Soldiers are a major event for the country. In the great journey of “building a powerful country and rejuvenating the nation, and against the background of the accelerated evolution of major changes unseen in the world in a century, building and consolidating national defense and a strong people’s army are directly related to the future and destiny of the country and the nation”. The Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China pointed out that “national defense and military modernization are important components of Chinese-style modernization”, which fully reflects the great importance that the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core attaches to national defense and military construction, and provides guidance for national defense and military modernization on the new journey. Modernization points out the direction.
The modernization of the national defense and military is the security guarantee and strategic support for Chinese-style modernization
”If you fall behind, you will be beaten. Only when the army is strong can the country be safe”. Without a strong army, there can be no strong state. After the Opium War in 1840, modern China was repeatedly defeated in its battles with Western powers. The vast country gradually became a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, with the country humiliated, the people in trouble, and civilization in dust. History has inspired us that the Chinese nation’s emergence from suffering and the liberation of the Chinese people depend on a heroic people’s army; to comprehensively promote the great cause of building a powerful country and national rejuvenation with Chinese-style modernization, we must place national defense and military modernization as a barrier to national security, plan and deploy in strategic positions based on career development, and accelerate the construction and consolidation of national defense and a strong people’s army.
The modernization of the national defense and military is closely linked and internally unified with Chinese-style modernization. Without the modernization of national defense and the military, there would be no Chinese-style modernization. Comrade Mao Zedong once profoundly pointed out “the original requirements for building socialism were industrial modernization, agricultural modernization, scientific and cultural modernization, and now we must add national defense modernization”; Comrade Deng Xiaoping also emphasized “four modernizations, one of which is national defense modernization”, these all reflect the great importance our party attaches to national defense and military construction.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, President Xi has always adhered to the integrated operation of strengthening the country and the military, put national defense and military modernization in the chess game of Chinese-style modernization, and opened up the road to strengthening the military with Chinese characteristics, forming a new strategy for national defense and military modernization by 2027, 2035, and the middle of this century, a new “three-step” strategy for national defense and military modernization that connects near, medium and long-term goals Created a new situation in the cause of strengthening the military. Guided by the party’s goal of strengthening the military in the new era, we will comprehensively implement the strategy of reforming and strengthening the military, promote the reform of the leadership and command system, the reform of scale structure and force organization, and the reform of military policies and systems. Our military’s organizational structure will achieve historic changes, and the force system will achieve revolutionary changes. Reshaping, the basic framework of the socialist military policy system with Chinese characteristics has been constructed and formed. Our military system has been completely new, its structure has been completely new, its pattern has been completely new, and its appearance has been completely new It has laid a solid foundation for the modernization of national defence and the army.
Military means, as a means of guaranteeing the realization of great dreams, can only stop a war if it can be fought. The current and future periods are critical periods for comprehensively promoting the great cause of building a powerful country and rejuvenating the nation through Chinese-style modernization, and will inevitably encounter various risks, challenges and even turbulent waves. We must comprehensively modernize our national defense and military, build the People’s Army into a world-class military, effectively guarantee Chinese-style modernization, and safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests.
Comprehensive and accurate grasp of the scientific connotation of national defense and military modernization
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, President Xi has issued a series of important expositions around “Chinese-style modernization”, summarizing the Chinese characteristics, essential requirements and major principles for the formation of Chinese-style modernization, building a theoretical system for Chinese-style modernization, and promoting the new era and new journey. Chinese-style modernization provides scientific guidance and also carries out strategic design and scientific deployment for national defense and military modernization.
The most fundamental thing about modernizing the national defense and military is to uphold the absolute leadership of the party over the military. The leadership of the Party is the fundamental guarantee of Chinese-style modernization, which determines the fundamental nature of Chinese-style modernization, and it must also determine the fundamental nature of national defense and military modernization. To promote the modernization of national defense and the military on the new journey, we must fully implement a series of fundamental principles and systems for the party to lead the people’s army, comprehensively and thoroughly implement the chairman’s responsibility system of the Military Commission, and effectively unify thoughts and actions into the decisions and arrangements of the Party Central Committee and President Xi; Adhere to the party’s management of cadres and talents, and highlight political standards and combat capabilities Ensure that the barrel of the gun is always in the hands of those who are loyal and reliable to the party; improve the comprehensive and strict governance of the party system, enhance the political and organizational functions of party organizations at all levels, and integrate the party’s leadership throughout the entire process of continuing to deepen national defense and military reforms in all aspects.
To modernize national defense and the military is to modernize military doctrine, military organization, military personnel, and weapons and equipment. This reflects the inherent requirements for the construction of military forces resulting from changes in the concept of victory in modern warfare, elements of victory and methods of victory, and clarifies the main signs of the basic realization of national defence and military modernization. To realize the modernization of military theory is to keep pace with the times, innovate war and strategic guidance, and form a military theoretical system that is contemporary, leading, and unique; to realize the modernization of organizational form is to deepen the reform of national defense and the military, and the military force structure layout is scientific and reasonable, strategic deterrence capabilities are consolidated and improved, new areas and new quality combat forces continue to grow, and elite operations, system support, and joint victory have become the basic application models; To realize the modernization of military personnel is to deeply implement the strategy of strengthening the military with talents in the new era, promote the comprehensive transformation and upgrading of military personnel’s capabilities, structural layout, and development management, and forge high-quality, professional new military talents with both ability and political integrity; to realize the modernization of weapons and equipment, It is necessary to focus on strengthening national defense scientific and technological innovation and accelerating the development of strategic, cutting-edge and disruptive technologies Accelerate the upgrading of weapons and equipment and the development of intelligent weapons and equipment.
For the modernization of national defence and the military, we must adhere to the integrated development of mechanization, informatization and intelligence. The military conflicts and local wars that have taken place in recent years have shown that new qualitative combat capabilities generated based on intelligent combat systems are increasingly becoming core military capabilities. Based on mechanization, dominated by informatization, and oriented by intelligence, the three superimpose, penetrate, and support each other, jointly giving rise to new forms of warfare and methods of warfare. Only by accelerating the integrated development of mechanization, informatization and intelligence and keeping up with the new military revolutionary trends in the world can we seize the opportunity and take the initiative in seizing the commanding heights of the military struggle.
The modernization of national defence and the army is a guarantee of security for insisting on the path of peaceful development. Since ancient times, soldiers have not been warlike. Chinese-style modernization is modernization on the path of peaceful development. Building a consolidated national defense and a strong military commensurate with international status and national security and development interests is a strategic task of China’s socialist modernization drive and an insistence on taking the path of peaceful development. Safety guarantee is an inevitable choice for summarizing historical experience. China has always pursued a defensive defence policy and adhered to the strategic idea of active defence, and no matter how far it develops, China will never seek hegemony or engage in expansion. To promote the modernization of national defense and the military on the “new journey”, we must faithfully implement the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind, resolutely oppose all forms of hegemony and bullying, and contribute China’s strength to building a beautiful world of lasting peace and universal security.
Advancing the modernization of national defence and the military at a new historical starting point
The Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China included “continuous deepening of national defense and military reforms into the overall plan for further comprehensive deepening of reforms, and made a series of major strategic arrangements for improving the leadership and management system and mechanism of the people’s army, deepening the reform of the joint operations system, and deepening cross-military and civilian reforms”. On the new journey, we must deeply understand and grasp the themes, major principles, major measures, and fundamental guarantees for further comprehensively deepening reforms, resolutely implement the new “three-step” strategy for national defense and military modernization, and accelerate the modernization of military theory, military organizational form, and military personnel. Modernize and modernize weapons and equipment, and lead the modernization of national defense and the military to move forward with better strategies, higher efficiency, and faster speed.
