Sunday, July 25, 2010

Peace Mission 2010

Looks like the military exercise between Shanghai Cooperation Organization is becoming an annual occurrence instead of bi-annual.

According to rian, the next one will be this September. Previously, Peace Mission had taken place in 2005, 2007 and 2009. The article is as follows:

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will conduct a series of anti-terror drills from September 9 - 25 in Kazakhstan, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

The exercise, codenamed Peace Mission 2010, will be held at the Matybulak base near the town of Gvardeisky with each of the SCO member states (China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) contributing at least one operational-tactical group.

Iran, India, Mongolia and Pakistan have observer status in the organization.

The drills will test the interoperability of the SCO armed forces in rendering assistance to a member state involved in an internal armed conflict or subjected to a mass terrorist attack.


In many ways, these exercises have come full circle. In 2005, it involved 10,000 soldiers and was widely reported by different media circles. At that time, Russians were using the exercise as an opportunity to show off new hardware to export to China. Russians also showed themselves to be much better than PLA in all of the different missions. As time went on, PLA have improved a lot in the past 2 exercises, but there is a still a large gap between the operational capability of the two forces. Much of that is due to the less intensive and realistic training method of PLA. The Russians have had recent ground combats, so they have used those live combat experience to develop training procedure and ROE that is much more effective than that of PLA. Even as late as 2009, PLA commanders commented that they were impressed with Russian troops strictness in cleaning and maintaining equipments and their ability to fly and enter battle zones in their helicopter at much lower altitude.

1 comment:

SINOGASS said...

OK, there is still a gap between PLA and Russians but there must be some fields where PLA is superior ?!