Beijing’s new missiles, aircraft carriers, and hypersonic glide vehicles threaten US military assets in China’s littoral waters and beyond. It’s natural that US analysts focus on this danger.
But the spotlight on dangerous new Chinese hardware has until recently obscured another aspect of Beijing’s military development: the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) growing focus on the utility of battlefield information. According to Chinese military strategists, the force that best gathers and exploits information will gain a decisive advantage in future wars.
In order to gain an information edge, China is investing in AI. For now, the technology will augment, not replace China’s extant information-centric approach to warfighting. While dangerous, China faces obstacles in achieving its military AI goals.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, Chinese strategists came to believe that US information dominance represented a defining advantage. US information superiority allowed it to “see” the battlefield, make quick decisions, and carry out precision strikes that overwhelmed Iraqi forces.
Over the following decades, Chinese writings emphasized the critical role of information in modern warfare. Beijing developed at least two interrelated operational concepts aimed at dominating the information environment: system destruction warfare and multi-domain precision warfare.
System destruction warfare targets vulnerable links between sensors and platforms. If the system allows militaries to communicate, process battlefield information, and carry out strikes, Chinese strategists believe that the enemy will lose “the will and ability to resist.” Multi-domain precision warfare aims to integrate AI and big data analysis with precision strikes to identify and target enemy weaknesses.
These concepts are challenging to execute. They require generating, transmitting, and processing a vast amount of information to identify soft spots in enemy operating systems and networks. This is where AI comes into play. Beijing believes AI can integrate myriad data sources into comprehensive, actionable data sets that the technology can then analyze. Additionally, China is exploring how to use AI for missile guidance and target detection and identification, as well as for electronic warfare and decision making. The PLA is also developing AI-enabled autonomous vehicles and predictive maintenance, among other applications.
Another central aspect of China’s work in the military AI space focuses on By using AI to generate deepfakes and manipulate public opinion through social media influence operations,
US government leaders and defense industry insiders have sounded the alarm about China’s advances in AI, and some now claim that China is outpacing the United States in developing and fielding AI-enabled military systems. While it is impossible to know which country is ahead, and in which applications, China faces significant headwinds in its quest to develop and deploy military AI.
For now, Beijing remains dependent on the foreign semiconductors that provide the computing power it requires to develop high-end AI applications. Increasingly stringent US export controls have impeded, to some degree, China’s AI ambitions.
It is also unclear whether the Chinese military possesses the tech-savvy workforce needed to create world-class AI military systems. The PLA’s centralized decision-making processes may inhibit its ability to leverage AI-enabled decision-support systems.
Despite these and other challenges, China’s use of military AI remains a pressing US national security concern. But it is important to right-size the threat – to better understand both the PLA’s strengths and weaknesses – and to develop adequate countermeasures.
Sam Bresnick is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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