Strengthening the Party’s theoretical and scientific leadership in military guidance. Our party insists on combining the basic principles of Marxism with the practice of building the people’s army, absorbing the essence of China’s excellent traditional military culture, and constantly exploring new realms in the development of contemporary Chinese Marxist military theory and military practice. As an important part of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening the Military has achieved a new leap forward in the Sinicization and modernization of Marxist military theory. It is the fundamental guiding ideology of our party building and military governance in the new era. We must unremittingly arm our minds with Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, further firmly establish the guiding position of Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening the Military in national defense and military construction, and build and consolidate national defense and a strong people’s army under the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Strengthening the Military. Take new and greater steps on the road to strengthening the military with Chinese characteristics.
Efforts should be made to make the main responsibility and business of war preparation more solid and effective. The People’s Army is an armed group that performs the party’s political tasks. It must be both politically strong and capable. In the final analysis, this ability can win wars. To accelerate the modernization of national defense and the military, we must firmly grasp the fundamental direction of winning wars, establish the only fundamental standard of combat effectiveness, focus all our energy on fighting wars, and work hard on fighting wars. Conscientiously implement the military strategic policy for the new era, operate war preparation and cessation, deterrence and actual combat, war operations and the use of military forces in peacetime as a whole, innovate strategies, tactics and tactics, effectively shape the situation, manage crises, contain wars, and win wars. Adhere to the principle of “training troops as they fight, and comprehensively improve the actual combat level of military training and the ability to perform missions and tasks”.
Promote high-quality development of national defense and military construction through “reform and innovation”. Reform is a key move that will determine the growth of our army and its future. On the new journey, we must put innovation at the core of the overall military construction and development, transform development concepts, innovate development models, enhance development momentum, and promote the transformation of national defense and military modernization from quantitative growth to qualitative improvement. Focus on integrating national defense and military construction into the national economic and social development system on a wider scale, at a higher level, and to a deeper extent, continuously improve the quality and efficiency of national defense and military modernization, promote the simultaneous improvement of national defense strength and economic strength, and consolidate and improve the integration National strategic system and capabilities, and constantly write a new chapter of strengthening the country and the military.
As the world continued to actively combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the British newspaper The Guardian reported in late May 2021 that Fazze, a public relations and marketing agency with close ties to Russian officials, was accused of providing funding to influential YouTubers, bloggers, and other opinion leaders in France, Germany, and other European countries to spread false information claiming that vaccines like Pfizer (BNT) and AstraZeneca (AZ) had caused hundreds of deaths. The false information also criticized the EU vaccine procurement system for harming public health in European countries, with the goal of sowing public distrust of Western vaccines and shifting public acceptance toward Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. This is the most significant example of “perception warfare” in recent international history.
In fact, human society has always adhered to the principle of “conquering the enemy without fighting” as the guiding principle for optimal military operations. While traditional warfare still primarily takes place in physical space, victory requires the physical capture of cities and territories, as well as the destruction of enemy forces. However, as humanity’s understanding of the nature of war deepens, the use of information technology has become a new trend in warfare, enabling the achievement of traditional combat effectiveness without the need for physical engagement. Given the increasing attention paid to “information warfare” and “hybrid warfare,” this article discusses the closely related concept of “cognitive warfare,” exploring the emerging threats facing our country and our national defense response strategy.
Whether it’s what the US calls “hybrid warfare” or what Russia calls “information warfare,” the implications are quite similar: centered on the cognitive realm, the use of information to influence and manipulate targets, encompassing both peacetime public opinion and wartime decision-making. The rise of Nazi Germany after World War I was arguably the first modern regime to master the use of information to shape perceptions within its own country and even abroad. Its successful use of propaganda and lies, delivered through various communication technologies, was highly successful. Principles such as “repetition is power” and “negative information is more easily accepted and remembered than positive information” would later profoundly influence authoritarian governments, including Russia.
Using information capabilities to subvert national regimes
At the beginning of the 21st century, Russia began to pay attention to the situation where international discourse power was completely controlled by Western countries. It successively put forward theories such as “Information Warfare Theory” and “Sixth Generation Warfare Theory”, arguing that the sixth generation of warfare is a non-contact war that uses precision weapons and information warfare to traverse the battlefield. The purpose of war is no longer a devastating global war, but to achieve effects that cannot be achieved through traditional warfare by exploiting the enemy’s information capabilities to exploit its weaknesses, including changing social and cultural orientations and values, and thus subverting national regimes.
In 2005, Russia established the international news channel “Russia Today.” Initially focused on soft power propaganda, it shifted its focus after the 2008 Georgian War to attacking negative aspects of Western society and fostering conspiracy theories. The 2014 Ukraine crisis became a training ground for Russian information warfare forces. Using electronic jamming and cyber theft, they intercepted Ukrainian communications, inferring subsequent Ukrainian actions and releasing damaging information at critical moments. They also targeted sensitive issues in eastern Ukraine, including the status of ethnic Russians and economic downturn, distributing a large amount of carefully selected, targeted information to resonate with the public, influencing their perceptions and behavior and gaining control of media opinion. In terms of “cognitive warfare,” Russia’s approach has been successful, and has become a model for the Chinese Communist Party.
Manipulating “brain control” to control the public
In 2014, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) proposed the cognitive operational concept of “brain control,” building on its past “three warfares” of psychological warfare, legal warfare, and public opinion warfare, as well as Russia’s theoretical framework of “information warfare.” It states that a nation’s cognitive space is composed of the superposition of countless individuals, and that “brain control” uses national languages, propaganda media, and cultural products as weapons to comprehensively infiltrate and control the cognition, emotions, and consciousness of the general public and national elites, ultimately distorting, disintegrating, and reshaping their national spirit, values, ideology, history, and culture, thereby achieving the strategic goal of winning without fighting.
Therefore, the CCP’s “cognitive operations” fall under the broad category of psychological warfare. In the era of information globalization, it integrates information warfare, psychological warfare, and public opinion warfare, becoming the core of the CCP’s overall strategy. Since the 2016 military reform, it has been led by the newly formed “Strategic Support Force” and implemented at all political and military levels. On the one hand, the PLA has adopted American operational thinking in the field of “cognitive operations,” using units such as the 311 Base, the National University of Defense Technology, and the Academy of Military Sciences to develop tactics such as “psychological operations,” “ideological operations,” “consciousness manipulation,” and “strategic communication” to strengthen the “cognitive operations” capabilities jointly constructed by military-civilian integration and joint combat systems. On the other hand, it uses professional personnel to operate media platforms, shape the public opinion environment, and introduce “cognitive operations” into the actual combat application stage.
The CCP’s recent “cognitive warfare” offensive against Taiwan reveals its methods and tactics. First, the CCP primarily uses the internet to collect personal data from Taiwanese citizens, using big data databases to categorize information by target group, based on political leanings, age, occupation, and other factors. Second, it leverages intelligence gathering to launch targeted cognitive attacks on specific social media platforms, influencing the psychology of the targeted groups, particularly by releasing disinformation to weaken and distract Taiwanese society. Third, it employs online virtual organizations to set up fake social media accounts, infiltrate online communities, and disguise themselves as whistleblowers, deliberately spreading fabricated information to create confusion. Cybertroopers then massively repost and discuss this information, manipulating audience perceptions and creating a cycle of disrupting information retention, manipulating cognitive psychology, and altering thinking patterns.
Identify fake news and fight back together
At this stage, the CCP’s campaign for “brain control” over Taiwan aims to influence Taiwanese society’s cognition, distorting public opinion, devaluing democratic values, intensifying opposition, disrupting political conditions, and undermining public trust in the government. The following preventive measures can be taken within the national defense system:
1. Strengthening educational functions
Through national defense education in schools, institutions, and society, we will raise the public’s awareness of the threat posed by the CCP’s “cognitive warfare” and their ability to identify false information, and cultivate the habit of rationality, verification, and calmness.
