Measuring Training Details Against the Yardstick of Actual Combat: Conditions for Adversarial Training Must Be Grounded in Real War
How Long Should an Obstacle Be? Actual Combat Has the Final Say
■ PLA Daily Special Correspondents Song Shijie, Jiang Yucheng, Yan Zichang; Illustration by Xie Yan
"Company Commander, do we go or not?"
In the height of summer, a certain brigade of the 71st Group Army organized combined-arms tactical training. Before breaching a lane, Red Force commander Company Commander Qian hesitated as he reviewed intelligence relayed back from reconnaissance — the depth of the Blue Force's forward obstacle belt had been shortened by nearly one-third compared to previous exercises.
In the past, to delay Red Force attacks, Blue Force had mostly followed the principle of "set them as long as possible" when emplacing obstacles. The current situation was decidedly abnormal. Was it an "oversight" or a "trap"?
After a moment's deliberation, Company Commander Qian decided to seize the opportunity: "Breach according to the plan, quickly, and reinforce security to guard against a surprise attack."
Because the forward obstacle depth had been significantly reduced, the Red Force engineer element, under fire cover, successfully breached the lane in only half the planned time.
However, the moment they completed the breach, Blue Force surged forward and struck. Red Force ultimately prevailed by virtue of numerical superiority, but the assault was fiercely contested and "casualties" exceeded expectations.
"Every time we attack, breaching is a major problem — so why did a shorter obstacle make the attack harder?" The hard-won victory naturally prompted Company Commander Qian to conduct a thorough after-action review. Recalling the details of the engagement, he quickly identified the reason: compared to previous exercises, their breaching time had indeed been reduced considerably, but after penetrating into depth, small Blue Force elements repeatedly harassed them from multiple directions, and fire strikes were far more precise than before, making it difficult for Red Force to control the tempo of the engagement throughout.
"In this exercise, we emplaced obstacles based on our actual troop strength. Although the obstacle distance was shortened, we consequently had more forces available to commit to subsequent phases of the engagement." When exchanging views with Blue Force commander Company Commander Yin, the latter's words confirmed Qian's hypothesis. Yin candidly acknowledged that this shift in thinking had originated from an earlier "victory."
In that adversarial training exercise, Blue Force had constructed defensive works in advance and emplaced an obstacle belt nearly 5 kilometers long across Red Force's axis of attack. The approach was "highly effective" — right up until the exercise ended, Red Force was still struggling with the breach and had no capacity to address subsequent tasks.
Yet this "victory" drew considerable skepticism at the after-action review: "On a real battlefield, would you actually have the conditions to construct obstacles on such a large scale?" "You can't ignore reality and go to extremes — setting difficulty for difficulty's sake." Staff Officer Yang, who had participated in exercise control on multiple occasions, cut straight to the heart of the matter: "The battlefield has no rules, but there are certain operational principles that cannot be violated."
He offered examples: the width of Red Force's attack frontage should be determined by Red Force's attacking strength — you would not normally use a company's worth of troops to attack a defensive frontage held by a battalion; likewise, Blue Force, constrained by troop strength, time, and terrain, must integrate obstacle emplacement tightly with fire support arrangements, troop dispositions, and terrain features to form an organic whole — it is absolutely not a matter of simply pursuing maximum obstacle length.
"The length of an obstacle requires weighing multiple factors. Blindly pursuing 'boundless' obstacles may appear to be 'training hard and training strictly' (从难从严), but in reality it already violates the requirements of actual combat." The words of the brigade's operations and training section chief left a lasting impression on Company Commander Yin.
"As a 'whetstone' (磨刀石), the prerequisite for setting difficulty is to simulate the enemy's real situation to the greatest extent possible. The purpose of setting difficulty is to help Red Force identify shortcomings and improve capabilities. If you ignore reality in pursuit of a so-called 'victory' and blindly create situations that rarely occur in real combat, you have lost sight of the fundamentals." Company Commander Yin acknowledged that the experience prompted them to reexamine their own responsibilities.
Since then, they have regularly organized tactical war-gaming and battle-case study sessions, strictly simulating based on actual troop strength, and have stopped setting "out-of-scope problems" (超纲题) that amount to "setting difficulty for difficulty's sake." They have adhered to the practice of working backward from Red Force capability shortfalls to derive training subjects, taking "train what Red Force lacks" as the starting point for adversarial design, and reducing ineffective difficulty that is divorced from actual combat. They have explored a "Red-Blue role reversal" training method, deepening understanding of the "whetstone" function through role switching, and cultivating a cohort of personnel who understand the adversary and understand how to fight.
"In this exercise, Red Force's breaching time was greatly reduced compared to before, but shortfalls in command and control, battlefield awareness, and tactical coordination were exposed far more fully." Reviewing the "engagement," Company Commander Yin's words carried a note of "honorable defeat" (虽败犹荣): "On the future battlefield, these could all be decisive factors. Helping Red Force identify problems in advance — that is our 'victory.'"
The brigade's leadership told reporters that in adversarial training, the question of how long an obstacle should be has no definitive answer — but more important than that answer is the reflection and discussion it has prompted among the brigade's officers and soldiers: how should the Blue Force "whetstone" sharpen Red Force combat power?
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Commentary
"Training Hard and Strictly" Must Have a Basis
■ Yang Meng
In the past, some Blue Force commanders easily fell into the misconception that "the longer the obstacle, the better." In fact, obstacle length does not straightforwardly equate to adversarial difficulty — extending an obstacle is intended to delay the enemy's attack tempo, trading space for time; shortening an obstacle is intended to hold forces in reserve and lure the enemy in deep, wearing the enemy down through a contracted defensive line. Neither approach is absolutely superior to the other.
It must be clearly understood that the fundamental prerequisite for "training hard and strictly" (从难从严) in setting adversarial conditions is to benchmark against actual combat. "Training hard and strictly" must have a "basis" (据), and that "basis" is the "yardstick" (标尺) of actual combat. If, in order to "stump" Red Force, you create extreme situations that would be virtually impossible to encounter on a real battlefield, you have divorced yourself from actual combat and are being "difficult for difficulty's sake" (为难而难), deviating from the fundamental purpose of helping Red Force test operational methods and temper capabilities. The value of what a certain brigade of the 71st Group Army's Blue Force did in shortening the obstacle depth during training lies precisely in breaking the fixed mindset of "difficulty for difficulty's sake."
More important than answering "how long should the obstacle be" is translating actual-combat thinking into operational actions that can be known and felt. As the requirements for realistic training continue to rise, every echelon must at all times use the yardstick of actual combat to measure training details, and must genuinely recognize that winning or losing in training is not the end point — fighting a battle and advancing one step further is the ultimate objective.