Key Takeaways
• The PLA considers information operations (IO) as a means of achieving information dominance early in a conflict, and continues to expand the scope and frequency of IO in military exercises.
• The PRC presents a significant, persistent cyber-enabled espionage and attack threat to an adversary’s military and critical infrastructure systems.
• The PLA is pursuing next-generation combat capabilities based on its vision of future conflict, which it calls “intelligentized warfare,” defined by the expanded use of AI and other advanced technologies at every level of warfare.
Chairman Xi Jinping has called for the PLA to create a highly informatized force capable of dominating all networks and expanding the country’s security and development interests. PRC military writings describe informatized warfare as the use of information technology to create an operational system-of-systems, which would enable the PLA to acquire, transmit, process, and use information during a conflict to conduct joint military operations across the ground, maritime, air, space, cyberspace, and electromagnetic spectrum domains. The PLA is accelerating the incorporation of command information systems, providing forces and commanders with enhanced situational awareness and decision support to more effectively carry out joint missions and tasks to win informatized local wars. The PLA continues to expand the scope and regularity of military training exercises that simulate informatized operations and likely views offensive and defensive cyberspace operations as a means to achieve information dominance early in a crisis or conflict.
Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence Modernization (C4I). The PRC continues to prioritize C4I modernization as a response to trends in modern warfare that emphasize the importance of rapid information collection, processing, and sharing and accelerated decision making. The PLA is continuing modernization and reform efforts, both technologically and organizationally, to effectively command complex, joint operations across all warfare domains and potentially in multiple theaters.
The PLA sees networked, technologically advanced C4I systems as essential to providing reliable, secure communications to fixed and mobile command posts, thereby enabling rapid, effective, multi-echelon decision making. These systems are designed to distribute real-time data-including intelligence, battlefield information, logistical information, and weather reports via redundant, resilient communications networks-to improve commanders’ situational awareness. PLA field commanders view near-real-time ISR and situational data as well as redundant and reliable communications as essential to streamlining decision making processes and shortening response timelines. China has expanded its communications and intelligence gathering capabilities in key regions like the South China Sea, where it has rapidly constructed new facilities and antennas likely supporting satellite communications and technical collection between 2018 and 2021. The PRC is also fielding the Integrated Command Platform to units at multiple echelons across the force to enable lateral and cross- service communications and intelligence sharing required for joint operations. Digital databases and command automation tools allow commanders to simultaneously issue orders to multiple units while on the move and enable units to quickly adapt to shifting conditions in the battlespace.
As the PLA continues to focus on improving its ability to fight and win informatized wars, future information systems will likely implement emerging technologies such as automation, big data, the internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud computing to improve process efficiencies. The PLA has already begun this process by embracing big data analytics that fuse a variety of data to improve automation and to create a comprehensive, real-time picture for warfighters.
Electronic Warfare (EW). The PLA considers EW to be an integral component of modern warfare and seeks to achieve information dominance in a conflict through the coordinated use of cyberspace and electronic warfare to protect its own information networks and deny the enemy the use of the electromagnetic spectrum. The PRC’s EW strategy emphasizes suppressing, degrading, disrupting, or deceiving enemy electronic equipment throughout the continuum of a conflict. The PLA will likely use electronic warfare early in a conflict as a signaling mechanism to warn and deter adversary offensive action. Potential EW targets include adversary systems operating in radio, radar, microwave, infrared and optical frequency ranges, as well as adversary computer and information systems. PLA EW units routinely train to conduct jamming and anti-jamming operations against multiple communication and radar systems and Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite systems during force-on-force exercises. These exercises test operational units’ understanding of EW weapons, equipment, and procedures and they also enable operators to improve confidence in their ability to operate effectively in a complex electromagnetic environment. In addition, the PLA reportedly tests and validates advances in EW weapons’ R&D during these exercises.
Cyberspace warfare. The development of cyberspace warfare capabilities is consistent with PLA writings, which identify information operations (IO)-comprising cyberspace, electronic, space, and psychological warfare-as integral to achieving information superiority early in a conflict as an effective means to counter a stronger foe. The PRC has publicly identified cyberspace as a critical domain for national security and declared its intent to expedite the development of its cyber forces.
The PRC presents a sophisticated, persistent cyber-enabled espionage and attack threat to military and critical infrastructure systems, and presents a growing influence threat. The PRC seeks to create disruptive and destructive effects-from denial-of-service attacks to physical disruptions of critical infrastructure-to shape decision-making and disrupt military operations beginning in the initial stages and throughout a conflict. The PRC can launch cyberspace attacks that, at a minimum, can cause localized, temporary disruptions to critical infrastructure within the United States, and the PRC believes these capabilities are even more effective against militarily superior adversaries that depend on information technologies. As a result, the PRC is advancing its cyberspace attack capabilities and has the ability to launch cyberspace attacks-such as disruption of a natural gas pipeline for days to weeks-in the United States.
Authoritative PLA sources call for the coordinated employment of space, cyberspace, and EW as strategic weapons to “paralyze the enemy’s operational system of systems” and “sabotage the enemy’s war command system of systems” early in a conflict. PLA writings judge other countries have effectively used cyberspace warfare and other IO in recent conflicts and argue for attacks against C2 and logistics networks to affect an adversary’s ability to make decisions and take actions in the early stages of conflict. The PLA also considers cyberspace capabilities to be a critical component in its overall integrated strategic deterrence posture, alongside space and nuclear deterrence. PLA studies discuss using warning or demonstration strikes-strikes against select military, political, and economic targets with clear awing effects-as part of deterrence. Accordingly, the PLA probably seeks to use its cyber- reconnaissance capabilities to collect data for intelligence and cyberspace attack purposes; to constrain an adversary’s actions by targeting network-based logistics, C2, communications, commercial activities, and civilian and defense critical infrastructure; and, to serve as a force- multiplier when coupled with kinetic attacks during armed conflict.
The PLA’s recent structural reforms may further change how the PLA organizes and commands IO, particularly as the SSF continues to develop its capabilities and further integrate into joint planning, exercises, and operations with other PLA forces. The SSF likely is generating synergies by combining national-level cyberspace reconnaissance, attack, and defense capabilities in its organization, alongside other strategic IO capabilities.
Intelligentized Warfare. In October 2020, the CCP announced that modern warfare was evolving to include intelligentization and incorporated the concept into its 14th Five-Year Plan. Beijing anticipates that AI and other advanced technologies, such as cloud computing and big data analytics, will be key to success in future warfare. As a result, it is adjusting the PRC’s defense modernization plans to focus on integrating the development of “mechanization, informatization, and intelligentization,” suggesting the PLA will field some intelligentized capabilities as it completes mechanization and informatization over the next decade.
PLA strategists have stated new technologies will increase the speed and tempo of future warfare, and that operationalization of AI will be necessary to improve the speed and quality of information processing by reducing battlefield uncertainty and providing decision making advantage over potential adversaries. 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 technologies, and is pursuing greater autonomy for unmanned aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles to enable manned and unmanned hybrid formations, swarm attacks, optimized logistic support, and disaggregated ISR, among other capabilities.
Based on the Annual Report by Secretary of Defense to U.S. Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2022
