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

unifying, and streamlining a plethora of sometimes
overlapping and mutually contradictory national,
provincial, and local defense mobilization and emergency
response plans and bureaucracies. 43 Some suggested
that the emergency response systems of foreign
countries, including the United States, could be useful
models from which China could learn. 44
At another level, ideas for improvements in the
PLA’s ability to perform emergency response duties
relate more directly to force recruitment, organization,
training, and equipment. A number of authors put
particular emphasis on the need to expand the roles of
the militia and reserves as first responders to natural
disasters and other emergency situations and call for
improved training of militia and reserve forces and the
building of units with specialized skills for addressing
different types of emergency situation—floods, earthquakes,
chemical and industrial accidents, forest fires,
etc.—based on the needs of their communities. 45
The interest in increasing the responsibilities and
the competence of the militia and reserve forces for
performance of disaster relief duties touches on another
issue which, though subtly addressed, appears
evident in some of the open-source discussion of the
lessons of Wenchuan and China’s emergency response
and disaster relief: just how much of a role should the
PLA play in MOOTW, and how do they relate to the
PLA’s primary mission of national defense? 46 Some
argue that participation in MOOTW like the earthquake
relief effort is, in fact, good training for military
operations and thus contributes directly to the furtherance
of the PLA’s primary mission. For example,
Zhao Guoqi, a senior colonel and political commissar
in the Communications Command Academy in Wuhan,
compared the damage done by the Wenchuan
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