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

creasing time and distance traveled, employing forceon-force
(confrontational) maneuvers, and incorporating
all services, reserve forces, and civilian support in
many training scenarios. Perhaps in the future some
of these same realities will be applied to combined
exercises. As National Defense University professor
Ouyang Wei recently told a reporter, “in the future,
joint military exercises between China and foreign
countries will focus more on pragmatic cooperation
and on resolving ways to jointly deal with actual security
issues. For example, to jointly deal with terrorism
and separatism, it is necessary to aim at actual needs in
organizing a joint military exercise in terms of exercise
subjects, use of troops, application of tactics, performing
command, and providing support for action.” 91
Most combined exercises China has conducted
are tiny compared to the combined exercises NATO
conducted during the Cold War or the United States
and the ROK conducted for decades. For example, in
1990, 55,000 troops took part in the Return of Forces to
Germany (REFORGER) exercise “compared with the
97,000 soldiers that took part in the 1988 REFORG-
ER.” 92 Or, as reported by GlobalSecurity.org, “about
200,000 U.S. and South Korean service members participated
in Team Spirit.” 93 These numbers varied
from year to year, but the scale of such exercises was
exponentially larger than the largest Chinese combined
exercise to date.
The limitations described above, particularly the
carefully prescribed enemy which does not require
fighting a war at sea, in the air, or with ballistic missiles,
support the official Chinese contention that
combined exercise scenarios are not directed at any
third party such as Taiwan reinforced by U.S. forces.
Many combat actions, mandated by PLA doctrine for
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