On cold platform mornings in Bengbu, Anhui province, soldiers disembark from passing trains and are handed steaming meals before they even reach their buses. They are greeted not by uniformed logistics officers but by a freshly formed volunteer unit of retired servicemen nicknamed the "little cart" team, who prepare, load and deliver boxed hot lunches to convoying units with military precision.
The team was created by the Bengbu military supply station after it confronted a familiar problem: as military supply and support tasks move toward continuous, unit‑level and long‑range operations, conventional manpower arrangements strain under the demand. The supply station issued a call for volunteers across the city; 51 veterans applied and 10 were selected after vetting. The recruits receive training, uniforms, a team flag and formal appointment letters, and have already performed multiple large‑scale meal runs, serving up to 200 personnel on some days.
Among them is Cao Jun, a former cook who now experiments with "warm heart" bento boxes designed to appeal to troops from across China. The service blends practical skill and a volunteer ethos: one member known as "Warm‑Heart Brother" earned his nickname by delivering meals punctually, while another rose to lead the makeshift kitchen after inventing popular dishes. The supply station logs each mission in a service manual, turning episodic help into a routinized supplement to formal logistics.
This arrangement is pragmatic rather than ceremonial. The PLA has been reorganizing logistics for operations that are continuous, decentralized and increasingly mobile; those changes expose intermittent shortfalls in hands‑on tasks such as loading, carrying and meal distribution. Local authorities in Bengbu have turned to veterans to plug those gaps, providing both a rapid surge capability for peak tasks and a domestic public‑service narrative about ex‑servicemen continuing to serve the nation.
For military planners the model has attractions: volunteers bring relevant skills, civil ties and local knowledge; formalized procedures, training and identification reduce the friction of integrating them into operations. For local governments the arrangement addresses employment and socialization of veterans, converts goodwill into operational value and showcases a capacity to support national defence without direct military expansion.
Yet the practice also raises questions about scalability and command integration. Reliance on volunteers for routine surge tasks can mask underlying shortfalls in institutional capacity and may complicate operational security and chain‑of‑command clarity as support tasks scale up or occur in more sensitive contexts. Still, in the near term the Bengbu experiment underscores how China's civilian and local administrative apparatuses are being mobilized to sustain a more logistically demanding military posture.