Military Modernization with Chinese Communist Characteristics – The Diplomat

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A China People’s Liberation Army Air Force pilot sits in the cockpit of a J-10 fighter jet during an aerial demonstration at a base of the 24th Division of the PLA air force in Yangcun, Tianjin, China on Tuesday April 13, 2010.

Credit: AP Photo / Alexander F. Yuan

In mid-August, the Chinese Air Force, the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), hosted the 10th Annual Golden Helmet, its annual air combat competition for the best PLAAF fighter pilots. This year, the PLAAF instituted further changes to make the competition more realistic. However, PLAAF appears to have also used Golden Helmet 2021 to test various methods to instill greater lan or combat spirit in its fighter pilots. Such efforts are of questionable value, but they point to the fact that, regardless of the technical competence of the PLAAF and the Chinese military as a whole, these forces will remain encumbered by the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party to shape the thoughts and feelings of their warriors.

Golden Helmet has evolved over the past decade, expanding and becoming more realistic. It started out as a simple one-on-one air combat competition, but in 2014 a two-on-two dog-fighting event was added, and this year even four-on-two dog fights were staged. . From 2014, the PLAAF began to view inflicting some degree of simulated damage to an aircraft as a kill, and from 2017 it changed the focus of competition towards achieving certain missions rather than just knocking down opponents or not being shot by them. . Apparently, until 2017, if a participant could not take down their opponents, they would often run away in order to run the clock and the engagement ended in a tie.

By 2020, the PLAAF had added early warning and electronic warfare aircraft to air combat, pushing simulated combat far beyond visual range and forcing participants to deal with jamming as they fought. This matches the PLAAF’s emphasis on system of systems training and its efforts to have fighter pilots focus on team combat to complete missions rather than just focusing on numbers. of victims.

In this year’s Golden Helmet iteration, the PLAAF attempted to increase the degree of such articulation by having for the first time different aircraft and participants from different units fight on the same team in a single formation. . (The Chinese military uses the term joint as the US military does to indicate inter-service cooperation, but it also sometimes uses the same term loosely to refer to what the US military calls joint-arms cooperation or even simply inter-unit cooperation.) Unit-versus-unit competition has long been an aspect of Golden Helmet, whose winning unit would receive the Skyhawk Cup. Because head-to-head dogfights are almost certainly always an event at Golden Helmet, this latest change likely didn’t eliminate the competition between the units and the Skyhawk Cup, but it made Golden Helmet much less of a competition and this more of an advanced training event.

However, rather than focusing on this change, reports on Golden Helmet 2021 focused on another first in this iteration: the study and training in lan, or the fighting spirit, which was conducted. throughout the competition. This was done in order to explore ways of [conducting] the work of cultivating the fighting spirit of the air force of the peoples of the new era. So it seems that the PLAAF used its best fighter pilots as guinea pigs to try out different methods of cultivating combativeness that it could then apply to the full force.

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As usual with reporting on the Chinese military, details of how the PLAAF explored ways to cultivate the fighting spirit were few and sketchy. The PLAAF tried a typical way to strengthen the political consciousness of the participants for training and war preparation: a temporary branch of the Chinese Communist Party was organized at the Golden Helmet 2021, and at the meetings of the branches of the party, the participants were informed about the international situation, the need for preparation for war, their functions and their missions. The courage to face difficulty and death as well as the fighting spirit of the aerial bayonet, a reference to the fighting spirit of the PLAAF pilots who faced American pilots during the Korean War, were also vigorously promoted. during these meetings.

The PLAAF also tried another typical method of strengthening participants’ combativeness: it rallied participants before each event, encouraged them at each event, and carried out evaluations immediately after each event. The PLAAF also tried to have under-wing discussions immediately after an event. A pilot who won an air-to-air engagement would have encouraged everyone who gathered near his plane after it landed by saying: The fighting spirit is the key to defeating the enemy and achieving victory. Victory in aerial combat does not only depend on skills and tactics; it is also necessary to have an altruistic spirit of relentless combat.

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Some of the PLAAF’s efforts were more personal. The PLAAF apparently made participants self-criticize, which seems to be a better way to undermine morale than to strengthen the fighting spirit. Political agents investigated participants’ thinking, helping them find relief and overcome difficulties, which sounds somewhat grim in translation, but almost certainly refers to mental coaching. The political officers of the Chinese military are supposed to serve as a sort of advisor, so that’s to be expected. But their effectiveness in this role is probably proportional to their presence, and the political officers of the PLAAF are the furthest from there as they are generally not pilots.

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All of the ways that PLAAF tried to cultivate the fighting spirit during Golden Helmet 2021 are of questionable value. There is not necessarily an inverse relationship between training and political indoctrination, so if the PLAAF applies these methods of cultivating combativeness throughout the force, the PLAAF fighter pilots will not necessarily become less effective. unless they sacrifice training time for indoctrination. PLAAF is unlikely to overlook training.

However, even though these indoctrination methods promote a greater sense of purpose in some pilots, one wonders why the PLAAF deems them necessary in the first place. Is the morale of the PLAAF fighter pilots low, or is the PLAAF just finding new ways to do the same? The latter seems more likely, but the efforts of the PLAAF will likely still be an extravagant waste of time and effort. They will probably keep politicians busy at the expense of keeping everyone busy. They will, however, satisfy the Chinese Communist Party’s innate desire to try to ensure conformity and allegiance in its tried and true, but not necessarily true, ways.

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