2. Follow the constraints
Although there are currently no internationally accepted legal rules that can clearly define the extent to which cognitive warfare constitutes an act of war, making it even more difficult to hold people accountable, media platforms can still strengthen the review of their own reporting content in accordance with existing regulations, and the public can also refrain from spreading suspicious information and following the trend of tennis melee, so as to facilitate the establishment of information verification measures and mechanisms.
3. Combining Military and Civilian Strength
Incorporate information and communication-related institutions and industries into the national defense mobilization mechanism, coordinate in peacetime the review, analysis, and disposal of fake news, strengthen talent training and research cooperation, and enhance the capabilities of professional units of the government and the national army; in wartime, cooperate with the overall national actions and carry out countermeasures.
Currently, Taiwan already has the National Security Bureau’s National Security Operations Center responsible for responding to controversial information from hostile foreign forces. There’s also the non-profit Taiwan Fact-Checking Center. Facing the challenges of cognitive warfare, we must continue to integrate various sectors, strive for international intelligence exchange and experience sharing, optimize the media environment, collaborate across multiple channels, and instantly identify the authenticity and source of information, jointly building our offensive capacity to respond to cognitive warfare.
Conclusion
In reality, all countries around the world face threats related to cognitive warfare and information-based psychological warfare. However, democratic and free societies are by no means vulnerable to cognitive warfare attacks and must instead rely on diverse strategies and methods to protect them. We aim to establish a more comprehensive and substantive framework, build a powerful counterforce, and enhance the quality and discernment of our citizens, thereby gaining immunity from the CCP’s cognitive warfare campaign to seize control of our minds.
(The author is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Tamkang University)
With the approval of Xi Jinping, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, the Central Military Commission issued the “Outline of Joint Cooperation between the People’s Liberation Army of China (Trial Implementation)”, which will come into effect on November 7, 2020.
The Outline focuses on building a legal system for joint operations and strengthening the clear orientation of preparing for war. It is of great significance to consolidate and deepen the results of the reform of the leadership and command system, scale structure and force composition, and to promote the liberation and development of our military’s joint operations capabilities.
The Outline is the top-level regulation of our military’s new-era combat doctrine system. It focuses on clarifying the basic issues of joint combat organization and implementation, unifying combat thinking, clarifying responsibilities and procedures, and guiding combat operations. It also clarifies major principles, requirements, and basic procedures for joint combat command, combat operations, combat support, national defense mobilization, and political work.
The Central Military Commission requires that all levels should earnestly study and implement the “Outline”, adhere to combat effectiveness as the only fundamental standard, use the “Outline” as the basic basis for organizing and implementing joint operations and joint training, and comprehensively improve the ability to win in the new era.
The battle flag hunt, the military parade ground was full of ups and downs, and the climaxes continued——
From north to south, the surging iron torrents train elite soldiers; in the deep blue ocean, soldiers step on the waves to forge sharp swords; above the vast sky, eagles fly thousands of miles towards the blue sky; deep in the dense forests, the east wind roars to the sky; the skynet controls power, and the invisible war defeats the visible… One after another joint combat exercises are gradually unfolding in multiple domains and all dimensions, presenting a picture of a strong army that trains together to plan for war, uses training to promote war, and wins war through strong training, sounding the strong note of a new era in the history of our army’s training and preparation.
Over the past year, the world has been undergoing unprecedented changes unseen in a century, intertwined with the global COVID-19 pandemic. Under the sky shrouded by the epidemic, the international situation has been in constant turmoil and confrontation. The drone warfare that has shined in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has shown the world the unique characteristics of modern warfare.
“When times change, things change. When things change, we must be prepared for change.” In the future, “what kind of war to fight and how to fight it” carries the heavy mission, and the entire military is surging with enthusiasm for researching and winning wars.
Faced with new changes in the national security situation, new threats from powerful enemies and adversaries, and new developments in the form of warfare, we urgently need to provide answers to strengthening the military, winning battles, and meeting the needs of the times.
“Overall, modern warfare has indeed undergone profound changes. These changes may seem dazzling, but there are regularities behind them. The fundamental thing is that the winning mechanism of war has changed.” Faced with the rapid development of the new world military revolution and changes in the war situation, under the guidance of the commander-in-chief and in accordance with the unified deployment of the CMC’s policy and system reforms, the CMC Joint Staff Department organized experts from the Academy of Military Sciences and capable personnel from relevant departments of the CMC, various theater commands, various military services and armed police forces to form a joint research group to pool wisdom and strength to tackle key problems and advance the formulation of new-era combat regulations.
On November 7, 2020, the “Outline of the Joint Cooperation Warfare of the People’s Liberation Army of China (Trial Implementation)” was implemented throughout the army, marking a new coordinate system for our army’s joint cooperation war in the new era.
Since the issuance of the Outline, commanders have taken the lead in learning it, agencies have taken the lead in studying it, and troops have practiced learning it. The officers and soldiers of the whole army have been enthusiastic about learning and publicizing the Outline. A great discussion on joint operations in the new era, a great liberation of thoughts, and a great practice of preparation for war have been vigorously carried out in the whole army.
Pointing to victory, leading the new practice of preparing for war in the new era
“Following the main road, who would you follow to seek a shortcut?” In the world of soldiers, there is no such thing as “easy”. The only way to win a battle is to be prepared.
What kind of war we will fight in the future will require innovative tactics; if we cannot innovate tactics, it will be difficult to win future wars.
In essence, combat regulations are about solving the problem of how to fight and how to win, and are the refinement, deepening and concretization of military strategic policies. The Outline of Joint Cooperation of the People’s Liberation Army of China (Trial) (hereinafter referred to as the Outline) deeply studies the characteristics and laws of future wars, accurately grasps the era characteristics of the integrated development of mechanization, informatization and intelligentization of our army, and through the forward-looking and concrete design of future operations, implements the spiritual essence and content requirements of the new era’s military strategic policy into the troops’ preparation for war.
The Outline is not only a guideline for preparing for war, but also a guideline for winning joint operations.
At the beginning of the new year of 2021, a certain area of the Eastern Theater Command is organizing a multi-service, multi-directional, systematic combat training. Under the guidance of the newly issued “Outline”, this exercise involves the full-domain linkage of land, sea, air, space, network and electric power, close coordination of political and public opinion, and information-led throughout the entire process from combat preparation to situation shaping to mission implementation. All units work closely together, demonstrating the firm determination and strong ability to maintain national unity with a thunderous momentum, and also witnessing the transformation of our military joint cooperation from “formal linkage” to “spiritual linkage”.
In the west, at midnight in mid-spring 2021, a series of urgent alarm bells rang. According to the level transfer order of a certain base of the Western Theater Air Force, the officers and soldiers of a certain air defense battalion of the Army quickly rushed to their positions, and the level transfer time was further shortened. According to the unified deployment, more than 10 Army air defense forces in the theater air force responsibility area entered the Air Force command chain in an organized manner, breaking the information barrier of the services, sharing early warning information, and jointly taking on combat readiness duty, and initially forming a joint air defense combat system. “You lend me the ‘eye in the sky’, and I will help you with the ‘iron fist'”, the integrated joint air defense combat across the services has taken a new step and entered a new stage.
In the north, at the beginning of the summer of 2021, war eagles soared and iron currents rolled, and an exercise with the theme of air-ground joint operations was in full swing. According to the plan, a certain command post of the Air Force of the Northern Theater Command and a certain group army of the Army jointly organized a brigade-level command post exercise to study and explore the composition of joint command institutions and test the integrated joint combat command capabilities of the command post personnel. Intelligence analysis and processing, joint firepower strikes, and integrated rear-end support were coordinated and planned and carried out in an integrated manner, and the command institutions were organized in an integrated manner with all elements. Through repeated joint combat and training, the policy of leading training through combat and carrying out combat through training has been further implemented, and the joint combat and command capabilities of commanders of all services and arms have been significantly improved.
