Progressive Socialist Party - Military Structure and Organisation

Military Structure and Organisation

The PSP military wing, the People’s Liberation Army – PLA (Arabic: Jayish al-Tahrir al-Sha’aby) or Armée de Libération Populaire (ALP) in French was raised early in 1976 with the help of Fatah and initially comprised 3,000 lightly armed fighters drawn from the Druze and Shia Muslim communities of the Shouf. Other sources however, place its numbers as high as 5,000.

At this stage a predominantely infantry force provided with light weapons drawn from PLO stocks or pilfered from LAF and ISF barracks, the PSP militia also fielded by 1977 a small mechanized corps made of gun-trucks (US M151 MUTTs, Land-Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers, GMC, Chevrolet, Ford, Mitsubishi and Nissan light pick-ups, plus Mercedes-Benz Unimog light trucks) equipped with heavy machine guns, recoilless rifles, and Anti-aircraft autocannons. After suffering casualties during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of June 1982, the PLA was quietly re-organized and expanded late that year by Walid Jumblatt, who turned it into a disciplined fighting force structured along conventional lines, with ‘Commando’, armoured, mechanized infantry and artillery units provided with Soviet-made armoured vehicles, field guns, Howitzers and MBRLs.

Heaquartered at the Druze town of Baakline in the Shouf, the PSP militia by 1983 aligned 17,000 troops – 5,000 uniformed regulars, backed by 12,000 male and female reservists staffed by a qualified, Soviet-trained Officer corps. It was subsequently enlarged in the wake of the Mountain War, with the inclusion of 960 Druze soldiers (900 privates, plus 60 Officers and NCOs) of the Lebanese Army’s Fourth Brigade after its disintegration in September 1983.

This allowed the PLA to seize seven US-made M48A5 main battle tanks (MBTs) and a number of Staghound armoured cars, AMX-13 light tanks and M113 APCs for its own armoured corps, further strengthened in 1985 with the arrival of some 70 T-54/55 MBTs, BTR-152, BTR-60 and BMP-1 APCs supplied on loan by Syria and the USSR, which they employed in the War of the Camps waged that same year against Nasserite and PLO militias in west Beirut.

They also fielded a powerful artillery corps equipped with Soviet 122 mm howitzer 2A18 (D-30) and 130 mm towed field gun M1954 (M-46) pieces, along with truck-mounted BM-11 130 mm and towed BM-12 (Chinese Type 63) 107 mm MBRLs, coupled by Man-portable, shoulder-launched Soviet SAM-7 ‘Grail’ AA missiles which were used to bring down two Lebanese Air Force Hawker Hunter fighter jets during the 1983-84 ‘Mountain War’.