Close Partners Become the "Strictest Examiners" on the Testing Ground — How Effective Has It Been?
"Impressive! I deliberately added false-positive decoys to raise the difficulty, and you still weren't stumped." "A fall into the pit, a gain in your wit — ever since I got stumped at the last competition, I've put in enormous effort to train hard." … On a scorching summer day, a professional skills competition and evaluation at a Rocket Force regiment drew to a close. Rather than resting immediately, the officers and soldiers formed pairs and began their after-action reviews.
The regiment's primary mission is transport operations, and many positions require two personnel working together in coordinated pairs. Yet for this competition, the regiment deliberately split the two personnel assigned to the same position — one competed, while the other served as examiner.
"Having close partners become the strictest 'examiners' on the testing ground is a new exploration in refining our evaluation mechanism (考评机制)," a regimental leader told reporters, explaining the origins of the approach.
During a realistic-combat confrontation exercise (实战化对抗训练) the previous year, soldiers of a certain battalion repeatedly exhibited problems including delayed judgment, rigid responses, and poor coordination, ultimately ending in defeat.
Sergeant Zhang Xiangtian and Master Sergeant Liu Yongqing were partners; during that exercise, the two were tasked with securing a critical position. Zhang Xiangtian made a series of errors due to nerves, freezing in place on several occasions and failing to properly handle contingencies (特情). At the after-action review, this pair — ordinarily a model of seamless coordination — fell into an argument.
Liu Yongqing felt that Zhang Xiangtian had "dropped the ball" at a critical moment. Zhang Xiangtian felt somewhat aggrieved: to prepare for the exercise, he had trained extra hours nearly every day that month. "In routine evaluations, I have never dragged the battalion down. This was just a momentary lapse from nerves — was there really any need to put it that way?"
"On the battlefield, will you get a chance to be 'momentarily nervous'?" "But I just get nervous easily — we've been partners this long, don't you know that?" At those words, Liu Yongqing fell silent for a moment, then stood up to offer a self-criticism: "I bear responsibility for this failure too. Zhang Xiangtian has a relatively poor capacity to handle psychological pressure. As his squad leader and partner, I knew full well about this weakness, yet I thought it didn't affect routine evaluation scores anyway, so I never put in the effort to help him correct it…"
After the two finished their reflection, several other pairs present stood up one by one to reflect on similar problems. This drew the attention of Chief of Staff Li. The defeat had exposed many problems that had not previously been identified. Chief of Staff Li was initially quite angry, but he quickly realized: these pairs of soldiers who lived and worked side by side day and night both understood each other's weaknesses and shortcomings and were intimately familiar with the responsibilities of their own positions — so why not have them keep watch over each other's weak points and serve as each other's "examiners"?
The regimental Party committee soon studied and discussed the matter and decided to pilot this mechanism. They specified that each unit could, based on its actual circumstances, split paired soldiers during evaluations — one participating in training and testing, the other supervising training and administering the examination.
Squad leader Zhang Qinghui had long noticed that his partner, Junior Sergeant Wang Chongyang, habitually followed a fixed troubleshooting sequence and lacked experience in handling multiple faults simultaneously. During the evaluation, he layered in conditions including missing equipment, personnel casualties, and electromagnetic interference, forcing Wang to break out of ingrained thinking and forge genuine troubleshooting skills (排障硬功).
Staff Sergeant Liu Keyi, targeting her partner Junior Sergeant Jin Daoxiang's problems of slow leak-plugging movements and poor procedural sequencing, set up a multi-point leak contingency during the training tank leak-plugging segment, deliberately compressed the time during medium transfer operations, and introduced a relatively complex set of environmental interference — giving Jin a genuinely substantive lesson. Walking off the training ground, Jin Daoxiang exclaimed: "When your partner is the 'examiner,' the questions are far more 'devious'!" Liu Keyi then pulled him aside to begin the after-action review immediately.
Routine training and evaluations became more targeted and carried more of the smell of gunpowder (硝烟味), causing weaknesses and shortcomings that had previously been difficult to surface to emerge one by one. More and more officers and soldiers began proactively identifying capability gaps, and an atmosphere of learning from, competing with, helping, and surpassing one another (比学赶帮超) grew increasingly robust.
"On the testing ground, there is less of the formality of 'outsiders watching the spectacle' and more of the seriousness of 'insiders scrutinizing the craft,'" the regimental leadership explained. They have also combined this approach with realistic-combat training to advance upgraded measures such as cross-squad mutual examinations and scenario-setting for key and difficult subjects, allowing "the people who know you best" to hone "the sharpest blade."
Not long ago, the smell of gunpowder rose again on the training ground as a new round of live-force confrontation exercises (实兵对抗) was held on schedule. The regiment broke from existing position groupings and assigned the two members of each original pair to the Red and Blue forces respectively. At the outset of the confrontation, the Blue force continuously jammed communication frequencies and disguised itself as false targets to lure the enemy into traps; the Red force used terrain for concealment to close with the "enemy," rapidly assessing the authenticity of targets. The intensity of the confrontation escalated quickly: the Blue force dispatched squads to harass and attempt to fragment the Red force's combat formation; the Red force rapidly adjusted its disposition and directed rear fires to conduct precision strikes…
Walking off the training ground, members of both sides immediately launched their after-action review, their identities as "comrades" and "adversaries" shifting back and forth as they dug into each other's problems and put forward recommendations.