While recent scholarship has gone a long way toward demystifying China’s missile force, it remains in many ways a poorly understood phenomenon, with an unusually high degree of censorship even by the already strict standards of the PLA. The following is a brief executive summary of a much longer PLARF Order of Battle report. The purpose of the full report is to improve the level of detail available to researchers by providing the most thorough encyclopedia of PLA Rocket Force units and leadership available in open sources. We utilized a wide range of Chinese language sources to compile dossiers on as many PLARF units and institutions as possible, including for support units which are critical to the PLARF’s mission but often go overlooked. We worked to provide information, where available, on each unit’s history, mission, location, leadership, equipment, and force structure. We hope that the information contained in this report will fill a critical gap in scholarship, serve as a valuable resource to the PLA research community, and help facilitate further research and greater understanding of the PLARF.
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