But Mr. Blasko and other experts said that because the military did not have heavy-lift helicopters, vital equipment like excavators and cranes had to be brought in on roads obstructed by landslides, slowing the pace of the rescue operations.

Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the military’s response did not reflect well on the military’s preparedness for a potential war with, say, Taiwan, the independently governed island that China claims as its sovereign territory. China’s air force deployed 6,500 paratroopers to Sichuan, but only 15 ended up dropping into the disaster zone, military officials said, because of bad weather and forbidding mountain terrain. Mr. Shen called the effort too little and too late.

“The air force should have been able to get troops into Wenchuan in two hours,” he said, referring to a county near the quake’s epicenter. “It took 44 hours. If it took them 10 hours, that’s understandable. But 44 hours is shameful.”

Image Soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army prepared to aid earthquake victims in Sichuan Province in May. Credit... Reuters

Allan Behm, a former official in Australia’s Defense Ministry, said the Chinese military was evidently still focused on conventional warfare rather than engineering skills. In spite of its efforts to modernize, Mr. Behm said, “the P.L.A. is still built on the idea of bringing hundreds of thousands of troops into the battle area.”

China has often deployed the P.L.A., along with a separate paramilitary force, the People’s Armed Police, to respond to natural disasters, social unrest and other domestic security issues. Tai Ming Cheung, a senior fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California at San Diego, said that in addition to preparing for a possible conflict with Taiwan, China was “focused on projecting power inside its borders, to ensure social stability.”

In January, P.L.A. units from southwestern China’s Chengdu Military Region were deployed to southern areas hit by heavy snowstorms. In March, they were transferred to Tibetan regions of western Sichuan to pacify antigovernment protesters. Then, in May, the earthquake hit, and they came down from the Tibetan plateau to rescue people buried under collapsed buildings.