In the direction of the South China Sea, war eagles roared and attacked fiercely, dragons took off and stepped on the sea and waves, radars flew and missiles raised their heads… Under the unified command of the theater joint command, all mission forces worked as a whole and coordinated closely to quickly build a battlefield layout that was multi-domain joint, both offensive and defensive, and deployed in echelons. They adopted a combination of centralized command and decentralized command, and flexibly carried out sea and air escort and deterrence and expulsion in a reasonable, forceful and restrained manner, effectively maintaining peace and tranquility in the South China Sea.
In the past year since the implementation of the Outline, the orientation of preparing for war has become clearer and firmer, the sole fundamental standard of combat effectiveness has been more firmly established, training and preparation for war as the main responsibility of the troops has become more prominent, researching and planning war as the primary responsibility of officers and soldiers has become clearer, the ideas and measures for joint operations and victory have become increasingly effective, and the entire army has continued to set off a new upsurge in training and preparation for war.
Keep pace with the times and clarify the new mechanism of joint cooperation in the new era
“All beneficial ways go with the times.”
Military theorist Douhet once said: “Victory smiles only on those who can foresee the changes in the character of war, not on those who wait for the changes to happen and then adapt to them.”
Looking around the world, the game and struggle among major powers are intensifying, the threat of war exists, the war situation continues to evolve, new military reforms are booming, stealth, unmanned and intelligent weapons and equipment have become the mainstream trend, the battlefield space has expanded to all domains and dimensions, the integrated linkage of combat forces has become the norm, combat command, action and support have become more sophisticated, and winning future wars requires the support of more advanced combat theories.
The gap in combat concepts is the fundamental gap, and the backwardness of combat theory is the biggest backwardness. When modern wars are surging in the world, what is most needed is newer and braver minds.
The new-era combat regulations, led by the Outline, adhere to Xi Jinping’s military strategic thinking and the new-era military strategic policy as the soul and outline, deeply grasp the new changes in national security, new adjustments in combat opponents, new designs in strategic layout, new connotations of active defense, and new developments in combat guidance, and materialize the principles and methods of commanders’ understanding and guidance of war into norms and standards for the specific implementation of the troops, so as to promote our military-joint cooperation war to a higher level.
——It comprehensively expounds the contemporary connotation of war guidance under information conditions.
The Outline aims to win future high-end wars, accurately grasps the characteristics of lowered thresholds for future armed conflicts, blurred boundaries of war, and increasingly prominent mutual influence and efficiency between the war field and other fields, strengthens the political and social attributes of combat operations, innovatively develops military struggle paradigms, emphasizes relying on the country’s integrated strategic system and capabilities, emphasizes the integration of war and non-war domains, emphasizes the comprehensive implementation of military and political, diplomatic, economic, cultural and other means, and gives full play to the overall advantages of the party, government, military, police and people. It reflects the modern war concept and the war guidance for winning the people’s war and total war in the new era.
——All elements standardize the style and methods of our joint military operations.
The Outline is based on the tasks and development of our army, and systematically expounds on the possible joint operations in the future, covering the core missions of various strategic directions, covering land, sea, air, space, network and electromagnetic multi-dimensional space. At the same time, it also creatively summarizes the basic types of joint operations, highlights the basic actions that run through the joint operations and have common characteristics, and forms a closed-loop chain of joint operations with all elements and in all fields.
——The joint combat command system and organizational operation mode were designed throughout the entire process.
The implementation of joint operations organizations is extremely complex and difficult. Whether they can be “coordinated” in terms of strength, “joined” in operations, and “excellent” in effectiveness depends crucially on whether they can achieve “unification” in command. The “Outline” focuses on building a strong and efficient joint operations command structure, closely integrates the Central Military Commission and the theater joint command operation model mechanism, fully considers that it not only complies with the general direction and general requirements of the reform, but also leaves room for flexible formation in practice. It focuses on solving major issues such as the construction of a joint operations command system, the differentiation of command authority and responsibility interfaces, and the integration of services into the joint system, so as to ensure that thousands of troops and horses can jointly act under unified orders.
Taking joint training as the guideline, promoting a new leap forward in joint training in the new era
At the Central Military Commission’s military training conference, President Xi Jinping stressed the need to strengthen joint training, adhere to joint training as the key, develop a joint training system with Chinese characteristics, and accelerate the improvement of integrated joint combat capabilities. Soldiers should be trained in the way they fight, and troops should be trained in what is needed for fighting. Today’s world-class armies all regard improving joint training as the top priority for war preparation.
The Outline is the opening chapter of the new era combat doctrine and the guiding principle for the transformation of joint training in the new era. The Outline provides direction, inspires vitality, and gives birth to a new pattern of joint training in the new era.
——Incorporate combat into training to present an “integrated posture” of training.
In the Taiwan Strait, the naval and air fleets carried out joint combat readiness patrols to test and enhance the joint combat capabilities of multiple services, maintain a high state of alert at all times, and resolutely defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Exercise preparation is combat preparation, and the exercise state is the combat state. Joint military exercises are no longer simple training activities, but have become a preparation process to promote combat readiness and enhance capabilities. Joint training, the “source” and “main stream” full of power, is guiding and driving the in-depth advancement and vigorous development of military struggle preparations, and fully unleashing the role and effectiveness of training to carry out combat and training to promote preparations.
——Systematic training has become the “new normal” of joint training.
“East”, “South”, “West”, “North”, and “Central” are joint live-fire exercises organized by various theater commands, “Crossing”, “Mobility”, “Red Sword”, “Sky Sword”, and “Joint Logistics Mission” are series of systematic exercises organized by various services, covering all seasons, all weather, and all regions. The CMC, theater commands, and services are responsible for division of labor, overall design, and systematic organization. They are decomposed from top to bottom and integrated from bottom to top, driving the operation and inspection of the joint combat system. Joint exercises and systematic training present a new look, and new changes have taken place in the training and preparation mode. Our military’s joint training has entered a new stage of all-round transformation and overall improvement.
——Joint training between China and foreign countries highlights the “integration” of joint exercises.
At the foot of the Helan Mountains and in the heart of the Bronze Gorge Desert, the “Western Joint-2021” China-Russia joint exercise was booming. In this joint exercise, the Chinese and Russian militaries were mixed and planned together. The two sides shared their positions, coordinated closely, and acted together. They practiced more than 20 subjects such as joint air defense, joint obstacle removal, and joint three-dimensional seizure. With the support of the deeply integrated combat system between China and Russia, new breakthroughs in joint exercises and training were achieved. “Maritime Joint”, “Common Destiny”, “Peace Mission”… With the joint training between China and foreign countries as a “window”, the new changes in the joint training of the Chinese military are being brilliantly presented to the world.
——Intensive training in new domains, demonstrating an “open attitude” in research and warfare.
In joint exercises, underwater unmanned “fish schools”, land unmanned “wolf packs”, and air unmanned “bee swarms” began to emerge. New domains and new types of forces such as land aviation, special operations, electric power, unmanned, network, and aerospace were deeply integrated into the joint combat system and the joint exercise process, and realistic combat scenarios were carefully constructed to accurately experiment with modern war organization and management. As the most active practice area for preparing for war, joint training, with an innovative and open attitude, boldly tried and made great strides towards the new combat areas pointed out in the Outline.
Integrating war and construction to shape a new pattern of system construction in the new era
President Xi stressed that we must adhere to the principle of building the country in accordance with war, strengthen the coordination of war and construction, speed up the promotion of major strategic, leading and fundamental projects, and accelerate the creation of a high-level strategic deterrence and joint combat system.
If the “trouble” in the construction of the joint combat system is not resolved quickly, once the “interest” of the debt accumulates, it will become a “pain” on the battlefield tomorrow. From the perspective of war, the “Outline” calibrates the “sight” of construction and firmly points to the correct direction of military construction.
——Calibrate the construction “sight” to point to the needs of joint operations.
