Senior PLA officers stress leadership by CPC for China's strategic missile forces

China's senior military officers have stressed that the country's strategic missile forces should promote loyalty and obedience in their ranks towards the Communist Party of China (CPC), according to an article published in Wednesday's People's Daily, the CPC's flagship newspaper.
Against the background of the profound changes in the society and the increasingly complicated struggles in the ideological areas, continuous efforts should be made to resist the tendency of "westernization" in the military forces as well as the idea of separating the military forces from the leadership by the CPC, said the article jointly signed by Jing Zhiyuan and Zhang Haiyang, who are, respectively, commander and political commissar of the Second Artillery Force (SAF) of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
The article summarized the experience in developing the PLA Second Artillery Force under the leadership of the CPC. The PLA Second Artillery Force is a strategic missile force that controls the country's nuclear weapons.
The officers called for more efforts to promote socialist theory education to SAF service personnel, to ensure that the military forces always follow the CPC's instructions.
The most important mission of the SAF is to safeguard the country's security and development, and the SAF should plan to build a strategic missile force commensurate with the country's status and in line with the demands of the military forces' new missions, the article said.
The article also called on the SAF to constantly improve its preparedness to handle diversified threats, it said.
The article also said that the SAF should promote its strength of "strategic deterrence" as well as its capability in actual warfare in the information age, by more efforts to integrate all kinds of combat forces as well as better training for service personnel.
The SAF should also promote technological development and innovation, especially in the information technology field, and make efforts to improve its armament and equipment as well as its human resources, the article said.
Moreover, the article said that management of the military personnel should be conducted in a legal, scientific and effective way, and the safety management and measures to prevent serious safety problems and accidents should also be intensified.

Posted in: China's strategic missile forces