Can the PLA Get Rid of Information Islands?
| AUTHOR | Anushka Saxena |
| DATE | October 5, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | China Defence Geostrategy |
In discussing the achievements of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as national day festivities are underway, on October 5, 2026, the PLA Daily published an “observation report” from a “certain” unit of the Information Support Force (ISF), one of the newest branches of the Chinese military. It’s a useful piece to understand what PLA troops are up to in the Karakoram and the “Kunlun snow lines,” right across Ladakh sector.
This unit, the report informs, has gone from being at “station duty” to becoming a “regional management” unit, replete with a resource management and scheduling platform that now brings together previously siloed equipment systems onto a single platform for real-time monitoring and dispatch. Now, the report claims, the cross-regional scheduling that once required phone calls to every station now takes one instruction and a few minutes. An anecdotal example it presents is that of an Air Force brigade requesting for a link1 across thousands of kilometres to “remotely execute missions.” It was apparently set up in under half a day. Further, in an exercise described in the report, the ISF unit’s duty station “obtained the mission from the cloud” and then dynamically allocated network resources to multiple task forces. That could suggest that requests now come in as tasks through the same cloud-based command system, rather than by phone.
Why was the need felt to set the platform up? In addition to the PLA’s obvious march towards system-of-systems (体系作战) thinking and informatisation, one of the failures the report itself lets up is shown to be the trigger. In a past exercise, one of two stations supposed to be working together had a downed information link and the second station did not detect it for 20 minutes. As a consequence, the authorities supervising the drill marked it as a failure, and during the debriefing later, the lead supervisor argued that the first station had essentially become an “information island” (信息孤岛) – a circumstance the cross-regional platform is supposed to solve for.
The report also mentions achievement of stable remote-control signals, which could, in the case of hilly and harsh terrain as that of Tibet and Xinjiang, mean that uncrewed ground vehicles have been deployed. Though the PLA Daily itself doesn’t mention this, one can distill it from previous coverage where, in April 2026, the 82nd group army deployed said UGVs in obstacle circumvention operations.
The report, as alluded to above, also speaks of interesting things ISF duty officers are being made to do – they are no longer just “technicians,” but are now “data officers” who are expected to analyse situations and assist command decisions. Hence, fewer of them are required to sit at the stations themselves, and more are being sent to the ground for joint training support. One example talks about how an army regiment training above 4,000 metres as the ISF in Kunlun to “tailor-make” a network setup for it, which just goes to show how proliferated the ISF’s ground units are – something that the PLA has already discussed in previous coverage of the ISF’s “forward-deployed network-information detachments.”
The PLA’s informatisation project remains slow-moving but real, and its success or failure in the Western Theater Command’s active situations and harsh terrain undoubtedly remain a priority for Chinese military leadership. With a 2027 milestone deadline for the completion of basic informatisation looming large, digital clouds and integrated platforms are likely to become all the rage in training drills. Whether they can survive hypoxia in troops, sustained interferences in radio communications, and even electronic attacks in conflict, remains an open question.
Footnotes
Here, the “link” refers to any information relay between points A and B – may it be two stations, C2 and forward troops, etc. It can be a fibre-optic cable, a microwave relay chain, a satellite channel or a radio circuit. In the context of the Kunlun mountains, the report describes the “link” as the “information artery laid along the snow line,” which could, prima facie, mean it is a physical/ tangible relay. One of the operators mentioned in the report, who is affiliated with the ISF Unit – Tian Jinhu – has, in his listed skills, the mention of optical cables, transmission and power supply.↩︎