Under the guidance of the Outline, the concept of jointness has been gradually established, and the barriers of “coordination” of military operations and “integration” of combat domain capabilities have been gradually broken down. The land, sea, air, and fire arms have been combined in the same domain, and cross-domain integration of combat domains such as space, network, and electromagnetic space has gradually become a reality. With the support of the network information system and combat data information as the link, a full-time and smooth command link has been built. The system is internally connected to each combat sub-center, and is connected to each combat group (team) command post. When necessary, it can directly reach the end of the individual platform to achieve joint command to the end. All operational forces worked together around the overall intention, realizing the transformation of the joint combat concept from focusing on the “service attributes” of combat forces to focusing on the “operational domain”, which has become the main feature of future joint combat. Studying, planning, and training for war with the “Outline” has become a trend throughout the military.
——Calibrate construction’s “sights” to point to system shortcomings and weaknesses.
Based on the Outline, our army insists on combining inheritance and innovation, theory and practice, innovatively designs strategies for winning future wars, focuses on highlighting problem orientation, takes root in training and preparation for war, promotes the construction of joint combat command system and new combat force construction, and effectively solves the outstanding shortcomings and weaknesses in military combat preparation. In mid-May 2021, the Party Committee of the Northern Theater Command held a special war meeting, and in accordance with the Outline, thoroughly identified contradictions and problems in joint combat research, command and control mode transformation, joint handling level, and efficient command capabilities. According to the Outline, it optimized system support, improved command and control methods, and improved command means, which promoted the transformation of the operation mode of the theater joint command center and the improvement of command effectiveness. Looking across the entire military, similar practices are becoming more and more common. Referring to the Outline to find gaps, ideas, and methods in the near and long term has become the new mainstream for planning and promoting construction at all levels and in all fields.
——Calibrate the construction “sight” to point to the urgent need to balance powerful enemies.
To implement the principle of building the military in accordance with war and coordinating the military construction, we must not only focus on solving current practical problems, but also pay attention to solving long-term development problems. The Outline is anchored on the future of defeating the strong and contains a far-sighted plan to build a world-class military. Guided by the Outline and focusing on changes in the war situation and changes in scientific and technological development, the construction of asymmetric means to check and balance powerful enemies has ushered in a qualitative leap. Batches of new drones, new helicopters and other advanced weapons and equipment have been tested and deployed, and a series of high-tech equipment has been deployed and developed, which has given us more confidence and stronger capabilities to win the war. The Outline condenses the “war code” of historical wisdom and also integrates the way to build first-class and win the future in the new era.
“But look at the path you have come from, and you will see verdant and green mountains.” One year after the implementation of the Outline, the new-era combat regulations are releasing capabilities and increasing efficiency in building a joint combat system with Chinese military characteristics.
In the new era and new journey, our path of joint military operations will surely become broader, our ability to defend the country’s strategic development interests will surely become stronger, our confidence in winning future informationized wars will surely become firmer, and the great goal of building a world-class military will surely be fully realized.
“We have a string that is tightly tied to us, a mission that we shoulder, and a storm that we are watching closely… We are always ready!”
Since the 1990s, the concepts of multi-dimensional central warfare, such as network-centric warfare, personnel-centric warfare, action-centric warfare, and decision-centric warfare, have been proposed one after another. The evolution of the concept of multi-dimensional central warfare reflects the overall goal of seeking advantages such as platform effectiveness, information empowerment, and decision-making intelligence by relying on military science and technology advantages, and also reflects the contradictory and unified relationship between people and equipment, strategy and skills, and the strange and the normal. Dialectically understanding these contradictory and unified relationships with centralized structured thinking makes it easier to grasp the essential connotation of its tactics and its methodological significance.
Strengthen the integration of the “human” dimension in the combination of people and equipment
The concepts of personnel-centric warfare and platform-centric warfare largely reflect the relationship between people and weapons and equipment. Some have specially formulated human dimension strategies, emphasizing continuous investment in the human dimension of combat effectiveness, which is the most reliable guarantee for dealing with an uncertain future. Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the rapid development of intelligent weapons and equipment, unmanned combat has emerged, and voices questioning the status and role of people have arisen one after another. It is imperative to strengthen the integration of the human dimension and enhance the synergy of the human dimension.
First, we need to enhance spiritual cohesion. Marxism believes that consciousness is the reflection of objective matter in the human mind. Tactics are the expression and summary of combat experience, and they themselves have spiritual or conscious forms. When studying tactics, we naturally need to put spiritual factors first. Some scholars believe that war is still fundamentally a contest of human will. In the information age, people’s spirits are richer and more complex, and enhancing the spiritual cohesion of the human dimension is more challenging and difficult. To enhance people’s spiritual cohesion, we need to coordinate the cultivation of collective spirit and individual spirit, maximize the satisfaction of individual spiritual needs in leading the collective spirit, realize individual spiritual pursuits in shaping the value of collective spirit, and empower people’s spirit with all available and useful information; we need to coordinate the cultivation of critical spirit and innovative spirit, adhere to the tactical epistemology of dialectical materialism, resolutely oppose idealism and mechanism in tactical cognition, and constantly inherit and innovate in criticism; we need to coordinate the cultivation of fighting spirit and scientific spirit, and promote the revolutionary spirit of facing death with courage and winning, and promote the spirit of winning by science and technology.
The second is to enhance the organizational structure. Organizations are the organs of the military, and people are the cells of the organization. The settings of military organizations in different countries have their own characteristics and commonalities. For example, the Ministry of National Defense is generally set up to distinguish between the structure of military branches, hierarchical structures and regional structures, and to distinguish between peacetime and wartime organizations. Although the purpose of construction and war is the same, the requirements for the unity of construction and the flexibility of war are different. To enhance the organizational structure and promote the consistency of war and construction, it is necessary to smooth the vertical command chain, reasonably define the command power and leadership power, command power and control power, so that the government and orders complement each other, and enhance the vertical structural strength of the organization; it is necessary to open up horizontal coordination channels, explore the establishment of normalized cross-domain (organizations, institutions, departments) coordination channels, change the simple task-based coordination model, and enhance the horizontal structural strength of the organization; it is necessary to improve the peace-war conversion mechanism, focus on the organization connection, adjustment and improvement in the change of leadership or command power of the troops, and maintain the stability and reliability of the organizational structure network.
The third is to enhance material support. The spiritual strength of people in combat can be transformed into material strength, but spiritual strength cannot be separated from the support of material strength. To enhance material support and thus realize the organic unity of material and spirit, it is necessary to ensure combat equipment, bedding, food, and medical care, build good learning venues, training facilities, and re-education channels, provide good technical services in combat regulations, physiological medicine, etc., help design diversified and personalized capacity improvement plans and career development plans, and provide strong material and technical support for the development of people’s physical fitness, skills, and intelligence, and thus comprehensively improve people’s adaptability and combat effectiveness in the uncertain battlefield environment of the future.
Deepen the practice of the “skill” dimension in the combination of combat and skills
The combination of combat skills is an important principle of tactical application. The technology includes not only the technology at the practical operation level (such as shooting technology), but also the technology at the theoretical application level (such as information technology). It can be said that tactics, technology, art and procedures together constitute its “combat methodology”. Scientific and technological development and scientific technology are important characteristics of scientific and technological development. To deepen the combination of combat skills, it is necessary to correctly grasp the relationship between technology and tactics, art and procedures, and continuously deepen the practice of the “skill” dimension.
First, promote the tacticalization of advanced technology. Technology determines tactics, which is the basic view of dialectical materialism’s tactical theory. The evolution of the concept of multi-dimensional central warfare is also an example of technology driving the development and change of tactics. Engels once pointed out: “The entire organization and combat methods of the army and the related victory or defeat… depend on the quality and quantity of the population and on technology.” However, technology-driven tactics have a “lag effect”, especially in the absence of actual combat traction. This requires actively promoting the military transformation of advanced civilian technologies and the tactical application of advanced military technologies. On the one hand, we must actively introduce advanced civilian technologies, especially accelerate the introduction and absorption of cutting-edge technologies such as deep neural networks and quantum communication computing; on the other hand, we must strengthen tactical training of advanced technology equipment, closely combine technical training with tactical training, and promote the formation of new tactics and new combat capabilities with new equipment as soon as possible.
