Steering in the Right Direction in the Military-Technical Revolution
Robert Work, James A. Winnefeld, Jr., and Stephanie O’Sullivan
March 23, 2021
A couple of years ago at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum, a senior executive at one of China’s largest defense companies claimed that “mechanized equipment is just like the hand of the human body.†He continued, “In future intelligent wars, AI systems will be just like the brain of the human body.†More recently, the People’s Liberation Army sought broad participation from young technology-savvy inventors in an AI challenge-style competition to develop the best algorithms to direct joint military forces in a realistic fight over a disputed island territory — in other words, Taiwan.
We should not be surprised. China believes that AI-enabled “intelligentized combat operations†will be central to surpassing the United States in the emerging military-technical revolution. It is developing new warfighting concepts to harness big data, swarm intelligence, automated decision-making, and autonomous unmanned systems and robotics in ways that could give it a decisive military advantage on the battlefield. China is also investing heavily in supporting technologies like quantum computing and 5G, and is leveraging its approach to military-civil fusion to focus its brainpower and resources on bringing these concepts to life. We assess that, in the big picture, the military-civilian fusion is generally working for China as a successful stratagem.
https://warontherocks.com/2021/03/steering-in-the-right-direction-in-the-military-technical-revolution/
