Military researchers zero in on new tech
PLA experts prioritise AI-driven weapons programme to take strategic high ground
Researchers in the armed forces have prioritised key areas of military technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI)-driven naval warfare and aerospace combat capabilities, expanding on President Xi Jinping’s calls for “bold innovations” in advanced technology.
In a series devoted to Xi’s concept of developing “new quality combat power”, Study Times, a publication under the Central Party School of the Communist Party, has published articles by various People’s Liberation Army (PLA) researchers stressing such technologies had become the strategic high ground in military dominance and were essential to winning on future battlefields.
Xi has pushed the PLA to develop hi-tech and advanced capabilities to win a modern war.
In a meeting last month, he urged officials to “boldly innovate and explore new types of combat force construction and applications, and liberate and develop new quality combat power”.
The authors said the role of artificial intelligence was a priority for “new combat forces”, and that it was a “clear trend” that AI-powered military systems would be a “key variable in changing the rules of war”.
They discussed how AI was changing the nature of military command and decision-making, saying it could process and analyse large amounts of data to help make faster decisions, and in some cases, independently make complex tactical decisions and operations. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned drone boats were also becoming more prevalent, they said.
After Xi last month urged forces to prepare “for the military struggle at sea”, the articles discussed how “unmanned intelligent combat will deeply change the deployments of naval forces, prompting changes in battle concepts and accelerating the evolution of combat”.
The authors also explored how massive drone networks could assess situational awareness during sea battles, process data with cloud computing, and use advanced algorithms to form adaptive command, assault and logistic chains. AI-controlled drones could also be used for tasks such as air refuelling, communications relays, electronic countermeasures for reconnaissance and surveillance, swarm bombing and decoy deployment, they said.
The flexibility and cost-effectiveness of AI-integrated drones would upend traditional naval theories, one researcher wrote, and “new methods of warfare at sea, such as unmanned attrition warfare and unmanned guerilla warfare, will gain new asymmetric advantages”.
In another article, researchers focused on the expansion of “new military realms”, in which “electromagnetic space, cyberspace and aerospace” would become the “new frontiers of military struggle”.