China and Pakistan opened Karakoram 2026, their first-ever joint army training exercise, at a training base in Korla, Xinjiang, on 14 October 2026. Beijing’s Ministry of National Defense describes the drill as joint counter-terrorism operations in high-altitude areas. With training in UAV operation, on-the-move target search and firing, and long-range sniping, followed by joint command and live-force phases. It is the first time the People’s Liberation Army and the Pakistan Army have trained side by side on the ground, after fifteen years of Shaheen air exercises and six years of Sea Guardians naval drills.
The official framing is tidy. The subtext is more interesting. The PLA’s own medical research describes the Tibetan plateau as the worst posting in the force for soldier health and morale, and the army has spent a decade building oxygen plants, hyperbaric chambers and a piped “combat oxygen” network to outposts above 5,000 metres because its lowland recruits cannot be made native to thin air. The Galwan Valley clash of June 2020, fought at around 4,250 metres, showed what happens when those soldiers meet sudden violence at altitude.
Pakistan, by contrast, learned high-altitude warfare the hard way: forty years of holding positions on the Siachen Glacier, the Gayari avalanche of 2012, and a lost war at Kargil in 1999 where its Northern Light Infantry fought and died on ridgelines above 5,000 metres. That painful institutional knowledge is what Beijing is seeking in Korla, a city that sits at roughly 930 metres, nearly four kilometres below the mountains that give the exercise its name.
This China Scoop analysis examines what Karakoram 2026 reveals about the PLA’s chronic weakness in mountain warfare, the psychological aftermath of Galwan, what the Pakistan Army brings to the partnership, and why the counter-terrorism label may not be the whole story. The interactive section below includes an altitude-and-oxygen explorer, a terrain profile of every location in the story, a side-by-side comparison of the two armies, and a timeline of China-Pakistan military exercises since 2011.
China’s first-ever army drill with Pakistan is billed as counter-terrorism training “in high-altitude areas”. Read the fine print and a different story emerges: an army that still struggles with mountains, learning from a partner that paid in blood to understand them.
The altitude problem the PLA cannot engineer away
Every army that has fought above 4,000 metres learns the same lesson: altitude is not terrain, it is an enemy with its own order of battle. The air at 4,000 metres carries roughly 60 per cent of the oxygen available at sea level. At 5,400 metres, where Pakistani and Indian soldiers have faced each other on the Siachen Glacier since 1984, it is closer to half. Troops lose cognitive sharpness, sleep badly, lose appetite and weight, and a minority develop pulmonary or cerebral oedema that kills within hours unless they descend.
The PLA knows this well. Its own medical literature is unusually candid. Researchers at the Army Medical University in Chongqing have reported for a decade that the plateau environment takes the heaviest toll on soldier mental health of any posting in the force. A 2015 survey of 1,021 soldiers garrisoned at altitude found scores on the standard SCL-90 psychological checklist significantly above the national military norm across depression, anxiety, phobic anxiety and interpersonal sensitivity. Jamestown’s China Brief, reviewing the Chinese studies, summarised the pattern bluntly: the longer a soldier stays on the plateau, the worse both body and mind become.
Drag the slider to see how much air a soldier actually gets
Above 3,000 m most lowlanders need days to acclimatise; above 4,000 m, weeks. Exertion at this height is where the PLA’s own guidelines warn that early altitude-sickness symptoms get ignored.
Oxygen fraction is derived from the standard barometric formula; actual values vary with weather and latitude. Acclimatisation guidance is general, not medical advice.
Beijing’s answer has been logistics on a heroic scale. From 2013 it built oxygen plants and hyperbaric chambers at every base above 3,000 metres on the Tibetan and Qinghai plateaus; PLA Daily counted around 170 oxygen facilities and nearly 5,000 oxygenators by 2017. Soldiers now inhale concentrated oxygen for at least an hour a day from bedside outlets. In 2025 PLA Daily described a 20-kilometre “combat oxygen” supply zone serving a border regiment stationed at 5,380 metres in the Hotan military sub-district, not far from the Galwan Valley. Earlier, a division on the plateau issued formal guidelines because, as one officer admitted, soldiers tended to ignore early symptoms of altitude sickness and some had lost their way on patrol after becoming disoriented.
