MoD report puts 10 Chinese brigades on the LAC after the 2025 drawdown
The 2025-26 annual report says 10 Combined Arms Brigade-sized forces remained on the line and 10 in training areas. Indian forces, it said, were not thinned to match.
New Delhi3 min read
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China cut the number of People's Liberation Army formations facing India along the Line of Actual Control in 2025, the Ministry of Defence said in its annual report for 2025-26. Ten Combined Arms Brigade-sized forces remained on the LAC. Another ten sat in traditional training areas away from the front.
The ministry published the 323-page report last week. Indian coverage on Monday treated the brigade count as the first official Indian number for the post-disengagement year. Officials did not publish a matching figure for 2024, so the size of the cut has to be read against earlier unofficial estimates. Before the October 2024 disengagement, China was widely estimated to have more than 60,000 troops in the Ladakh sector alone. Ten Combined Arms Brigades on the LAC plus ten in the rear translate, on Indian briefings this week, to roughly 40,000 to 50,000 troops on the line and a similar number in training areas.
The Indian Army's own posture, the report said, stayed robust, well-poised, and prepared to deal with any emerging contingency in every sector. That sentence is the ministry's way of saying the reduction on the Chinese side was not matched by a drawdown on the Indian side.
The same chapter lists the diplomatic track that ran beside the military one. The Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination met for its 33rd and 34th rounds in March and July 2025. Special Representatives talks on the boundary, frozen for years after Galwan, resumed in December 2024 and again in August 2025. Corps commanders met for a 23rd round in eastern Ladakh on 25-26 October 2025. Border Personnel Meetings continued in a cordial and friendly environment, the report said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Tianjin in August 2025 for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit. President Xi Jinping came to New Delhi this week for the BRICS summit, his first visit to India in seven years. The ministry presents those journeys as political cover for the quieter work on the ridge lines.
What the report does not do is declare the LAC settled. Patrol protocols, buffer zones and the maps each side carries remain disputed. The October 2024 disengagement ended the most dangerous face-offs. It did not produce an agreed line. Ten brigades on the Chinese side are fewer than the wartime peak. They are still a standing army on a live border.
Readers who saw last week's summit photographs already know the political weather has warmed. The new information is the order of battle. A Combined Arms Brigade is not a ceremonial unit. It is a combined infantry, armour, artillery and support package designed to fight. Ten of them on the LAC means China has not gone home. It has gone from surge to garrison.
Indian forces have spent six years building roads, habitats and airfields behind their own posts. That construction continues. The ministry's insistence that the Indian deployment remains robust is also a budget sentence. Drawdown talk in New Delhi would collide with those projects.
The report's other frontier note is about Pakistan. After Operation Sindoor, the ministry said, the Line of Control significantly altered, then stabilised after Director General of Military Operations talks on 10 and 12 May 2025. Unpredictability continues, it added. The LAC chapter is calmer. The two files still sit in the same annual book.
Xi left Delhi on Sunday. The brigade numbers now sit in the public record. The next test is whether winter 2026-27 looks like the winters before Galwan or like the winters after it. The report gives the 2025 answer. It does not write 2026.
Indian brigades that sat opposite those Chinese formations through 2021-24 did not pack up when the October 2024 buffers were drawn. Habitats at DBO, the DS-DBO road, the Nyoma airfield work and the extra artillery positions in eastern Ladakh are now part of the standing bill. A ministry report that praises a Chinese reduction without recording an Indian one is telling the cabinet the insurance premium stays. Winter stocking for 2026-27 will be ordered on that basis, not on summit photographs.
