6 Implementing Chinese Tactics in Training Events, part 2 Offense

Implementing Chinese Tactics in Training Events, part 2 Offense by James (Jay) Hunt

Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 7-100.3, Chinese Tactics, provides key insights for the U.S. Army training, professional education, and leader development community on how Chinese ground forces approach tactical operations. This article series provides a comparison of concepts and conditions presented in the ATP with the opposing force (OPFOR) as described in the Training Circular (TC) 7-100 series and the Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE World). It is intended to suggest practical areas of emphasis for training developers’ incorporation of ATP conditions and S2 development of threat models.

Each article discusses purposes and philosophies that might shape a training event road-to-war and main tactics, battlefield organization, and control measures, implementing force groupings and highlights unique conditions or battle drills. This article focuses on implementing ATP 7-100.3 conditions for an offense.

For this series and compliance with AR 350-1 and TRADOC Regulation 350-70, examples will use the fictional country of Olvana, the DATE Pacific large regional hegemon that presents many of the conditions of China as described in the ATP.

A similar, yet distinct approach to offensive operations.

ATP 7-100.3 describes offensive actions as the decisive form of land operations for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Army’s (PLAA). The approach is most often against enemy formations but may also focus on key terrain. While this is not unique to the PLAA, the focus of its execution is distinct from how the OPFOR has traditionally executed offensive actions as described in TC 7-100.2, Opposing Force Tactics.

The Chinese model relies much more on separating and isolating portions of an enemy's defense for subsequent defeat in detail, rather than the common OPFOR’s disruption of an enemy’s defense and massing of combat power to overcome it. The envelopment of a flank, whether an actual enemy flank or one created through action, takes advantage of areas in which the enemy has no concentrated defenses, does not expect an attack, or is in some other way vulnerable. Where no clear flank exists, PLAA elements will leverage all domains (including air, electronic, virtual) to create a vulnerable point for an enabling attack.

Figure 1 Sample Functional Diagram for OPFOR Integrated Attack (with common activities, actions, targets)

The PLAA holds that forces have multiple combat power effects through coordination and synchronization of their capabilities and that isolation of an element from its parent is the most effective way to diminish the enemy force and subsequently annihilate it. This philosophy extends to isolating reinforcements, reserve forces, and support elements from contributing in any significant manner.

Rather than focusing on winning direct confrontations through technological superiority, technology advantages, deception, and agility are used to offset or negate enemy strengths while finding and exploiting enemy weaknesses. This effectively results in a return to classical tactics, albeit across multiple domains, to enable flank-creation, envelopment or isolation, and defeat in detail.

The PLAA holds that forces have multiple combat power effects through coordination and synchronization of their capabilities and that isolation of an element from its parent is the most effective way to diminish the enemy force and subsequently annihilate it. This philosophy extends to isolating reinforcements, reserve forces, and support elements from contributing in any significant manner.

Rather than focusing on winning direct confrontations through technological superiority, technology advantages, deception, and agility are used to offset or negate enemy strengths while finding and exploiting enemy weaknesses. This effectively results in a return to classical tactics, albeit across multiple domains, to enable flank-creation, envelopment or isolation, and defeat in detail.

Table 1 Comparison of Offensive Purposes (rearranged to highlight commonalities)

While the PLAA is certainly capable of the mass wave attacks observed in the past, their new emphasis on agility and leveraging a multi-domain environment and a connected battlefield may result in a more focused and lethal adversary. Traditional advantages of massive overmatch are being supplemented with an understanding that offensive operations against an advanced defender are more complex. The PLAA recognition that operations will exercise a range of capabilities at depth with the likelihood of communications disruption. An increased acceptance of initiative-taking and emphasis on mission understanding at lower echelons of command is intended to mitigate such disruptions and allow continued operations. While this may be aspirational in the near term, the modeling of leadership similar to Western forces will continue to shape PLA robustness in the face of multi-domain operations.