None of this is a sign of an army at ease in the mountains. It is the signature of an army that has decided the mountains must be made habitable by machinery, because its soldiers, who are overwhelmingly recruited from the lowland provinces, cannot be made native to them. Former PLA instructor Song Zhongping put it with disarming honesty: Chinese soldiers come from all parts of China and it is not easy for many of them to adapt quickly to the plateau. The PLA has even quietly expanded recruitment of ethnic Tibetans, whose genetic adaptation to altitude the Han majority lacks.
Galwan: when the heights fought back
If one event explains why the PLA wants a mountain partner, it is the night of 15 June 2020 in the Galwan Valley, around 4,250 metres up in eastern Ladakh. In a brawl fought with clubs, stones and bare hands, India lost 20 soldiers including the commanding officer of 16 Bihar. China said nothing for eight months, then in February 2021 named four dead and one seriously wounded: regimental commander Qi Fabao, shown in PLA footage bleeding heavily from a head wound.
Independent estimates of Chinese losses run far higher. Russia’s TASS reported 45 dead; a US intelligence assessment cited 35. An investigation published by Australia’s The Klaxon in 2022, drawing on Weibo posts and mainland bloggers, put the figure at 38 and described a retreat across the Galwan river in darkness in which soldiers were swept away by rising, sub-zero water. Beijing’s deletion of those posts, and its criminal prosecution of bloggers who questioned the official toll, is itself a data point.
What interests us here is not the arithmetic of the dead but the psychology of the survivors. Ten Indian soldiers were held by the PLA for some sixty hours after the clash. Their debriefing, reported by India’s Sunday Guardian, described their captors as shocked, anxious and in “panic-mode”, fearful of retribution, and “horrified by what they saw”. It is a one-sided source, and should be read as such. But it rhymes with what the PLA’s own research says about how its lowland soldiers cope with sudden violence at altitude, where hypoxia blunts judgement, amplifies fear, and makes every exertion a struggle for breath.
The plateau is the worst posting
Army Medical University studies since 2015 find high-altitude troops score worse on every SCL-90 dimension than the force norm; a 2017 study of 46 plateau units attributed gradual improvement to new counselling, not to adaptation.
Oxygen as a weapons system
170 oxygen facilities, 5,000 oxygenators, hyperbaric chambers, bedside outlets, and in 2025 a 20 km “combat oxygen” supply zone for a regiment at 5,380 m near Galwan.
Captors in shock
Ten Indian soldiers held after Galwan described PLA troops as anxious, frightened and fearing retribution for more than sixty hours. Single-source, but consistent with the medical picture.
Drownings in the dark
Social-media reconstruction of the retreat suggests many PLA casualties came from a panicked crossing of the Galwan river, not from Indian blows. China has not disputed it in detail; it has deleted the posts.
The PLA responded to Galwan the way it responds to most problems: with hardware and infrastructure. It built roads, heated barracks, all-weather helipads and the oxygen network described above. What it could not build was a corps of soldiers for whom the plateau is home. That is the gap Karakoram 2026 is designed to close, and it is why the Pakistani contingent, drawn from an army that has been garrisoning the roof of the world for forty years, is the more interesting party in the room.
What Pakistan brings, and what it cost to learn
The Pakistan Army is not a mountain army by design; it is a plains-and-Punjab army that was forced up the glaciers. In April 1984 India’s Operation Meghdoot seized the passes above the Siachen Glacier, and Pakistan has held the lower, harder-to-supply positions on the western side ever since, up to around 5,400 metres. In 2012 an avalanche at Gayari buried a battalion headquarters and killed some 140 people. A Pakistani Senate committee in 2019 called conditions on the glacier “deplorable” and noted that men were being kept at posts for 60 to 75 days against a recommended 30. Indian assessments put Pakistani non-combat losses on the glacier at dozens a year.
