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

As the link between the war front and the home front,
the logistic process is at once the military element in the
nation’s economy and the economic element in its military
operations.
Duncan Ballantine 89
Civil sector support to China’s military logistics
capability has become a key feature of military modernization
through peacetime-wartime integration. It
seeks to leverage civilian expertise, scientific innovation,
technology, and logistics resources to develop a
joint civil-military logistics capability during peacetime
that would support wartime military mobilization.
Civil support occurs during mobilization and socialization,
or the contracting of goods and services.
Mobilization refers to preparations for war, while socialization
not only refers to contracting for goods and
services in preparation for a potential war, but also to
support of the military in its daily peacetime activities.
In fact, much of the socialization effort to date has
been done in non-operational units, such as schools
and headquarters units, in large cities. 90
Civil-military support was included in the 17th
CPC National People’s Congress Work Report in 2007
when Hu Jintao identified areas for integration, including:
weapons and equipment research and manufacturing,
military personnel training, and logistics. 91
Building on the traditions of civil support for a new
age, Hu sought to combine national defense and national
economic development to “change the mode of
logistics building for a quantity and scale pattern to a
quality and efficient pattern.” Exploiting the resources
of the national economy for defense building in peacetime
and mobilization in wartime enable the military
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