China Banks On AI To Beat U.S. Joint Warfighting Concept

Researchers at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology have sifted through 21,000 Chinese military and defense equipment contracts for 2020 and found out that 350 of them were related to AI systems and equipment, providing an extraordinarily detailed, entirely open-source view of China’s efforts to build an “intelligentized” force, Ryan Fedasiuk reported for Breaking Defense.

Photo Insert: China has been enhancing its military capabilities at a drastic rate.

Despite the PLA’s significant progress in adopting AI-enabled systems since 2017, there are at least two clear vulnerabilities in its blueprint to build an “intelligentized” force, Georgetown;’s Fedasiuk noted.

“First, while Chinese military leaders plan to exploit weaknesses in US sensor and communication networks, it is not clear how they plan to build resilient, cloud-based networks of their own.

PLA officers often write that the US military is susceptible to information manipulation and data poisoning, even calling data integrity ‘the Achilles’ heel’ of the US joint all-domain command and control strategy,” he added. None of the 350 unclassified Chinese military contracts focuses on building resilient networks or secure datasets.

Second, Fedasiuk argued, China’s “intelligentization” strategy is entirely predicated on access to AI chips designed by US companies and manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea.

The supply of these high-end microelectronics is far from guaranteed. The US and its allies have already adopted measures to starve Chinese military companies of the chips required to train advanced machine learning models.

But to effectively slow Chinese military progress on AI, US policymakers should continue to scale up investment in the organizations meant to regulate technology outflow, like the Department of Commerce’s Office of Export Enforcement; and crack down on third-party intermediaries who supply the Chinese military and defense industry with US-made equipment.

To mitigate the threat posed by Chinese military AI systems, US defense planners should boost investment in counter-autonomy and adversarial AI research that exploits Chinese system vulnerabilities, at the same time they shore up the robustness of US AI systems.

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