China Military’s Enormous Threat

Nineteen years ago this week the US suffered a defining event in its modern history. Known since that day simply as “9-11,” the American people have managed skillfully to balance the country’s emerging critical need for national security with the systemic requirement for individual freedom. China and the CCP leadership do not understand the key importance of this relationship nor do they seek it at home or abroad. Advances in computer technology during the last few years have enabled the Communist Party leadership to move further toward complete tyranny over the country’s domestic population and increased military aggression overseas. Using the latest developments in big data analytics and nascent editions of AI technology, Beijing is pushing the modernization of its military in ways that today threaten the entire world.

President Xi Jinping announced that there is a modernization plan for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to enhance its capabilities to put China on par with the most advanced Western nations. At issue for the West and China’s neighbors, is Beijing’s end goal of hegemonic power and the methods it intends to employ to achieve it. Using publicly available data RAND Corporation wove together a picture of China’s broadly outlined national defense big data (国防大数据) plan. What it reveals should give China’s Asian neighbors and the world cause for immediate alarm. The Chinese definition of “national defense” big data collection by its military is all-encompassing. Its two defining characteristics are supersecrecy and supercomplexity.

The recently released RAND study reports that other key characteristics of China’s informationized military plan “go beyond those of general big data” that normally include high velocity, high variety, high volume, and high value computing. The country also is incorporating the 6S characteristics of supercomplexity, supersecrecy, speedy deployment, safety, a strong degree of confrontation, and strong timeliness. What that means to the world in common vernacular is that China intends to own the warfighting domain and possess the capacity to win both a localized war and one against a superpower. If the CCP leadership decide to forcibly conquer Taiwan or take control of the South and East China Seas, having an information advantage could be the deciding factor in a modern, fast-changing battlespace that incorporates information warfare. If it faces off with the United States it will need to control the information domain to achieve parity or potentially win.

First reported three years ago in the People’s Liberation Army Daily, Li Daguang, of China’s National Defense University’s Military Logistics and Military Science and Technology Equipment Teaching and Research Department, said that for China big data is the single most significant point of focus in great power struggles and that “data sovereignty” is being treated as equally critical to land, sea, air and space sovereignty. The goal of offensive data includes the destruction of the information infrastructure of an adversary.

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The PLA Academy of Military Science’s Information Resources Center considers national defense big data to be a critical resource that will play a decisive role in joint operations. This is an area where American military analysts in past years considered China to be behind the West. PLA scholars claim that a futuristic “digitized officer” won’t fully replace humans, but will be more capable and faster at accomplishing many critical tasks. C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), cybersecurity, modeling and logistics are only a few of the research areas the PLA is concentrating its resources on in the next decade. Other programs are centered around an effort to train and recruit the personnel to handle the R&D effort.

One question Western military strategists are asking in 2020 is what are China’s operational plans for their advanced big data capabilities in the future? And, is this intermediate step enough to create the needed linkage necessary for effective future artificial intelligence efforts. The RAND report suggests that there is a wide range of possibilities that all dramatically enhance the country’s technical warfighting capabilities.
The PLAN aims to use pictures from remote sensors to “create an image database on which to train deep learning algorithms to differentiate between different types of warships, then use those algorithms to build a multi-sensor warship detection platform.” This would provide the PLAN a capability to identify medium-sized warships with 95 percent accuracy. Another project aims to identify soil, water, rock, or synthetic objects with only a 5% error rate. Yet another seeks to ID and target communications sources on land and underseas to employ limited acoustical imaging to identify underwater targets. A 2017 Political Work Studies journal suggests that China also intends to use these advanced computer technologies in the ideological education of its military personnel and to track a soldier’s actions and thoughts. These represent an annotated list of a large data set of possible technology advances. It may be 2020 but it sounds a lot more like George Orwell’s 1984!

DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

Putin’s Saber Rattling

Earlier this week, President Biden reversed his 2022 decision, authorizing the provision of antipersonnel land mines to the Ukrainian government. It follows an earlier Administration authorization to allow the use of an advanced American missile system capable of striking as deep as 100 miles inside Russian territory. The US election season may be ending, but both Russia and the West show no indication of stepping down the conflict. Russian propaganda continues to swell as the Kremlin increases its threats to use nuclear weapons against the West. Last week Andrey Sushentsov, program director of the pro-Kremlin think tank Valdai Discussion Club (VDC), published an article on growing nuclear tensions in the region. Official Russian language in the last few years has been threatening. Since the US election, rhetoric like that in the Sushentsov article, has approached the level of nuclear blackmail. The VDC article’s main theme centers on Russia’s intent to directly confront the West militarily if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) becomes involved in Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. “On the one hand, these threats are intended to frighten the West, but on the other, Russian propagandists themselves are starting to believe in the inevitability of escalation,” according to Ksenia Kirillova of the Jamestown Foundation. On November 11, Sushentsov wrote that “The conflict will reach a completely new level, with unpredictable consequences for Europe and the entire world.” Kirillova points out that Putin’s distorted image of the world is divorced from reality and is causing the Kremlin to issue demands that are impossible to fulfill. Financial and other Russian resources needed to support Putin’s war are growing scarcer at the same time. This week the Kremlin announced a reduction of payments to its soldiers. Recently North Korea acknowledged it was sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine as Putin is running out of bodies to use as cannon fire. The war is not going well for Russia. One question floating around the Washington intelligence community is whether Putin will act out of desperation before President-elect Trump assumes office. In recent months the Russian propaganda machine is spewing out materials from fairly reputable analytical platforms inside the country. Kirillova says that “Kremlin ‘experts’ do not conceal that such threats are only intended to break the West psychologically, as they themselves are not prepared for full-scale nuclear war.” Despite Russia’s lack of preparation for an all-out war with the West, the expanding nuclear rhetoric carries with it an increase in the threat of a full-scale war in multiple theaters of operation. In June 2023 a founder of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Sergey Karaganov, called for “delivering a pre-emptive strike of retaliation” on Poland to force the West to surrender. In the previous month, Dmitry Suslov, a direct of research programs at the policy center proposed organizing “a demonstration nuclear explosion” aimed at intimidating the West. In September, President Putin announced a reappraisal of Russian nuclear doctrine after speaking earlier in the year at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and jokingly calling Suslov a “scary person.” Pavel Baev, writing in the European Daily Monitor, says “Putin intends his announcement to mark an escalation of nuclear brinkmanship and influence the proceedings of future Ukrainian peace efforts.” Putin is expanding the list of environmental conditions that are acceptable for using a nuclear weapon and incorporating it into Russian military doctrine. Baev adds that “The ups and downs of Russian brinkmanship are disconnected from the kinetic battles of the war, correlating instead with Ukrainian peace offensives, such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first peace summit in Bürgenstock, Switzerland.” Despite the increase in vitriolic language, in a You Tube video published a week before the US presidential election, Karaganov openly assured the West the primary goal of the escalation is to break the American spirit and that of the West, not outright nuclear war. By Election Day in the US, with political prognosticators predicting a win for former president Trump, Karaganov changed his tune and called for an increased role in nuclear deterrence. Kirillova points out that Western concessions to Russia are unlikely to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. The distorted reality inside the Kremlin continues to push that President-elect Trump is an adherent of “world government,” that Ukraine will create a nuclear weapon, and Russia must prepare for a nuclear conflagration to achieve its ambitions for a new world order. President-elect Trump has indicated he will not agree to concessions that destabilize Europe, the Middle East or other regions. Going forward a strong US foreign policy may be the most stabilizing course the West can count on to restrain Putin and his intent to rebuild the Russian empire. Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept. Illustration: Pixabay

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