Beijing, China: July 2, 2008 –IR Summary/ NYT – During the earthquake, the operation by China Militatry had glaring deficiencies. Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, does not seem to be satisfied by military approach to handle the situation.

He said:  “The air force should have been able to get troops into Wenchuan in two hours,” he said, referring to a county near the quake’s epicenter. “It took 44 hours. If it took them 10 hours, that’s understandable. But 44 hours is shameful.”

James C. Mulvenon, a specialist on the Chinese military at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a government contractor in Washington that performs classified analyses on overseas military programs, said:

“The earthquake has shown both Army’s both sides, best as well as worst. It mobilized quickly, but the troops were unprepared to save lives in the first 72 hours, when thousands were buried under toppled masonry and every minute mattered.
“You basically had a bunch of guys humping through the mountains on foot and digging out people with their hands,” Mr. Mulvenon said. “It was not a stellar example of a modern military.”

In an online forum hosted by the state-run People’s Daily, Zhang Zhaozhong, a prominent defense analyst, said that specialized units like the Marine Corps, the 38th Army Corps of Engineers and the engineering division of the Second Artillery Corps understood how to rescue survivors from beneath collapsed buildings.
But he acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of the deployed forces, ordinary combat troops, had little if any rescue training.

The army had about 100 helicopters ferrying food, supplies and medical teams into the remote mountain areas and rescuing the injured, said Dennis J. Blasko, a former American Army attaché in Beijing.

“The management of aircraft and helicopters operating in the area is probably the largest extended operation of its kind the P.L.A. has ever conducted,” he said.
But Mr. Blasko and other experts said that because the military did not have heavy-lift helicopters, vital equipment like excavators and cranes had to be brought in on roads obstructed by landslides, slowing the pace of the rescue operations.

Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the military’s response did not reflect well on the military’s preparedness for a potential war with, say, Taiwan, the independently governed island that China claims as its sovereign territory.

China’s air force deployed 6,500 paratroopers to Sichuan, but only 15 ended up dropping into the disaster zone, military officials said, because of bad weather and forbidding mountain terrain. Mr. Shen called the effort too little and too late.
“The air force should have been able to get troops into Wenchuan in two hours,” he said, referring to a county near the quake’s epicenter. “It took 44 hours. If it took them 10 hours, that’s understandable. But 44 hours is shameful.”

Allan Behm, a former official in Australia’s Defense Ministry, said the Chinese military was evidently still focused on conventional warfare rather than engineering skills.
In spite of its efforts to modernize, Mr. Behm said, “the P.L.A. is still built on the idea of bringing hundreds of thousands of troops into the battle area.” Full

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