Developer Tip: Portrayal of Olvanan offensive actions should present varying levels of command resiliency and interoperability throughout their depth.

Organizing the Battlefield

Describing operational zones and other control measures is a common method of organizing a unit’s area of responsibility and operations. The PLAA offensive battlefield organization is similar to the OPFOR’s with naming being the main distinguisher. The emphasis on fixing the enemy combat with a minimum of force while maneuvering to attack flanks common in OPFOR doctrine is an evolving mindset for the PLAA. As in other areas, their formation groupings and battlefield control measures reflect the aspirational goal of increased command flexibility and enabling of initiative at lower levels.

Table 3 Comparison of Offensive Battlefield Zones, from ATP 7-100.3 and TC 7-100.2

The Security Groups’ mission follows closely with the OPFOR model of screening for mobility challenges and enemy composition and dispositions. The forward security group will maneuver well in advance of the Frontline Attack Groups and will usually be supported by their organic indirect fires and those of the Firepower Group. The screen frontage may be wider than planned to minimize the risk of betraying the intended attack direction.

The Frontline Attack Groups will generally serve as fixing elements to enable Thrust Attack Group or Depth Attack Groups’ maneuver to attack flanks or other objectives. The naming of the action elements that conduct the penetration or flank attacks enabled by the Frontline Attack Groups appears less important than their role.

The number, size, and range of firing positions will adapt based on the defender’s counter-battery capabilities. Firepower Groups will support forward elements in the Advance and Unfolding phases at maximum range, transitioning to massed aimed fires in support of the Attack Groups. Firepower Groups will also be integrated with short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) or rockets to achieve a combined arms effect similar to close air support.

Developer Tip: Ensure that groupings and their movements do not betray the intended points of attack through deception and information warfare. Conduct deep attacks for both practical effects as well as deception.

Force Groupings and Roles

The ATP describes a Chinese force structure that is evolving to meet its expanded understanding and tactics. The highly structured and rigid deployment patterns of previous generations are starting to give way to more flexible and dynamically task-organized groupings. This “building the plane in-flight” makes threat modeling difficult, forcing developers and analysts to focus on roles and tactical functions rather than stock hierarchies. As noted in the ATP, Chinese naming of these groupings is similarly flexible and appears to be unstandardized and still somewhat in development.

Table 4 Comparison of Selected Offensive Force Groupings, ATP7-100.3 versus TC 7-100.2

The force groupings for the offense are broadly similar between the Chinese model and the OPFOR. Each prefers to fix the enemy's combat power while maneuvering to strike at flanks and key systems.

            Figure 2 Sample Olvanan CA-BDE Advance Formation

The Security Groups’ mission follows closely with the OPFOR model of screening for mobility challenges and enemy composition and dispositions. The forward security group will maneuver well in advance of the Frontline Attack Groups and will usually be supported by their organic indirect fires and those of the Firepower Group. They may also be supported by an Advance Group. The screen frontage may be wider than the planned attack corridor to minimize the risk of betraying the intended point of attack (up to 5km for a CA-BDE).

The Advance Group supports the Security Group while seeking to find and initiate contact with the enemy forward elements. The implementation of this element may vary based on conditions and forces encountered. In some cases, it may function similarly to a movement to contact’s advance guard with the tasks of gain and maintain contact, disrupt, or fix the enemy. In others, the Advance Guard functions more like the OPFOR reconnaissance attack, finding and initiating the fix ahead or the Frontline Attack Groups in order to facilitate bypass of a Depth Maneuver Group. This capability may also be used as part of the deception plan to focus the enemy's attention away from the planned actual point of penetration.

The Frontline Attack Groups will generally serve as fixing elements to enable the Depth Attack Groups’ attacks against the enemy flanks or other objectives. They may also conduct probing across all areas of contact with the enemy defenders to identify potential weak points and vulnerabilities.

