The Molting Path — Six Transformations of the People's Army Ground Force

What "Molting" Means

In nature, a bird's molt is a self-renewal oriented toward survival and the long flight ahead: the old feathers are shed, the new feathers grow in, and life gains new speed and strength. Shen Yi borrows this image to speak of an army: molting means the systematic reshaping of organizational form, force structure, weapons and equipment, training mode, and the concept of victory — and it also means continually answering one and the same fundamental question. In the face of changes in technology, changes in war, and changes in the adversary, how does one always keep the initiative in winning?

The first episode, Where the Banner Points, began from faith, loyalty, courage, and mission, answering why the people's army is worthy of trust. The second episode turns the camera to the training grounds of the people's army ground force, answering how this heroic force converts the fruits of reform, the fruits of science and technology, and the advantage of personnel into real combat capability. The most arresting images of the program: amphibious armored vehicles breaking through the waves to storm the beach; robot wolves racing forward armed with individual rocket launchers; and unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned surface vessels, warplanes, and warships together composing a multidimensional battlefield.

Renewing the Form: From Steel Torrent to Agile Elite

The people's army was founded with the ground force, developed on the strength of the ground force, and draws its roots from the ground force. In the past its hallmarks were massive scale, a full roster of arms, and an unyielding fighting style; today the form of war is evolving toward informatization and intelligentization, and the key to victory has shifted to information superiority, system effectiveness, and joint operations.

That the "steel torrent" is transformed into an "agile elite" — the word "transformed" carries a profound conversion in the form of force. Where massed charges were once emphasized, today greater weight falls on multi-arm coordination, precision assault, rapid deployment, and system support. Armored platforms still shoulder the heavy tasks of assault and protection, but they no longer act in isolation: through information chains, command chains, firepower chains, and support chains they are linked with reconnaissance, firepower, engineering, air defense, communications, and unmanned combat forces, becoming nodes within an operational system.

The growth of Wang Rui, a vehicle commander in an amphibious combined-arms brigade, is a microcosm of this transformation. Fifteen years into his service, his gaze — and that of his comrades — has gradually turned toward the sea, and the footprints of their training settle ever more between the waves and the beach. Vehicles must withstand the test of wind and swell; crew members must master maritime driving, coordinated sea-crossing, beach-storming assault, and deployment ashore; and their units must keep step with air, maritime, and unmanned forces besides. The battlefield a single vehicle commander faces has expanded from the patch of land in front of his driver's hatch into a system battlefield composed jointly of coast, beachhead, sea surface, airspace, and information space.

The steel is still hard; the torrent is more precise. The force remains deep and substantial — but its application has grown far more supple.

Renewing the Methods: Unmanned First, Manned in Support

The landing exercise offers a vivid new way of fighting: unmanned equipment screens ahead, and manned forces follow behind. The robot wolves charging up onto the beachhead are among the most striking images of the entire episode — their quadruped configuration keeps them mobile across sand, scree, and broken ground; some carry reconnaissance and sensing payloads, others light weapons or individual rocket launchers. They can push forward to observe, identify targets, and relay information; they can also take on fire support, accompanying resupply, and work in hazardous environments. Areas that once required officers and soldiers to approach at personal risk are now first scouted and dealt with by unmanned platforms, opening a lane for the follow-on forces.

The mechanism of victory reaches far beyond the robot wolves themselves. Unmanned platforms must be plugged into the command system and linked with reconnaissance, early warning, fire strike, and ground assault into one complete chain, holding reliable contact amid complex electromagnetic environments and a rapidly shifting battlefield picture. Only when the information seen by sensors reaches the command nodes in time, when a commander's decision is accurately translated into platform action, and when the effects of that action are swiftly fed back — only then does unmanned equipment truly become combat capability.

Human command judgment remains at the center throughout. Unmanned equipment takes on forward scouting, hazardous work, and some fire missions; officers and soldiers remain responsible for understanding the battlefield, making decisions, organizing coordination, and carrying out the decisive actions — front and rear linked, far and near combined, the virtual and the real complementing one another. This at once reduces exposure and unnecessary casualties, and raises the speed of reconnaissance, the responsiveness of fire, and the efficiency of assault.

Three trends are visible: ground-force tactics are evolving from the charge of a single platform toward manned-unmanned teaming; from preset procedures toward dynamic adaptation; and from fire coverage toward the precision release of energy.

Renewing the Structure: Combined-Arms Capability Down to the Company and Squad

Weapons and equipment are the ground force's "new feathers"; force organization is the "bone and sinew" that supports the flight. The program trains its lens on the heavy combined-arms battalion, and in particular on how combined-arms capability is deepening down to the company level and into the squad.

The point of combined-arms integration is to weave different specialties, different platforms, and different operational elements into a single system of action — so that reconnaissance finds targets faster, command forms decisions faster, fire completes strikes faster, and support keeps up with the action faster. Under the traditional division of labor, each arm completed its tasks within relatively independent procedures, and coordination was concentrated at the higher levels. Today the rhythm of the battlefield has quickened and windows of opportunity close in a flash: reconnaissance and discovery, intelligence assessment, command decision, fire strike, effects evaluation, and maneuver support must all be completed in succession within a shorter and shorter span. As combined-arms capability extends down to the grass-roots end, companies and squads gain more support in information, in firepower, and in resources — and higher demands are placed on grass-roots commanders and on every soldier.

