According to Army Technology, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) could be one of the leading military forces in developing artificial intelligence in terms of investment.
According to a report in October 2021, the Center for Emerging Security and Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University announced an estimated placement of $1.6 billion to $2.7 billion in research and investment in AI each year, on par with the US military.
According to the Harnessed Lightning report, PLA focuses on using AI in 7 main areas: Automatic vehicles; Intelligence, monitoring and reconnaissance; Automatic target recognition; Maintenance and logistics prediction; Information and electronic warfare (EW); simulation training; Command and control structures (C2).
With the hope of improving coordination and quick response in combat, PLA focuses on developing AI in self-driving vehicles, specifically ground and aerial launchers.
This shows that the current top concern is the development of autonomous platforms that can contribute to creating an advantage for PLA in battles.
In addition, the Chinese military can also apply AI to the field of cognitive warfare.
According to the Global Times, another unmanned surface vehicle was used in an exercise in January 2021 and coordinated with a group of UAVs in a landing attack.
Other autonomous technologies include a leader tracking system for logistics trucks, allowing a convoy carrying only one or two soldiers to lead, but this was reported in 2017 and has not been put into operation.
According to an article published on the Chinese Military Network in January 2021, China is also making other developments in this field, such as a 'biological shark' designed to have an invisible underwater shape and conduct reconnaissance, search and rescue, as well as hydrological monitoring at a depth of 600m, or a psychological robot called Little Fat, used to encourage playmakers to talk about their problems and help playmakers diagnose them.
The Chinese military plans to focus on contents such as algorithms, the development of unmanned platforms and smart weapons, mainly including precision guided missiles, hypersonic surfing vehicles (HGV), UAVs, cyber attacks, targeting vulnerabilities in the US combat network system, exploiting advantages to implement the Anti-Appearance/ Anti-Invasion (A2/AD) strategy.
Chinese universities have also made a lot of progress in drones. Although designed for disaster relief and area surveys, the technology could theoretically be transferred to the military.
AI is meaningful to the Chinese military because it gives Beijing the opportunity to compete on par with Washington in developing an emerging technology.