Second, promote the technicalization of command art. “Art” is a highly subjective concept. Some Chinese and foreign scholars believe that “the art of command is rooted in the commander’s ability to implement leadership to maximize performance”, while others believe that “the art of command is the way and method for commanders to implement flexible, clever and creative command”. Chinese and foreign scholars generally regard command as an art. The main reason is that although command has objective basis and support such as combat regulations, superior orders and technical support, the more critical factor lies in the commander’s subjective initiative and creativity, which is difficult to quantify by technical means. With the development of disciplines and technologies such as cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the cognitive structure and mechanism of command will become more explicit, the mysterious veil of “command art” will gradually fade, and the technicalization of command art will become an inevitable trend. This requires continuous strengthening of technical thinking, continuous deepening of the construction of artificial intelligence-assisted command decision-making means, continuous deepening of the application of human brain decision-making mechanisms, practical use of technology to deconstruct art, and continuous promotion of the technicalization of command art.
The third is to promote the regulation of combat technology. Many scholars place technology on a position that is almost as important as tactics. This insistence on the integrated development of tactical regulation and the regulation of specialized military technology and special combat technology is an important way to promote the systematic and standardized construction of combat regulations and further achieve the integration and unification of tactics and technology at the legal level.
Seeking the advantage of the “odd” dimension in combining the odd and the regular
The odd and the even are a basic contradictory structure of tactics, with inherent identity. Without the odd, there is no even, and without the even, there is no odd; either the odd or the even, ever-changing. The choice of the odd and the even is the category of decision-centered warfare, and the application of the odd and the even is the category of action-centered warfare. In the 1990s, the theories of asymmetric warfare, non-contact warfare, and non-linear warfare were proposed. If “symmetric warfare, contact warfare, and linear warfare” are even, then “asymmetric warfare, non-contact warfare, and non-linear warfare” can be called odd. From the perspective of natural science, “symmetry, contact, and linear” are general, and “asymmetry, non-contact, and non-linear” are detailed. It is an inevitable requirement to grasp the dimension of “odd” in the combination of odd, odd, and even, and to seek the advantages of the “three nons”.
First, seek “asymmetric” advantages. “Symmetry” and “asymmetry” originally refer to the morphological characteristics of things or space. Symmetrical warfare is a battle between two troops of the same type, and asymmetric warfare is a battle between two different types of troops. The theory of asymmetric warfare requires the scientific and reasonable organization of troops, combat forces and weapon systems of different military services, deployment in a wide area, and the concentration of superior forces to deal a fatal blow to the enemy at the best combat opportunity, and then quickly redeploy the forces. Due to the limited combat power, the troops have positive asymmetric advantages and negative asymmetric disadvantages. Seeking asymmetric advantages and avoiding asymmetric disadvantages is the common expectation of the warring parties, which will lead to such a situation that the warring parties cycle back and forth between symmetry and asymmetry. Therefore, to seek “asymmetric” advantages, it is necessary to seek asymmetry in combat power, combat capability, combat command and other aspects, adhere to and carry forward “avoid the strong and attack the weak, avoid the real and attack the virtual”, “you fight yours, I fight mine”, and effectively play advantages and avoid disadvantages in asymmetry. For example, when weapons and equipment are symmetrical, strive to gain an asymmetric advantage in personnel capabilities; when forces are symmetrical, strive to gain an asymmetric advantage in command art.
The second is to seek “non-contact” advantages. “Contact” and “non-contact” are a description of the distance between different things. Contact in the military field is usually defined by the projection distance of weapons. The concept of “non-contact combat” originated from World War II and was created during the Cold War. The connotation of contact combat and non-contact combat changes with the change of the striking distance of weapons and equipment. The warring parties always seek to attack each other at a farther distance or in a wider space without being threatened. Since the 1990s, the theory of “non-contact combat” has been used in many local wars. Non-contact combat is a combat action style that implements long-range precision strikes outside the defense zone while being far away from the opponent. Non-contact combat embodies the idea of winning by technology, flexible mobility, and center of gravity strikes. With the rapid development of military science and technology, the armies of major countries in the world will have the ability to perceive and strike globally, and the connotation of “non-contact” will be further compressed to space, cognitive domain and other space fields. To this end, on the one hand, we must base ourselves on the reality of “contact combat”, learn from each other’s strengths and overcome our weaknesses in contact, and continuously accumulate advantages; on the other hand, we must expand the space for “non-contact combat”, seize the initiative and seize the opportunity in non-contact, and continuously expand our advantages.
The third is to seek “nonlinear” advantages. “Linear” and “nonlinear” usually refer to people’s thinking or behavior patterns. The movement of all things in the universe is complex and mostly nonlinear, while human cognition always tends to be simple, abstract, and linear, and has invented concepts such as logic lines, time lines, and linear mathematics. In military science, the transition from linear operations to nonlinear operations reflects the development and progress of military technology theory. Since the second half of the 20th century, nonlinear operations have been on the historical stage. Some scholars have pointed out that in linear operations, each unit mainly acts in a coordinated manner along a clear front line of its own side. The key is to maintain the relative position between its own units to enhance the safety of the units; in nonlinear operations, each unit simultaneously carries out combat operations from multiple selected bases along multiple combat lines. The key is to create specific effects at multiple decision points against the target. Linear operations mainly reflect the action-centered warfare idea, while nonlinear operations mainly reflect the target-centered warfare idea. To this end, on the one hand, we must deepen the use of linear warfare and make full use of its practical value in facilitating command, coordination and support; on the other hand, we must boldly try non-linear warfare and maximize its potential advantages of extensive mobility and full-dimensional jointness. (Yin Tao, Deng Yunsheng, Sun Dongya)
Source: China Military Network-People’s Liberation Army Daily Author: Gao Kai and Chen Liang Editor-in-charge: Zhao Leixiang
2025-01-23 06:50:x
“Order dispatch”: a new style of precision strike
■Gao Kai, Chen Liang
Lenin once said, “If you don’t understand the times, you can’t understand war.” In recent years, the widespread use of information and intelligent technology in the military field has promoted the deep integration of technology and tactics, and has given birth to “order-based” precision strikes based on intelligent network information systems. Commanders and command agencies can generate strike list requirements based on combat missions. The decision-making system can intelligently match strike platforms, autonomously plan action paths, and scientifically select strike methods based on personalized needs such as strike time, combat space, and damage indicators, thereby quickly and accurately releasing strike effectiveness.
The operational characteristics of “order-to-order” precision strikes
As the informationization and intelligence of weapons and ammunition continue to improve, the cost of modern warfare is also increasing. How to use limited strike resources to achieve the best cost-effectiveness and maximize combat effectiveness has become a central issue for commanders and command agencies in combat planning. “Order-based” precision strikes can provide a “feasible solution” for this.
Instant optimization and precise energy release. Modern warfare places more emphasis on structural strikes and destruction of the enemy’s combat system, and achieves combat objectives by quickly and accurately releasing combat effectiveness. This requires commanders and command agencies to seize the fleeting “window” of opportunity and strike high-value, nodal, and key targets in the enemy’s combat system before the enemy responds. The traditional “discovery-guidance-strike-assessment” combat loop is time-consuming and has poor combat effectiveness. Therefore, “order-dispatching” precision strikes need to rely on advanced intelligent network information systems, do not pre-determine the strike platform, and publish a list of strike targets in real time. The auxiliary decision-making system quickly evaluates the strike performance of various weapon platforms and the expected damage to the target, autonomously assigns strike platform tasks, quickly links and regulates multi-domain firepower strike forces, and autonomously closes the kill chain to quickly strike key targets.