The program's invocation of "Infantry Plus" (步兵+) sums up this leap: an evolution from the "ordinary foot soldier" to the "all-domain super soldier." The new-era infantryman must keep his assault craft while also cultivating a reconnaissance sense, an intelligence sense, a coordination sense, and a support sense; crew members must understand infantry action; infantry must grow familiar with armored platforms and unmanned equipment; fire units must grasp the forward picture; and support forces must advance on their own initiative with the progress of the battle. Every person has a specialty, and every person understands the system — each standing at his own post while also seeing the post beside him and comprehending the action upstream and downstream.

Renewing the Domains: From the Land Battlefield to All-Domain, Three-Dimensional Operations

The ground force takes the land as its base — but today's "land" carries a richer spatial meaning. The discovery of a land target may come from an unmanned aerial vehicle; long-range maneuver may be underwritten by airpower; cross-sea operations call for coordination with maritime platforms; command and control rests on stable information networks; and the application of fire must contend with complex electromagnetic environments. As officers and soldiers in the program put it: to integrate into the operational system, one must know not only what flies in the sky and what swims in the water, but also grow familiar with unmanned boats and unmanned aircraft.

Maneuver warfare and three-dimensional offense-and-defense are the keys to understanding this change. Maneuver warfare emphasizes rapid arrival, flexible deployment, and cross-domain employment; three-dimensional offense-and-defense emphasizes mutual support among ground, air, and multiple new-domain forces. From the waves and the beachhead to the plateau and the Gobi, from daylight advance to night assault, from ground armored forces to low-altitude unmanned platforms — the training grounds of the people's army ground force keep expanding.

This all-domain, three-dimensional capability is placed in the service of peace: China stays on the path of peaceful development and pursues a defensive national defense policy; the point of strengthening training and war preparedness is to deter the risk of conflict with credible strength, and to reduce the chance of strategic miscalculation with firm resolve.

Renewing Capability: Growing Together with the Equipment

Equipment can be renewed within a relatively short span; the generation of human capability, by contrast, requires long training, continuous learning, and repeated mutual tempering. Fielding new-type equipment is only the starting point of building combat capability; turning equipment performance into operational effectiveness, and technical advantage into system advantage, ultimately depends on a new type of high-caliber, professional military personnel.

Today's vehicle commander must master driving, gunnery, and maintenance — and also understand sea state, terrain, wave formation, information coordination, and the rhythm of the mission. Today's infantryman must train his body, his marksmanship, and his assault skills — and also learn reconnaissance, learn the terminal, learn unmanned platforms, and learn coordinated support. The content of training has expanded from mastering a single piece of equipment to understanding how a system runs; from completing a single subject to handling complex situations; from knowing one's own specialty to operating in coordination across multiple arms and multiple platforms.

Intelligentized equipment raises the bar on the human element still further. One detail stressed by a drone operator is worth turning over again and again: when a drone's algorithms and software-and-hardware go beyond the portion that is automatically matched, and a special situation arises, how does one use human hands, at the critical moment, to deal with that one percent of the exceptional? Machines can raise the speed of perception and the efficiency of action, but commanders must still grasp the purpose of the mission, the disposition of friend and foe, and the boundaries of action; algorithms can offer auxiliary judgment, but officers and soldiers must still keep a clear head, a sense of responsibility, and decisiveness in complex environments.

The more advanced the equipment, the more it demands high-caliber people to master it; the higher the caliber of the people, the more they drive the iteration of equipment and the innovation of tactics. And the molting of the people's army ground force has always had a firm political guarantee: upholding the Party's absolute leadership over the people's army, weaving the red gene into training, and carrying mission and responsibility down to every fighting post.

Renewing the Posture: From Platform Superiority to System Victory

What truly sets the upper limit of combat capability is whether the pieces of equipment can form an efficient system among themselves. Once a robot wolf is plugged into the reconnaissance, command, fire, and support chains, it becomes a forward node within the system; once an armored fighting vehicle is fused into a combined-arms formation, it can act in concert with aerial reconnaissance, long-range fire, infantry assault, and engineering support; a squad is small in scale, yet with the system's information and fire support behind it, it too can play a decisive part at the critical point.

Five shifts: force building from scale and quantity to quality and effectiveness; operations from the employment of a single arm to multi-arm combined-arms integration; the space of the battlefield from a flat land domain to all-domain, three-dimensional extension; the application of equipment from a mainstay of manned platforms to the coordinated development of the manned and the unmanned; and the way of winning from a contest of individual platform performance to system confrontation and joint victory.

Rebuilding the equipment system requires the organizational and institutional structure to match it; adjusting that structure requires the training mode to move in step; innovating tactics requires a matching structure of talent — and in the end every element is put to the test in combat-oriented training. Strengthening the military through reform, through science and technology, through talent, and through law-based governance interpenetrate one another, converging into the overall strength of a modernized, new-type ground force.

Reading the Title, and the Root That Does Not Change

In the episode's title, The Molting Path, the "feathers" are the wing of capability built jointly by equipment, organization, tactics, and talent; the "molting" is the proactive transformation aimed at future war; and the "path" carries the historical root of the people's army while also marking the new orientation of a modernized, new-type ground force — moving toward all-domain, three-dimensional operations and integration into joint operations.

The strength of an army is to be judged not only by the steel it possesses but by whether it can organize that steel into a system of victory; not only by the technology it commands but by whether it can master that technology with advanced concepts. Yet the root is never altered: the Party's absolute leadership over the people's army remains forever the foundation of army building and the soul of a strong military; serving the people remains forever the fundamental purpose; and being able to fight and to win remains forever the requirement of the mission.