Intelligentized Warfare. In recent years, the PLA has increasingly emphasized intelligentization as a leading element of its modernization plans. The PRC is in the middle of its 14th Five-Year Plan, covering years 2021-2025, in which it outlined the development of intelligentized weapons as important to keep pace with modern warfare. Beijing is applying its research into AI technologies, such as machine learning and human-machine teaming, to military processes, such as decision-making to ultimately gain a cognitive advantage in future warfare.
PLA strategists have stated new technologies would enhance the PLA’s capability to process and utilize information at scale and machine speed, allowing decision-makers to plan, operate, and support cross-domain unconventional and asymmetrical fighting in the battlefield. The PLA is researching various applications for AI including support for missile guidance, target detection and identification, and autonomous systems. The PLA is exploring next-generation operational concepts for intelligentized warfare, such as attrition warfare by intelligent swarms, cross-domain mobile warfare, AI-based space confrontation, and cognitive control operations. The PLA also considers unmanned systems to be critical intelligentized technology, and is pursuing greater autonomy for unmanned aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles to enable manned and unmanned teaming, swarm attacks, optimized logistic support, and distributed ISR, among other capabilities.
SPACE AND COUNTERSPACE CAPABILITIES
Key Takeaways
- The PLA views space superiority, the ability to control the space-enabled information sphere and to deny adversaries their own space-based information gathering and communication capabilities, as critical components to conduct modern “informatized warfare.”
- The PLA continues to invest in improving its capabilities in space-based ISR, satellite communication, satellite navigation, and meteorology, as well as human spaceflight and robotic space exploration.
- The PLA continues to acquire and develop a range of counterspace capabilities and related technologies, including kinetic-kill missiles, ground-based lasers, and orbiting space robots, as well as expanding space surveillance capabilities, which can monitor objects in space within their field of view and enable counterspace actions.
Space Strategy and Doctrine. The PRC officially advocates for the peaceful use of space and is pursuing agreements in the United Nations on the “non-weaponization” of space. The PRC continues to improve its counterspace weapons capabilities and has enacted military reforms to better integrate cyberspace, space, and EW into joint military operations. The PRC’s space strategy is expected to evolve over time, keeping pace with the application of new space technology. These changes probably will be reflected in published national space strategy documents, through space policy actions, and in programs enacted by political and military leadership. In September 2021, Xi stated that “space is an important strategic asset for the country that must be well managed and
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OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China