Then there is Kargil. In 1999 Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry, recruited largely from Gilgit-Baltistan, infiltrated across the Line of Control and occupied ridgelines between 4,500 and 5,400 metres above the Srinagar–Leh highway. India counter-attacked uphill under artillery and air cover and, at great cost, retook the heights. Pakistan lost the war politically and militarily. A Pakistani soldier who spent 77 days on the Indian side told Time magazine that the first five days were hell, that troops had only energy packs and ice to eat, and that a young soldier from Punjab died in front of him from altitude sickness.
Defeat is a brutal teacher, and the Pakistan Army learned. The Northern Light Infantry was converted from a paramilitary force into a regular regiment. The Army High Altitude School at Rattu in Gilgit-Baltistan became a serious institution, training not only Pakistani infantry but foreign students and civilian rescue teams. More recently Pakistan has raised Specialised High Altitude Warfare Battalions, again recruiting from the high valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan where men are born acclimatised. None of this makes Pakistan a match for India’s High Altitude Warfare School at Gulmarg, which trains roughly 500 soldiers a year and whose alumni retook Kargil and held the heights in Ladakh in 2020. But it is institutional knowledge the PLA does not possess, learned the only way armies ever learn it.
- Equipment and money. China supplies over 80 per cent of Pakistan’s arms imports; every weapon in Korla is Chinese, and the drill doubles as a showroom.
- Drones and sensors. UAV operation is first on the skills list. The PLA’s plateau units have been built around unmanned ISR and loitering munitions since 2020.
- Engineering. Roads, pressurised barracks, oxygen plants, heated outposts: the PLA has turned altitude into a logistics problem and thrown money at it.
- Scale. Xinjiang Military District alone has more infantry, armour and artillery on the plateau than the whole Pakistan Army deploys in the north.
- Forty years on the glacier. Continuous occupation of Siachen positions since 1984, including rotations, casualty evacuation and resupply at 5,000 m+.
- Native recruits. The Northern Light Infantry and the new SHAW battalions draw on Gilgit-Baltistan, where soldiers arrive already adapted to thin air.
- A real school. The Army High Altitude School at Rattu runs mountaineering, ice-craft and high-altitude survival courses; it has trained foreign militaries.
- Scar tissue. Kargil, Gayari and three decades of altitude deaths taught the army how men break at height and how to keep them from breaking. Hard-won, and expensive.
- A winning record above 4,000 m. Pakistan lost Kargil. The PLA has not fought a sustained high-altitude engagement since 1962 and took disputed losses at Galwan.
- A shared enemy that matters at altitude. The stated target is terrorism; the terrorist threat to Chinese interests in Pakistan is in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, mostly below 2,000 m. The high-altitude framing points elsewhere.
- Interoperability. Different languages, radios, doctrine and command cultures. A first drill fixes none of that; it discovers how much there is to fix.
- Trust at the tactical level. Pakistani officers privately note that Chinese security contractors in Pakistan prefer their own perimeters. One exercise will not change that.
Counter-terrorism, or something else?
Take the official purpose at face value for a moment. China has real security concerns in Pakistan. The Baloch insurgency has killed Chinese engineers on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor; the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan operates from Afghanistan, which borders both countries. A joint counter-terrorism drill makes sense. What does not follow is the altitude. The Wakhan Corridor and the Khunjerab Pass, where the Khunjerab Security Force and PLA border troops held a joint patrol in May 2026, are high, but they are not where the TTP or the Baloch Liberation Army fight.
The terrain that matches the brief, high, cold, contested and adjacent to both armies, lies to the south-east: Ladakh, Siachen, the Shaksgam Valley that Pakistan ceded to China in 1963 and that India still claims. Chinese analysts have been candid about the direction of travel. Beijing confirmed in May 2026 that it provided technical support to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, the Indian strikes of May 2025. The Global Times quotes military commentator Zhang Jueshe calling Karakoram 2026 an expansion of cooperation “from specialised units in specific areas to regular army forces”. Indian analysts have for years tracked PLA assistance to Pakistan’s mountain-warfare build-up, and read it as a two-front rehearsal.
