As they celebrate the 98th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on August 1, Chinese soldiers stated their aim to build world-class forces by strengthening military capacity.
The PLA has been pioneering new approaches to developing and deploying advanced combat forces. Homegrown equipment, such as domestically built aircraft carriers and next-generation nuclear submarines, has entered service, significantly enhancing its combat capabilities across multiple domains.
In June this year, China's aircraft carrier formations, Liaoning and Shandong, conducted a series of comprehensive training exercises in the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, and the Western Pacific.
"Going forward, we will remain focused on the missions of the aircraft carrier formation, conduct in-depth research on winning strategies for modern naval warfare, continue making breakthroughs in combat capability development, and keep sharpening the formation's operational effectiveness in an effort to build a strong force capable of defeating the enemy in any air and sea battle," said Gao Xiang, who serves with the Shandong aircraft carrier formation.
The PLA Ground Forces have also been accelerating their integration into a joint combat system, enhancing their ability to win in modern warfare, and conducting targeted training to strengthen overall combat readiness.
"President Xi Jinping emphasized the need to strengthen military training and combat readiness, consistently placing training at a strategic level and making it the core focus of our work. We must remain focused on our primary mission, achieve the integration of traditional and new-quality forces, as well as the coordination of combat and support forces, in order to forge a unified and capable force that can win battles and push forward toward the centenary goal of the PLA," said Zheng Zhijiang, who serves with the 71st Group Army of the PLA Ground Forces.
The PLA Air Force has been consistently improving its capabilities to fight both in the air and at sea, progressing toward becoming an integrated force with both offensive and defensive capabilities.
"President Xi stressed as he inspected the air force last November the need to conduct all-element, systemic, and scenario-based training under complex conditions and the need to step up coordinated training with troops of other military branches, achieve deep integration of combat and training, enhance joint command, joint operations, and joint support capabilities. We have been carrying out joint trainings in military bases and that aims to build a joint training platform that breaks the boundaries of different military branches and different domains of warfighting, as well as to provide different military branches with a place where they can test their skills," said An Xinyu, who serves at a PLA Air Force base.
"We focus on the fundamental requirement of being able to fight and win. We place special emphasis on training with new equipment, new skills, and new tactics to ensure every unit is sufficiently trained to win in battle and every launcher is combat-ready at any moment. Guided by the strategic demand for building both nuclear and conventional capabilities, deterring conflict across all domains, and by the core standards of always being ready to fight, launch on time, and inflict effective destruction, we have been accelerating the buildup of our strategic strike capability and are advancing toward the goal of building a world-class strategic military branch," said Han Sen, who serves in the PLA Rocket Force.
Chinese soldiers vow to build world-class forces on 98th founding anniversary of PLA
