A Navy Unit's Party Committee Guides Grassroots Units in Cultivating a Strong Atmosphere of Combat Training and War Preparedness
One day in early May, a Navy unit organized a certain battalion to conduct a combat-readiness rapid-mobilization drill. When the whistle sounded, Squad Leader Li Gen, who had been in the middle of maintaining his weapon, snapped to attention and stopped what he was doing. There had been absolutely no advance word about this combat-readiness mobilization, but Li Gen did not panic — he immediately organized his soldiers and headed to the combat-readiness storeroom. When they arrived at the floor where the storeroom was located, however, he was dumbstruck. By all rights, personnel should have been entering the storeroom by squad and platoon in turn to draw their equipment and then quickly assemble downstairs. But now the storeroom was a one-way bottleneck — people were going in but not coming out — and all he could faintly hear from inside were voices asking where the riot shields were and others shouting that they couldn't find the batons.
"The various supplies in the storeroom are kept in relatively fixed positions to make them easy to grab — how could anyone not find things?" Li Gen stared at the scene before him, completely baffled. The storeroom manager who had caused the chaos stood there red-faced, sweating with anxiety.
It turned out that a superior leader had come to conduct an inspection that morning, and in order to "make a good impression," the storeroom manager had deliberately "tidied up" the storeroom, stacking all supplies and equipment "neatly." Because he had been single-mindedly pursuing an "attractive appearance" at the time, some items of equipment had been "tucked away" deep inside. It was precisely this round of "rearranging" that caused the chaos now unfolding.
In the end, the company to which Li Gen belonged failed to complete its assembly within the prescribed time, and the battalion's overall mobilization result was rated "unsatisfactory."
The disorder triggered by this inspection-preparation effort caught the attention of the unit's Party committee. After conducting research, they found that such situations were far from rare: on the training ground, officers and soldiers should be grouped according to ability level for targeted remediation and specialized intensive training, but when an inspection or observation visit was imminent, some unit leaders would deliberately standardize training content and tempo to ensure "uniformity of movement"; in day-to-day management, garrison order and interior hygiene were ordinarily maintained according to combat-readiness standards, but as an inspection approached, some comrades would "sweat the details" and "dress things up," caring only about appearances while casting combat-readiness effectiveness aside entirely. On these phenomena, the unit's Party committee took an unambiguous stance: "Do leaders and staff organs come down to inspect grassroots units just to see whether things look 'attractive' and 'neat'? We must not disrupt work order or alter the normal state of combat readiness for the sake of inspection preparation — we must correct this without delay!"
To that end, the unit on one hand required that staff organ observation visits not focus on the scale of the scene, that inspections not interfere with daily order, and that supervision not consume training time; it established a pragmatic evaluation system and set up a supervision team to identify and rectify phenomena such as "showy formalism" (花架子) at the grassroots level. On the other hand, the unit drew up Detailed Rules for the Daily Implementation of Combat-Readiness Standards (《战备标准日常落实细则》) based on relevant regulations and actual grassroots conditions, stipulating that once a training plan has been approved, grassroots units must execute it rigidly except under special circumstances, so as to eliminate "inspection-driven adjustments" (迎检式调整), foster a strong atmosphere in which everything serves combat training and war preparedness, and ensure that officers and soldiers are not distracted for even a moment.
Recently, the unit's staff organ went deep to the front lines to inspect training conduct. When the group arrived at the training ground, officers and soldiers of a certain company were carrying out small-unit tactical training according to plan.
"In the past, the moment we heard that a leader was coming to inspect or observe, we'd start thinking about how to 'perform well,' and our minds would go off track," reflected Corporal Li Feng. "Now we just focus on training steadily and earnestly — there's nothing else we need to think about."