Our view is more cautious than the two-front alarm and more sceptical than the counter-terrorism label. The simplest explanation fits the evidence: the PLA has a chronic, well-documented weakness in high-altitude soldiering, it has a partner with four decades of painful experience, and it has chosen a comfortable base to begin transferring that experience. Whether the knowledge ever gets tested in anger is a political question. That it is being sought is a military fact.
Sixty years of exercises, one missing service
2011Shaheen-I begins the air-force series
2020Sea Guardians-I in the Arabian Sea
June 2020Galwan Valley clash
May 2025Operation Sindoor
May 2026Khunjerab joint patrol
14 Oct 2026Karakoram 2026 opens at Korla
What to watch
Where the live-force phase happens. If PLA footage shows troops operating in the Tian Shan above 3,000 metres rather than on the Korla range, the “high-altitude” label becomes meaningful. If it stays on the base, the label is branding.
Who is teaching whom. Watch for Pakistani instructors from the Army High Altitude School in the Chinese coverage, and for Chinese drone operators attached to Pakistani sections. The direction of instruction tells you which capability each side values.
Whether it becomes a series. Shaheen became annual; Sea Guardians is on its fourth iteration. A “Karakoram 2027” on Pakistani soil, ideally in Gilgit-Baltistan, would confirm that the PLA wants its soldiers on real mountains with real partners.
India’s response. New Delhi has so far said nothing. A quiet reinforcement of the Ladakh winter posture, or an accelerated Indian exercise with a partner of its own, would show the exercise is being read in Delhi the way it is being read here.
Sources and further reading
- Anadolu Agency, “China, Pakistan begin first-ever joint army training exercise”, 14 Oct 2026.
- Dawn, “Pakistani, Chinese armies begin joint training exercise in Xinjiang”, 15 Oct 2026.
- Global Times, “China, Pakistan to hold first joint army training, leveraging ‘complementarity'”, 12 Oct 2026.
- PTI / ThePrint, “China, Pakistan armies to hold joint drills”, 11 Oct 2026.
- Dialogue Pakistan, on CCTV-7 confirmation of Chinese-supplied equipment and the May 2026 Khunjerab patrol, 15 Oct 2026.
- South China Morning Post, “China military improves air supply for troops at Himalayan border with India”, 2025.
- South China Morning Post, “Chinese soldiers given tips on how to prevent altitude sickness”, 2021.
- Asia Times, “PLA troops sent to China’s high plateaus get oxygen boost”, Nov 2017.
- Jamestown Foundation China Brief, “Assessing Mental Health Challenges in the PLA, Part 2”.
- Ou & Zeng, “The role of psychological clinics to improve the psychological status of grass-roots soldiers on the plateau”, Medical Journal of the Chinese PAP, 2017.
- The Diplomat Magazine, “Are China’s Soldiers Psychologically Fit for Modern Wars?”, Apr 2018.
- Al Jazeera, “China admits it lost four soldiers in 2020 India border clash”, 19 Feb 2021.
- The Tribune, “China lost 38 soldiers in Galwan: Australian media report”, Feb 2022.
- Sunday Guardian, “Post Galwan battle, Chinese soldiers were in a state of panic”, 2020.
- Time, “In Enemy Territory: A Soldier’s Story”, Kargil 1999.
- The Week, “Inside the Indian Army’s High Altitude Warfare School”, Jan 2025.
- EurAsian Times, on Pakistan’s Specialised High Altitude Warfare Battalions and PLA assistance.
- Sunday Guardian, on the Pakistan Senate defence committee’s Siachen findings, Dec 2019.
Analysis reflects open-source reporting available on 15 October 2026. Casualty figures for Galwan remain disputed; both official and independent estimates are given. © China Scoop.
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