China's Attack Helicopters Are Preparing for Urban Warfare

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November 24, 2018 Topic: Security Region: Asia Blog Brand: The Buzz Tags: MilitaryTechnologyWeaponsWarHelicopters

China's Attack Helicopters Are Preparing for Urban Warfare

But the question is why?

China’s attack helicopter pilots have had a revelation: flying choppers in cities is difficult.

But Chinese pilots are training for urban warfare, which suggests that the People's Liberation Army is reorienting itself toward a different kind of warfare.

“While China’s attack helicopter forces were first developed in the 1970s to help counter tanks in an anticipated Soviet invasion from the north, with the shifting of strategic priorities—and growth of China’s cities—knowledge of urban environments is now more important than the deserts and steppe terrain previously emphasized,” notes the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, which translated an article from People’s Liberation Army Daily.

The article describes an exercise conducted by the Army Aviation brigade of the 79th Group Army, deployed in northeast China. “The unit’s Party committee recognized that there are many buildings in urban areas and, more than that, they are not evenly distributed,” recounted the PLA Daily article. “Both the electromagnetic environment and terrain make deep assaults difficult, and serve to better temper the units’ actual combat capability.”

While attempting to portray the training in a positive light, the article made clear that Chinese attack helicopter pilots were surprised to find that fighting in cities was not like fighting in the Manchurian plains. When one of the pilots “was about to transmit information, his screens suddenly showed interference and an uneven signal, eventually losing contact with the command post,” said PLA Daily.

“The electromagnetic environment in urban areas is complicated,” mused an aviation battalion commander. “It is very easy for battlefield awareness to be reduced with just a little interference—and it is very difficult to gather and transmit battlefield intelligence!”

Some helicopters in the exercise had to tasked with functioning as flying relay stations, to retransmit signals from other helicopters. Narrow urban spaces meant that helicopters could only operate in small groups of two or three aircraft, rather than massed attack helicopter strikes.

The brigade learned to “alter its routes through different districts according to the terrain and changes its unit composition according to tactical requirements, cooperates in researching combined tactical issues, and strengthens training in electromagnetic spectrum management according to natural and man-made environmental factors,” according to PLA Daily. “They also strengthened their ability to innovate tactics under the new system, and implemented courses in low-altitude navigation, search and rescue, etc.”

Historically, the People’s Liberation Army has not embraced helicopters as eagerly as the United States, for which operations without attack and transport choppers are practically unthinkable. But China has been catching up, as it races to modernize its armed forces. In 2009, it fielded the Z-10, China’s first domestically-produced attack helicopter (reportedly built with foreign help) and the Chinese equivalent of the AH64 Apache. At the same time, Taiwan recently activated a brigade of Apaches.

But since armies train for the type of battlefield they expect to fight in, the People’s Liberation Army is girding itself for street fighting.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

Image: Wikimedia Commons