A brigade under the People’s Liberation Army’s Central Theater Command has adopted a closed, two-batch training cycle for its headquarters staff that replaces isolated lesson drills with continuous, task-linked sequences of exercises. The unit organized commanders and staff into an intensive training program that emphasizes basic skills, targeted improvement of weak points, and a final phase of integrated, mission‑relevant rehearsal.
Trainers designed the syllabus around a "1＋N" concept: one principal subject serves as the spine of training while multiple associated subjects are chained together to simulate the demands of real operations. Participants moved from tactical maneuvers directly into observation and reporting, communications equipment operation, and live-fire drills in one continuous flow, a change aimed at conserving time while increasing the realism and relevance of each session.
The brigade framed the exercises explicitly by the maxim "train what you need to fight," abandoning older approaches that treated each syllabus item as an isolated skill. The first batch’s results show measurable gains in course pass and excellence rates, and the brigade is now converting the practices into standardized assessment criteria covering multiple echelons and specialties.
Although this report concerns a single brigade, the shift reflects broader, long-running PLA efforts to professionalize training, sharpen operational integration and speed the institutional adoption of mission-oriented evaluation. By knitting together communications, command and live-fire elements in continuous sequences, the model both economizes training time and advances the kind of combined-arms and command-and-control fluency that the PLA has prioritized in recent modernization drives.