After the military outbreak in the Galwan Valley, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has mobilized four out of five of its military theater commands with reports suggesting that the actual shooting drills and exercises from the East China Sea, the Sea Yellow to South China Sea to date was a distraction for its calculated aggression in Ladakh.
While both India and China have yet to finalize the dates of the meeting of the military commanders and each of them requested the postponement once, the PLA continues to accumulate along the 1,597 km Royal Line of Control (LAC) in the western sector. After the meeting of the foreign ministers of India and China on September 10 in Moscow, the decision was made to ask the military commanders to implement the total disengagement and then the de-escalation agreement on the ground. The two sides have yet to set a mutually convenient date for the meeting, but it is expected this week. It is understood that meetings at the corps commander level will be limited to the disengagement of forces after April and the Depsang Bulge issue will be addressed at a separate division commander level.
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According to a report by Nikkei Asian Review, the PLA has mobilized its Southern Theater Command, which oversees the South China Sea, the North Theater Command, which is located outside the Korean Peninsula, and the Teatro del Este, which oversees its archrivals Japan and Taiwan. The newspaper said that just as the Chinese annexed Tibet in the 1950s against the backdrop of their intervention in the Korean War, the current mobilization was a distraction to a real standoff in the Karakoram-Zanskar ranges of the Himalayas. . For the Ladakh operations, the PLA’s western theater command has fully mobilized with the Xinjiang and Tibet military districts fully involved in the aggression.
The Korean War in the 1950s also proved to be a distraction for the Jawahar Lal Nehru government and Indian diplomacy as they became involved in solving the North Korean problem, leaving their own flanks in the western and eastern sectors. opened to the Chinese military in 1962. The PLA chose to attack India in 1962 when the entire world drifted into the Cuban missile crisis.
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While India is engaging China through military and diplomatic channels to resolve the current deadlock, military commanders are prepared for the worst on all borders and at sea. They know that distraction, diversion, and deception are part of the Chinese information war with psychological operations playing the leading role before the flag is raised.
By deploying three military commandos against the US from South China to the East China Sea and testing the firing of both the DF-26 also called Chinese Guam Killer and the DF-21 D also called Carrier Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles Killer in the last week of August, the PLA is sending a message that it can take both the United States in the east and India on the western flank. The missile launch was to showcase China’s ability to take on USS Navy supercarrier Ronald Reagan and Nimitz in exercise around the Chinese nuclear submarine base on the Hainan Islands in the South China Sea. Perhaps the Ladakh raid is a distraction for Chinese movements in Taiwan after Hong Kong and not the other way around.
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