The Thrust Maneuver Group, if used, strikes at deeper targets and disrupts or precludes reinforcements from supporting the defense. Where the OPFOR leverages indirect fires at maximum range and air power to execute deep strikes, the ATP suggests a significantly different approach. Short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) and rockets might be used instead of close air support (CAS) to strike at deep targets and disrupt defenders and reinforcements.

These groupings described in the ATP may still be aspirational and under development. The force structures of the fictional DATE countries, particularly Olvana, are similarly adapting. As of this writing, the Olvanan Army force structure is being updated to more accurately represent this more agile force grouping. The existing Olvana force structure may still be used to represent the conditions described in the ATP. The example below illustrates how elements from the current Olvanan force structure (two brigade tactical groups (BTG) with additional elements) might be task organized into a combat group more representative of conditions described in the ATP.

         Figure 3 Sample Task Organization of an Olvana Combined Arms Brigade

Developer Tip: The structural ambiguity may itself be a training objective, forcing analysts to identify forces by role in a particular situation while mitigating some of the risks of tactical mirroring or template biases. When developing orders of battle for a given training event, be aggressive when choosing capabilities that meet the training requirements, such as SRBMs and INFOWAR.

Unique Conditions and Techniques

There are several conditions that ATP 7-100.3 presents that might be incorporated into training events that demonstrate the application of Chinese tactical preferences. These should not be construed as prescriptive but may provide unique add-ins to training event requirements.

Most Common Tactic – Envelopment

The envelopment is the most common of the offensive tactics discussed in the ATP and can be expected to be executed in one form or another at all echelons. The PLAA’s philosophical preference for fixing, deceiving, or precluding a portion of an enemy force then attacking a flank will be a key counter-task for developing plans and exercises. As the tactics mentioned in the ATP (penetration, pursuit, firepower, ambush, raid) are fairly well understood, this section will focus on the basic Chinese expression of envelopments.

The Chinese use of the envelopment as described in the ATP is similar in execution to the OPFOR integrated attack described in TC 7-100.2 (3-64). Fixing forces and information warfare (INFOWAR) elements prevent the enemy’s combat power from interfering with the assault and exploitation of an objective. The OPFOR description of the integrated attack does not, however, go into depth on some of the key elements described in the ATP, such as using penetrations and multi-domain attacks to create a flank or to exploit a vulnerable point in the enemy’s defense.

Information and Firepower Assault. Of the firepower attacks described in the ATP, the Information and Firepower Assault (7-101) appears to be uniquely able to create the conditions for decisive action in the offense. This comprises a “blitz” of indirect fires to destroy, degrade, or neutralize key targets, and electronic attack to disrupt and isolate command and control. This may be sufficient to accomplish the mission or set the conditions for subsequent operations.

Vertical Envelopment. The thrust maneuvering group (4-44), usually assumed to be a highly mobile armor force, may also be an air-mobile assault force. Such an attack opens another flank that the enemy must defend, attacking command nodes or supply areas, disrupting reinforcements or counterattacks, and blocking retrograde routes.

Increased initiative. The previously discussed desire to develop lower-echelon leaders’ situational awareness and initiative is an ongoing process. The Chinese assumption that communication interference will detract from their coordination and synchronization may be manifested in training events. Units should ensure that this fear is realized with extensive use of multi-domain attack vectors against command and control capabilities. It would also be accurate for OPFOR, in the face of such interference, to have a company or platoon exercise initiative by doing something unexpected. Analysts should be challenged with identifying incongruous behavior that might suggest opportunities or threats.

Conclusion

The shift in emphasis to China is a challenge to all Soldiers. Training developers, OPFOR personnel, and unit commanders all must maintain awareness of the evolving understanding of the pacing threat, and ensure that training events reflect its unique characteristics. They are not the Russians, Krasnovians, Missourians, or Cortinians. The composite OPFOR as described in the TC 7-100 series and the DATE actors are valuable and flexible tools to implement the mindset and unique characteristics of Chinese tactics.