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

make overall plans for joint training, but each year a
different service will command the training in which
one core issue is highlighted and one subject is practiced.
The culmination of these joint reforms to date
has been the 8-day exercise “Joint-209” which was
held in the Jinan MR and involved all of the services
and the People’s Armed Police (PAP), and was the
first joint war zone exercise for the PLA. The exercise
was said to have focused on four areas:
1. The inclusion of Army, Navy, Air Force, Second
Artillery, and PAP forces in the war zone in the exercise
for the first time.
2. The inclusion of local governments into training.
3. The inclusion of local national defense mobilization
organizations into the war zone joint training
system.
4. The use of an integrated command platform to
organize joint training for the first time. 89
CONCLUSIONS
The 10-year history of PLA informationization reveals
a pattern of limited progress stymied by service
rivalry, inadequate doctrinal development, and technological
shortcomings. In pursuing informationization,
the PLA has simultaneously taken a bottom up
and a top down approach. Technological improvements
have mainly followed a bottom-up process in
which even units at very low levels have been given
funds to develop their own systems. While individual
services have managed to develop robust vertical
command and control systems that link superior with
subordinate units, they have not taken the initiative
to develop integrative technologies that connect them
with their sister services. As a result, the CMC and
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