The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force now uses an AI system that draws up plans for large-scale strike operations. Instead of being released with great fanfare, the system appeared in a CCTV documentary released in early August to mark the PLA’s 99th anniversary. The system is described as prioritizing targets from a pool of hundreds, coordinating dozens of formations, and assigning tasks to more than 100 tactical units. According to the documentary, it has already been used in multiple missions.
The timing lines up neatly with Xi Jinping’s instruction in late July that the PLA must strengthen the military application of unmanned intelligent technologies and gradually build an intelligent military system. As China has been pursuing this very goal for years, Xi’s remarks are not new. The level of emphasis, however, is high: Beijing wants steady progress toward the modernization goals set for 2027, which marks the 100th anniversary of the PLA’s founding.
The AI system is described to handle a volume of decisions that would otherwise overwhelm human planners as, so goes the argument, traditional calculation methods cannot keep up when large numbers of aircraft and targets move at high speed. This indeed is a fair assessment and is far from being unique to China.
