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Amphibious Warfare Capabilities of the People's Liberation Army:
An Assessment on Recent Modernizations[1]

With specialized AMID supported by LST in place, the PLA hopes to speedily gain a beachhead by armor and APC assets and mobile fire support from the Type 89 Self Proper Howitzer, and open a front wide enough for the second echelon of infantry to have room to push forward against an urban area or setup a firebase with heavy artillery. AS most of Taiwan’s beachfront properties are well populated with multilevel apartment buildings, infantry and armor must work together to overcome it. With a secure beachhead, the PLA can land their Main Battle Tanks (MBT) in support of the swimmers, as the latter will be at a disadvantage when encountering Taiwan’s armor brigades equipped with M-60 MBTs.

The landing itself is not the actual issue, because most of the ROC defenders are not stationed near shore nor are they able to cover all areas with the same intensive fire over all possible landing zones. They will call for counter attacks carried out by their heavy units once the PLA’s landing point is identified, thus it is very important for any PLA amphibious unit to speedily rush ashore, establish a defendable perimeter and build up enough combat power to prevent being driven back into the sea when the ROC mechanized units counter attack.

It will be likely that AMID will be broken into regimental battle groups and attached to an infantry or armor division in a way similar to the way the Russian attach a battalion of Naval Infantry to an infantry division when it makes a sea assault. In this case, AMID regimental battle groups will be the first wave, with the mission of securing the landing beach. The first regular army regimental group or reinforced battalion reinforced with tanks would pass right though the first wave to assault the initial inland objectives. AMID regimental battle groups would then defend the immediate area, while a different regiment pushes on. If the divisional operation succeeded, the army regiment plus AMID elements would lead any attacks by the divisions thereafter, while other reinforcements would continue to arrive at the beach head.

It is noted that since the 2nd Marine Brigade maintains an armor regiment in its orbat, it will likely to serve the same role as the AMID regimental battle groups.

Because the landing is merely a prerequisite for accomplishing a subsequent more important ground mission, the PLA units must push forward to secure not just a landing zone, but a resuppy zone as well. A port will be a natural target, or a transportation junction to cut off lines of communication of the defenders. Once the PLA consolidation is completed, a breakout and exploitation must be carried out in high tempo. In the breakout phase of the attack, the PLA can force the defender to conduct land style warfare instead of an anti-landing operation; the PLA 2nd echelon would prefer to fight land warfare. It is clear that the defenders of a well developed island with a world class infrastructure can rush heavy mechanized force to a landing area much faster than the amphibious force can. Currently, the ROC Army is reforming their divisions into Mechanized Infantry Brigades to greatly increase reaction time. As the Allied Forces learned in Anzio Beachhead in early 1944, lack of rapid exploitation inland can render an early extremely successful landing irrelevant.

It is almost impossible to measure how well the PLA is going to conduct their amphibious operations, or their ability to maximize their new weapon systems and sea lift capability. However, one thing is clear, the PLA seems to know what their weaknesses are and are actively seeking means to overcome them. Increasing dedicated ship-born assets and force structure are two of the examples. There are many areas in which much can be improved upon, as the PLA has pointed out in their own publications, but any units that can spend 3 to 4 months at a time for field exercises will improve its combat effectiveness unquestionably with opportunities for junior officers and, more importantly, NCOs to build their real life experience.

The PLA still has much to improve. While the PLA Marine and PLA Airborne Corp have conducted training events at the same time, their operations are not fully integrated into PLA scenarios as yet. [25]