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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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