Defence Ministry says PLA cut LAC brigades in 2025 and still keeps ten
The 2025-26 annual report records a drop in Chinese combined-arms brigades on the northern borders. Ten brigade-sized forces remain on the LAC and in training areas. The Army says its own posture is unchanged.
New Delhi3 min read
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The Ministry of Defence's annual report for 2025-26, posted on the ministry website this week and reported in detail on 13 September, says 2025 brought a significant reduction in People's Liberation Army forces opposite India's northern borders. The same paragraph says ten combined-arms brigade-sized forces remain deployed along the Line of Actual Control and in traditional training areas.
Western estimates put a PLA combined-arms brigade near 5,000 troops. Ten brigades on the line and ten in the training belt would be about 50,000 people in each column if those figures are read as full formations. The report does not publish a headcount. It does not say how many brigades stood on the LAC in 2024. The comparison is qualitative: fewer than the year before, not none.
A November 2024 United States Department of War assessment had put about 1.20 lakh PLA troops on the LAC and more than 20 combined-arms brigades in forward locations across the western, middle and eastern sectors. If both documents are taken at face value, the 2025 cut is real and incomplete. Indian sources quoted by The Tribune read the new language as a withdrawal of brigades from the immediate line into training areas that can still feed the front.
The ministry's own next sentence is a reminder. The Indian Army's deployment in all sectors along the LAC, it says, is robust, well poised and prepared for any contingency. That is the language of a force that has not thinned its own side. India doubled troops in eastern Ladakh after 2020, added an armoured brigade and kept air defence in place through winter. Nyoma air base, 25 kilometres from the line, opened in November 2025.
The report lists the political and military contacts that accompanied the thinning: the prime minister's meetings with Xi Jinping, Special Representatives talks, corps commander rounds and border personnel meetings. It presents those channels as the reason the northern front is quieter than it was in 2020-22. It does not claim the dispute is settled. It does not withdraw the 2020 grievance over the changing of the status quo.
Infrastructure sits beside the troop count. Satellite imagery reviewed by Indian officials and described earlier this year showed a sharp rise in permanent Chinese structures since 2020 even as forward tents came down. Roads, villages and firing positions last longer than a seasonal brigade. A cut in deployed battalions can run next to a rise in concrete. The annual report's silence on that building rate is the gap a reader has to fill from other files.
The timing of publication is not accidental. BRICS leaders were in Delhi. The two armies have been trying to keep the line dull while the two capitals talk about trade and visas. A public note that the PLA sent brigades backward is useful to both sides if it is true. It is also useful to the Indian Army's budget case if the same note insists that ten brigades and the missiles, air defences and tanks behind them are still there.
What to watch is the next winter. If the ten brigades stay in training areas through the snow and the Indian deployment stays thick, the report's word "reduction" will have meant a rearrangement, not a retreat. If those brigades roll back to the spurs in October, the 2025 paragraph will read as a seasonal dip. The document itself gives the test: count the brigades, not the adjectives.
