The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

manner in which the joint communications system
was established casts doubt on this claim. The article
reports that in order for the services to communicate
with each other, ground force communication personnel,
with their equipment, were stationed aboard ships
to facilitate communication between the services. 47
Other reports reveal that individual MRs have established
or are working on their own joint C4 systems
and it is unclear if these technologies involve
TIS. In 2009, it was reported that the Jinan MR held a
meeting on the construction of a “new type of theater
joint command information system” designed to join
the services. 48 Similarly, a 2009 article stated that the
Nanjing MR in the past 2 years had established the
PLA’s first theater C4ISR system. 49 This system is said
to have broken the communication barriers between
services and solved the MR’s challenges with joint
operations command, real-time air intelligence, joint
firepower attack, and precision support. 50 Again, as
with other technologies, the development of theaterwide
C4ISR systems by individual MRs suggests that
a standardized C4ISR system has not been established
by the PLA or, at the least, that standardization is not
being enforced.
Despite the many successes in developing C4ISR
technologies, the PLA admits that its technologies
cannot yet fully support joint operations. However,
the PLA’s main difficulty in establishing an integrative
C4ISR system lies more with the approach the
PLA has taken with C4ISR modernization than with
the level of technology used. Stovepiping, for example,
has been a major impediment. While the services
have been good at establishing communications with
subordinate units, they have largely ignored connectivity
with their sister services.
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