Army must change with the times
Print Edition
PRESIDENT Xi Jinping has called for China’s army to be smaller but with greater combat capabilities and optimized structures as the country deepens reform of its armed forces.
Xi, who is also chairman of the Central Military Commission and head of a leading group on the reform of national defense and the armed forces, was speaking at a two-day conference on military reform which ended on Saturday.
Xi said the military must never get stuck in its old ways. It needed to change with the times.
“Otherwise, armed forces that were strong will become outdated, or even collapse at a single blow,” he said.
“History and reality tells us that a military, if it falls behind the times on scale and strength, it will fall behind on war ideology and developments in waging war, maybe forfeiting strategy and the right to initiate war,” he told the conference in Beijing.
China’s military needs to put more focus on technology rather than force of numbers, Xi said.
“This is a major, inevitable change,” Xi told the meeting. “We must seize the opportunity and make breakthroughs.”
He said changes had to be made if China was to build a strong world-class army.
In September last year, Xi announced that the armed forces would be cut by 300,000 troops from their original 2.3 million.
Citing rapid changes to the global military environment, Xi spoke about “informationized modern warfare,” noting that joint operations had grown to be the basic form of combat.
“Accordingly, there have been new changes in terms of the military’s size, structure, and formation, which features smaller in size, more capable in strength, modularization and multi-functionality, with scientific factors playing bigger roles,” Xi said.
He said the military’s structure must be readjusted and optimized, new types of forces developed, ratios between different types of forces rationalized, and the number and scale of the military downsized.
The Chinese army must grow into modern armed forces with Chinese characteristics, which can win informationized wars and implement their missions, he said.
“Quantity should be reduced, quality improved to build a capable and efficient modernized standing army,” Xi said, adding that China must develop a joint operation force system with an elite force at its core.
Xi urged the armed forces to embrace reform as a major political issue, strengthen rules and disciplines in their work, and further purge what he called the pernicious influence of Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou, two corrupt former vice chairmen of the military commission.
A total of 230 high-ranking military officials attended the meeting.
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