U.S., Japan and Philippines use mock Chinese ZBD-05 as live-fire target

During the U.S.-Philippines “Shoulder-to-Shoulder” exercise, allied forces used a simulated target ship near Bataan Island featuring a Chinese ZBD-05 amphibious assault vehicle as a dummy target for live-fire shooting.

The exercise brought together approximately 800 personnel from the United States, the Philippines, and Japan for combined amphibious denial training on the coast of Laoag in northern Luzon, Philippines, with media permitted to observe. Around 40 members of Japan’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade, the specialist island defense unit based in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, participated alongside American and Filipino forces, firing rifles, recoilless rifles, and mortars at targets that included unmanned boats configured to simulate an incoming amphibious assault force.

The Japanese unit’s presence is itself significant — the Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade was specifically created to defend Japan’s southwestern island chain against exactly the kind of amphibious assault the exercise was designed to counter, and its deployment to the Philippines for trilateral training with American and Filipino forces reflects how closely the three nations’ defense planning has converged around a shared threat assessment.

The ZBD-05 that served as the centerpiece dummy target is the People’s Liberation Army’s primary tracked amphibious infantry fighting vehicle, purpose-built for the beach-landing phase of an amphibious assault. It swims ashore under its own power, armed with a 30mm autocannon and anti-tank missiles, and is designed to get armored firepower onto a beach quickly enough to suppress defenders before follow-on forces arrive. China has conducted repeated large-scale amphibious exercises in recent years in which the ZBD-05 and its companion ZTD-05 amphibious tank variant play central roles in the initial assault wave, reflecting how the PLA has structured the first phase of any potential Taiwan invasion scenario around fast armored beach landings backed by fire support. Selecting a mock-up of that specific vehicle as the live-fire target was not incidental — it was a message about what the exercise was actually preparing for.

China has been expanding its amphibious capacity beyond dedicated military vessels. Recent reports have highlighted the PLA’s incorporation of civilian roll-on/roll-off ferries to augment military sealift, repurposing commercial vessels to transport troops and vehicles in numbers that China’s dedicated amphibious fleet alone could not sustain. That approach effectively multiplies the number of platforms available for a large-scale crossing operation without requiring proportional investment in purpose-built naval amphibious ships, and it has drawn attention from defense analysts tracking how China is closing the gap between its stated amphibious ambitions and its actual transport capacity.

Against that backdrop, the trilateral exercise at Laoag takes on a specific operational logic. The Philippines’ northern Luzon coast sits in the geographic corridor between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, and an allied military presence there that can credibly contest amphibious operations in those waters has direct relevance to any scenario involving Chinese military action across the Taiwan Strait. Japan’s southwestern islands, including the Ryukyu chain, sit at the northern end of the same geographic corridor. For all three countries, the ability to detect, target, and destroy amphibious assault vehicles and the platforms carrying them before or during a beach landing is not an abstract exercise requirement — it is the core defensive problem they would face in a Taiwan contingency that escalated into broader regional conflict.

The use of recoilless rifles and mortars alongside small arms in the live-fire component reflects a practical emphasis on the kinds of weapons that island defense forces would actually have available in the early phases of an amphibious denial mission. Portable, man-carried anti-armor weapons capable of engaging amphibious vehicles in the surf zone or on a beach are the tools that light infantry and island garrison forces rely on before heavier systems can be brought to bear. Training those fires specifically against a ZBD-05 silhouette ensures that when soldiers from all three countries encounter that vehicle in a real scenario, they have already practiced the engagement.

The Shoulder-to-Shoulder exercise series has been a consistent feature of the U.S.-Philippines alliance relationship, but its trilateral expansion to include Japanese forces and its explicit orientation toward amphibious denial against Chinese-pattern threats represents a meaningful evolution in how the three countries are integrating their defense preparations. Japan, the United States, and the Philippines each have distinct but overlapping interests in the security of the waters and islands between Luzon and Taiwan, and exercises that practice combined arms amphibious denial in that specific geography build the kind of interoperability and shared situational understanding that coalition defense requires.