Multi-domain energy gathering and coordinated strike. The advantage of modern combat precision strikes over previous firepower strikes lies in the information-based and intelligent combat system, which does not require human intervention and relies on a closed strike chain to autonomously complete tasks such as “detection, control, attack, and evaluation”. It can not only save the cost of strikes and reduce resource waste, but also achieve adaptive coordination based on unified combat standards. Therefore, the “order-to-order” precision strike requires the firepower strike forces distributed in various combat fields to establish a unified standard grid. As long as a demand is issued at one point, multiple points can respond and the overall linkage can be achieved. Forces and firepower can be flexibly concentrated, and multiple means and rapid multi-domain energy gathering can be used to determine the strike direction, strike order, and strike method of each strike platform on the move. Through system integration, time can be effectively saved, and multi-domain precision strikes can be carried out on key node targets and key parts of core targets of the enemy, giving full play to the overall power of the superposition and integration of the combat effectiveness of each combat unit.
The attack must break the enemy’s system and be quick and decisive. Modern warfare is a “hybrid war” implemented simultaneously in multiple fields. The interweaving influence and confrontation of new domains and new qualities such as information, aerospace, and intelligence are more obvious. This requires both sides of the war to be able to discover and act one step faster than the enemy, destroy and paralyze the enemy’s combat system, and reduce the efficiency of the enemy’s system. On the one hand, it is necessary to accurately identify the nodes of the enemy system and instantly optimize and accurately strike; on the other hand, it is necessary to conceal one’s own intentions and strike forces, and strike quickly when the enemy is unprepared. “Order dispatch” type precision strikes can well meet these two requirements. With the support of network information systems, intelligent integration of firepower strike forces in various fields can be achieved, and multi-source information perception, data cross-linking, and multi-domain coordinated strikes can be achieved. The seamless and high-speed operation of “target perception-decision-making command-firepower strike-damage assessment” is realized, and information and firepower are highly integrated to quickly achieve combat objectives.
The system composition of “order dispatch” type precision strike
The “order-based dispatch” precision strike builds an efficient closed strike chain, compresses action time, improves strike effectiveness, enables various firepower strike platforms to better integrate into the joint firepower strike system, and provides fast and accurate battlefield firepower support. The key lies in the “network” and the focus is on the “four” systems.
Multi-domain platform access network. With the support of information and intelligent technology, an integrated information network system with satellite communication as the backbone will be established, and the firepower strike platforms distributed in the multi-dimensional battlefield will be integrated into the combat network to establish a battlefield “cloud”. Different combat modules will be distinguished, and “subnet clouds” such as “detection, control, attack, and evaluation” will be established. Relying on the integrated communication network chain, the “subnet cloud” will be linked to the “cloud”, which can enhance the firepower strike platform’s full-domain, full-time, on-the-go access, autonomous networking, and spectrum planning capabilities, and realize the network interconnection of firepower platforms, domain-based combat systems, and joint combat systems, as well as the interconnection of internal strike forces.
Joint reconnaissance and perception system. Relying on various reconnaissance and surveillance forces within the joint combat system, conduct all-weather, multi-directional, and high-precision battlefield perception of the combat area. This requires the construction of a full-dimensional reconnaissance and perception force system that exists in physical and logical spaces, tangible and intangible spaces, and the deployment of intelligent perception equipment over a wide area to form an intelligence data “cloud”. Through the intelligence data “cloud”, the enemy situation is analyzed, the key points of the enemy combat system and time-sensitive targets are found, and the reconnaissance information is updated in real time to show the dynamics of the target.
Intelligent command and decision-making system. Relying on a new command and control system with certain intelligent control capabilities, various planning and analysis models are constructed to expand functions such as intelligent intelligence processing, intelligent task planning, automatic command generation, and precise action control. Databases such as the target feature library, decision-making knowledge base, and action plan library are expanded and improved to strengthen the system support capabilities for task planning, action decision-making, and control in the process of combat organization and implementation, improve planning and decision-making and combat action control capabilities, clarify “how to fight, where to fight, and who will fight”, and achieve accurate “order dispatching”.
Distributed firepower strike system. Relying on the intelligent network information system, on the one hand, it integrates land, sea, air, space and other multi-dimensional firepower strike platforms, strengthens the functions of intelligent target identification and remote control strike, and realizes various combat methods such as remote control combat of combat units, manned and unmanned coordinated combat, and flexible and mobile combat; on the other hand, it can build a low-cost firepower strike platform mainly composed of low-altitude and ultra-low-altitude unmanned strike platforms such as crossing aircraft and cruise missiles. By adding different functional combat payloads, it can work closely with high-end firepower strike platforms to implement battlefield guidance, precision strikes, firepower assessment and other tasks, and efficiently complete the “order”.
Autonomous damage assessment system. Relying on the reconnaissance and surveillance forces within the joint combat system to build a damage assessment system, after the firepower platform completes the strike, it will autonomously conduct strike effect verification on the target. It mainly conducts real-time, dynamic, objective, and systematic analysis and evaluation of the target’s appearance, degree of functional loss, etc., and promptly transmits relevant information to decision-making and command centers at all levels through video images. The evaluation center will judge “how well the strike was” and whether it meets the expected damage requirements. If it does not meet the requirements, the combat operations can be adjusted in a timely manner and supplementary strikes can be carried out to provide strong support for maximizing combat effectiveness.
Planning and implementation of “order-based” precision strikes
The “order dispatch” type of precision strike is just like the way online ride-hailing services operate. Through a series of processes such as formatted “order” generation, intelligent object matching, and autonomous path planning, it independently completes the “OODA” combat cycle. Its actions are more efficient, the strikes are more precise, and the coordination is closer.
Firepower requirements are reported in real time, and combat units “submit orders” on demand. Reconnaissance elements distributed in different combat areas and multi-dimensional battlefield spaces use radar, optical, infrared and technical reconnaissance methods to form battlefield target intelligence information through wide-area multi-source detection. This information is connected to the battlefield information network through intelligence links and is transmitted to combat units anytime and anywhere. The combat units will perform correlation processing, multi-party comparison and verification, and comprehensively compile battlefield target information to generate accurate task “orders”. The combat unit analyzes the target value and connects to the decision-making platform on demand, builds an “order”-style closed strike chain, and submits task “orders” in real time to achieve in-motion optimization and precise adaptation.
Differentiate fire strike tasks, and the decision center intelligently “dispatches orders”. Through the battlefield information network and relying on the intelligent task planning system, the decision center can automatically parse the task “order” information data submitted by the combat unit, and automatically generate the task requirements such as the type and quantity of ammunition, strike method and damage index required for the fire strike action according to the nature, coordinate position, movement status, threat level, etc. of the battlefield target, and form a fire support task “order”. Through intelligent matching of the best firepower platform, link nodes are connected as needed, and intelligent command-based “dispatching” is carried out, which is immediately delivered to the firepower platform waiting for combat.
The firepower platform can “accept orders” immediately by matching the best targets at all times. The firepower platforms distributed at multiple points in the battlefield area can respond to “accept orders” immediately through the battlefield information network. The firepower platform and the combat unit can establish a chain autonomously, and directly establish a guided strike chain after mutual “identity” verification, coordinate and cooperate with the firepower strike operation, and adjust the strike method and shooting parameters in time according to the damage to the target after the strike and the dynamics of the battlefield target, and then carry out firepower strikes again until the “dispatching” task is completed. The firepower platform always follows the principle of “strike-transfer-strike-transfer”, completes the strike task, quickly moves the position, stays in a combat state at all times, and receives “orders” online in real time. After the task is completed, the guided strike chain between the firepower platform and the combat unit will be automatically cancelled.
