Welcome to the jungle

While spending three months in the jungle is not fun, but the PLAAF airborne is no longer "just a light infantry", expect to see more those long-range drops in coming years.

Airborne troops finish 1st organic field training in tropical rainforest

(Source: PLA Daily) 2011-07-04

The officers and men let out hurray at the end of training. (PLA Daily/Liu Peng)

On June 27, an airborne troop unit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) finished the first organic training in a tropical rainforest which lasted for more than three months.

In order to meet the requirements of transformation from implementing a single operational mission to fulfilling diversified military tasks, the troop unit in recent years regularly took its troops to unfamiliar areas on the plateau in northwest China and the islands in southeast China to conduct adaptive training and challenge the operational capacity limits of the personnel and equipment.

Earlier this year the troops were organized to head to a tropical jungle at an altitude of more than 1,200 meters near the Tropic of Cancer to carry out training on 40-plus subjects including camouflage, shooting and obstacle-crossing in jungle, mountaineering and field survival under satellite surveillance.

During the drill, in the airtight tropical rainforest with a slope of as much as 80 degrees, special operation members each carrying a 40-kg load on the back carved out their way with machetes, climbed cliffs, crossed the valleys, and waded across rapids.

A batch of new-type IT equipment appeared in the field training. An unmanned aircraft carried out aerial reconnaissance of the "enemy’s" situation and precisely located the target, the battlefield TV reconnaissance unit sneaked into the forefront of the "enemy" to send back real-time three-dimensional reconnaissance scenes, and the officers and men utilized home-made Beidou communication system to make accurate positioning and timely transmit battlefield information. With the new-type IT equipment, the troops’ information support capability is greatly improved.

By Yang Min and Tan Jie

Editor:Liu Wanyun