Military District, which
comes under the Chengdu Military Region (MR), a few select field artillery and
armoured formations belonging to the Lanzhou MR also took part in the combined
arms exercises, which got underway last July and lasted till last October.
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