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

Ukraine’s Frozen Conflict

As we approach winter in the northern hemisphere, the war in Ukraine is beginning to resemble a “frozen conflict” from many perspectives. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently told the media he hopes the war will end faster once President-elect Trump takes over in January. Opinions in Moscow, however, differ from that of the Ukrainian leader. Russian President Vladimir Putin argues that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) needs to exclude Ukraine from joining in “exchange” for peace. If it does not, he says, then no end to the war is in sight. So far there is no Christmas solution. Several NATO countries, according to Vladimir Socor of the Jamestown Foundation, are tentatively considering “coalitions-of-the-willing” to provide security for Ukraine outside of the formal NATO framework. There is, however, no collective mechanism today under which such an arrangement is viable. According to the NATO Charter, while Ukraine is a NATO partner country, it may not join as a full member since it has not fulfilled the requirements for membership. That has not stopped NATO and allies from continuing “to provide Ukraine with unprecedented levels of support, helping to uphold its fundamental right to self-defence,” according to the organization. Socor says that keeping Ukraine out of NATO will not advance peace with Russia. Waiting for a peace settlement, he suggests, would only serve to encourage Moscow to continue the war indefinitely. Although the Biden Administration officially withdrew its support for Ukrainian membership in 2021, NATO maintains an “open door” policy toward membership-seeking countries. The current White House position led the way for European states to oppose Ukraine’s membership saying that a decision should be delayed until “conditions are met.” Biden pushed for changing “open door” to a “bridge” metaphor. It is not intended as an across-the-board NATO policy and has been implemented in the past on a case-by-case basis, says Socor. “The alliance’s open-door policy was not fully insulated from Russia’s non-statutory blocking power, and NATO-aspirant countries’ path toward membership was not always irreversible.” Russia has successfully blocked states like Georgia from joining, first in 2008 and again after the war in Ukraine began in 2014. Russia recognizes the value add of Ukraine to NATO is enormous and that Kyiv has a better case than some other nations. Putin’s invasion was, in part, intended to foreclose that option. By 2021, Moscow was pushing hard to maximize its war objectives, which included further annexations of Ukrainian territory. A main goal for Putin was, and is, to ensure there is no Ukraine left to join NATO. As President-elect Trump prepares to assume office in January, he is faced with the historical challenges presented by the war. Post-conflict security guarantees were the center of several proposals made during the 2023 military stalemate. The incoming Trump Administration has yet to outline how it intends to handle the Russia-Ukraine war. Analysts in Washington believe that the new Administration will expect its European allies to guarantee the majority of Ukraine’s security needs. As we approach 2025, several European nations have acknowledged that they do not view Ukraine as eligible for NATO membership as it would draw the organization into the middle of the conflict. Others want to wait until the war is over or pending a “peace” settlement before considering Ukrainian membership. Socor reports that some “influential voices” are suggesting that “Kyiv should join NATO after “freezing” the war along a stable armistice line, de facto accepting Ukraine’s partition, with NATO security guarantees applying de jure to the government-controlled territory only.” This would mean starting accession talks soon with the actual talks to commence only after a ceasefire is in place. Trump arrives in Washington at a time when Putin’s hybrid strategies of war in Ukraine have eviscerated commonly-held differences between war and peace. “Absent a political consensus in NATO over Ukrainian membership, certain European allies, including France’s President Emmanuel Macron, are holding informal consultations about post-conflict security guarantees to Kyiv by NATO members outside of NATO’s framework,” according to the Jamestown Foundation. The Biden Administration downplayed the discussions on possible forms of military assistance and defense industry cooperation by sending only an Assistant Secretary of State. For a European peace to hold the Trump Administration would need to formally extend the United States’ nuclear deterrence to Ukraine. Options under discussion in Europe include a “coalition of the resolute” to deploy forces to Ukraine as part of a possible armistice package, deterring further Russian attacks, says Secor. European officials are also debating, without any agreement, whether its military forces could perform non-combat logistical roles to free Ukrainian forces to fight. None of the possible courses of action has moved forward as all eyes are waiting on the incoming Trump Administration for clues about its intended level of support for a NATO framework and other non-NATO proposals. Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.