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I got really bored today so I decided to geolocate this DF-5 silo because its been bothering me.
There is maybe 10 seconds of footage at the beginning of the one of the clips that shows a group of soldiers forming up on a basketball court at the bottom of a valley.
Matches up with a suspected DF-5 silo location I've had saved for a while. These garrison areas are not far from the silos and are usually not so difficult to find when you figure out what you should be looking for.
Silo battalion garrison area at 27.026509°, 109.784275° is the match. Took a bit of brute forcing the Huitong area but we got there.
I have a theory that we can tell the difference between DF-5B and DF-5A silos by the types of equipment we see inside the upper equipment room of the silos, but I'd like more confirmation of that before committing to it. This one looks like an A and 633 is reported as an A unit.
These sort of sites are hard to pick out due to the large area DF-5 BDEs operate out of and the small footprint of the site. But Chinese silos have managed to gather a reputation for absolute secrecy that I'm not sure is deserved.
Silos are hard to hide partly because they are really really obvious when you're digging them. Its hard to hide heavy excavation vehicles and large spoil piles - like, for example, the silos China is digging at Sundian that me and @wslafoy wrote about last year.
There are more silos under construction I haven't published yet. In broad strokes expect the number of silos in the PLARF inventory to grow from 18 to ~30 in the next five or ten years or so.
But my general point is this - when the PLARF camouflages its launcher sites, its almost never to hide the actual number of launchers. Its almost always to hide *operations.*
