New Delhi: Even as India and China continue to engage each other at various levels to resolve the border standoff issues in eastern Ladakh, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been conducting training exercises in high-altitude areas since June to tackle logistical issues of food and fuel in preparation for a likely scenario of the standoff with India continuing well into the deadly Himalayan winter.
Aimed at ensuring efficiency in food and fuel availability and its swift distribution, the exercise module, which has been going on in a high-altitude area since June, also trains military cooks on how to cook fast hot dishes to feed the soldiers.
While training the forces to beat hunger pangs by taking recourse to dry food, 300 dishes of hot food with balanced nutritional values has to be cooked by 8 cooks within 80 minutes.
A recent training saw a joint support exercise in an “unfamiliar and complex area”—most possibly in the Tibetan plateau—at an altitude of 4,300 meters between a support brigade of the Xining Joint Logistics Support Center and a combined brigade of the 76th Army Group of the PLA.
The main duty of the officers and soldiers of the Xining logistics support unit is to pack the hot dishes and rice and deliver them to the designated areas to ensure that the officers and soldiers can eat steaming meals.
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An outlet of the state-controlled Chinese media quoted Zhou Baobin, from the logistics support unit as saying that the exercise is “a test of our physical abilities, skills and mutual coordination. It is also an assessment of our actual battlefield hot food”.
The 76th Army Group is one of the two Group Armies in the PLA’s India-focused Western Theater Command.
More than 50,000 soldiers of the 76th Army Group have been mobilized near the LAC and depth areas near the frontier in eastern Ladakh. It comprises five combined arms brigades, including 3,000 men under the artillery brigade, 2,500 soldiers under the air defence brigade and another 5,000 soldiers under the 12th armour brigade.
This Group Army is equipped with a range of heavy artillery including Type 99 tanks, Type 04A infantry fighting vehicles, and Type 11 self-propelled rocket launchers.
With the military, diplomatic and special representative level talks between India and China yielding no tangible result till now to ‘disengage and de-escalate’ the rising military buildup by the two Asian giants, there is a growing feeling in informed Indian circles that China is stonewalling progress in the parleys and may, in fact, be waiting for winter to arrive in India’s disadvantage because of logistical issues.
Winter in the tough and rugged Himalayan terrain from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh will considerably stretch India’s military besides facing logistical problems because of poor infrastructure besides adding enormously to the financial burden.
It is widely accepted that a prolonged stay at the standoff points for Indian and Chinese soldiers will be a logistical nightmare because of the extremely harsh winters, oxygen-depleted air due to the high altitude and the difficult terrain.