Acquire damage information from multiple sources, and the assessment center will “evaluate” in real time. Comprehensively use long-distance information-based intelligent reconnaissance methods such as satellite reconnaissance, radar reconnaissance, and drone reconnaissance to implement multi-domain three-dimensional reconnaissance, obtain the target’s fire damage information in real time, and provide accurate assessments for precision fire strikes. Comprehensively determine the damage effect, conduct quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the strike effect, distinguish the three damage states of the target’s physical, functional, and system, and provide timely feedback to the decision-making center. According to the damage assessment results of the strike target, timely put forward control suggestions, adjust the fire strike plan, optimize combat operations, and achieve precise control of fire strikes, so that commanders can accurately control the combat process and achieve efficient command and control of the effectiveness of fire strikes.
Technology and war are always intertwined. While technological innovation is constantly changing the face of war, it has not changed the violent nature and coercive purpose of war. In recent years, with the rapid development and application of artificial intelligence technology, people have never stopped debating the impact of artificial intelligence on war. Compared with artificial intelligence (AI), general artificial intelligence (AGI) has a higher level of intelligence and is considered to be a form of intelligence equivalent to human intelligence. How will the emergence of AGI affect war? Will it change the violence and coercive nature of war? This article will discuss this issue with you with a series of thoughts.
Is AGI just an enabling technology?
Many people believe that although large models and generative artificial intelligence show the strong military application potential of AGI in the future, they are only an enabling technology after all, that is, they can only enable and optimize weapons and equipment, make existing equipment more intelligent, and improve combat efficiency, and it is difficult to bring about a real military revolution. Just like “cyber warfare weapons” were also highly expected by many countries when they first appeared, but now it seems a bit exaggerated.
The disruptive nature of AGI is actually completely different. It brings huge changes to the battlefield with a reaction speed and knowledge breadth far exceeding that of humans. More importantly, it has brought about huge disruptive results by promoting the rapid advancement of science and technology. On the battlefield of the future, autonomous weapons will be endowed with advanced intelligence by AGI, their performance will be generally enhanced, and they will become “strong at attack and difficult to defend” with their speed and cluster advantages. By then, the highly intelligent autonomous weapons that some scientists have predicted will become a reality, and AGI will play a key role in this. At present, the military application areas of artificial intelligence include autonomous weapons, intelligence analysis, intelligent decision-making, intelligent training, intelligent support, etc. These applications are difficult to simply summarize as “empowerment”. Moreover, AGI has a fast development speed and a short iteration cycle, and is in a state of continuous evolution. In future operations, AGI needs to be a priority, and special attention should be paid to the possible changes it brings.
Will AGI make war disappear?
Historian Geoffrey Blainey believes that “wars always occur because of misjudgments of each other’s strength or will”, and with the application of AGI in the military field, misjudgments will become less and less. Therefore, some scholars speculate that wars will decrease or disappear. In fact, relying on AGI can indeed reduce a large number of misjudgments, but even so, it is impossible to eliminate all uncertainties, because one of the characteristics of war is uncertainty. Moreover, not all wars are caused by misjudgments. Moreover, the inherent unpredictability and inexplicability of AGI, as well as people’s lack of experience in using AGI, will bring new uncertainties, making people fall into a thicker “fog of artificial intelligence”.
There are also rational problems with AGI algorithms. Some scholars believe that AGI’s mining and accurate prediction of important intelligence will have a dual impact. In actual operation, AGI does make fewer mistakes than humans, which can improve the accuracy of intelligence and help reduce misjudgments; but sometimes it may also make humans blindly confident and stimulate them to take risks. The offensive advantage brought by AGI leads to the best defense strategy being “preemptive strike”, which breaks the balance between offense and defense, triggers a new security dilemma, and increases the risk of war.
AGI has the characteristics of strong versatility and can be easily combined with weapons and equipment. Unlike nuclear, biological and chemical technologies, it has a low threshold for use and is particularly easy to spread. Due to the technological gap between countries, people are likely to use immature AGI weapons on the battlefield, which brings huge risks. For example, the application of drones in the latest local war practices has stimulated many small and medium-sized countries to start purchasing drones in large quantities. The low-cost equipment and technology brought by AGI are very likely to stimulate the occurrence of a new arms race.
Will AGI be the ultimate deterrent?
Deterrence is the ability to maintain a certain capability to intimidate an adversary from taking actions that go beyond its own interests. When deterrence is too strong to be used, it is the ultimate deterrence, such as the nuclear deterrence of mutually assured destruction. But what ultimately determines the outcome is “human nature,” which is the key that will never be missing in war.
Without the various trade-offs of “humanity”, will AGI become a formidable deterrent? AGI is fast but lacks empathy, is resolute in execution, and has an extremely compressed gaming space. AGI is a key factor on future battlefields, but it is difficult to accurately evaluate due to lack of practical experience, and it is easy to overestimate the opponent’s capabilities. In addition, in terms of autonomous weapon control, whether humans are in the loop and supervise the entire process, or are humans outside the loop and completely let go, this undoubtedly requires deep thought. Can the firing control of intelligent weapons be handed over to AGI? If not, the deterrent effect will be greatly reduced; if so, can the life and death of humans really be decided by machines that have nothing to do with them? In research at Cornell University, large war game simulation models often “suddenly use nuclear attacks” to escalate wars, even if they are in a neutral state.
Perhaps one day in the future, AGI will surpass humans in capabilities. Will we be unable to supervise and control it? Geoffrey Hinton, who proposed the concept of deep learning, said that he has never seen a case where something with a higher level of intelligence was controlled by something with a lower level of intelligence. Some research teams believe that humans may not be able to supervise super artificial intelligence. In the face of powerful AGI in the future, can we really control them? This is a question worth pondering.
Will AGI change the nature of war?
With the widespread use of AGI, will battlefields filled with violence and blood disappear? Some people say that AI warfare is far beyond the capabilities of humans and will push humans out of the battlefield. When AI turns war into a war fought entirely by autonomous robots, is it still a “violent and bloody war”? When opponents of unequal capabilities confront each other, the weak may not have the opportunity to act at all. Can wars be ended before the war through war games? Will AGI change the nature of war? Is an “unmanned” “war” still a war?
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, said that all human behavior is mediated by language and affects our history. The Big Language Model is a typical AGI. The biggest difference between it and other inventions is that it can create new ideas and culture. “Artificial intelligence that can tell stories will change the course of human history.” When AGI touches the control of language, the entire civilization system built by humans may be subverted, and it does not even need to generate consciousness in this process. Like Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, will humans worship AGI as a new “god”?
AGI establishes a close relationship with humans through human language and changes human perceptions, making it difficult for humans to distinguish and discern, thus posing the danger of the will to war being controlled by people with ulterior motives. Harari said that computers do not need to send out killer robots. If necessary, they will let humans pull the trigger themselves. AGI accurately creates and polishes situation information and controls battlefield cognition through deep fakes. It can use drones to fake battlefield situations and build public opinion before the war. This has been seen in recent local wars. The cost of war will be greatly reduced, leading to the emergence of a new form of war. Will small and weak countries still have a chance? Can the will to war be changed without bloodshed? Is “force” no longer a necessary condition for defining war?
The form of war may be changed, but the essence remains. Whether war is “bloody” or not, it will still force the enemy to obey its will and bring a lot of “collateral damage”, but the way of confrontation may be completely different. The essence of war lies in the “human nature” deep in the heart, and “human nature” is determined by culture, history, behavior and values, etc. It is difficult to completely replicate it with some artificial intelligence technology, so we cannot outsource all ethical, political and decision-making issues to artificial intelligence, and we cannot expect artificial intelligence to automatically generate “human nature”. Artificial intelligence technology may be abused due to passionate impulses, so it must be under human control. Since artificial intelligence is trained by humans, it will not always be free of bias, so they cannot be completely separated from human supervision. In the future, artificial intelligence can become a creative tool or partner to enhance “tactical imagination”, but it must be “aligned” with human values. These issues need to be constantly thought about and understood in practice.
Will AGI revolutionize the theory of war?
Most subject knowledge is expressed in natural language. The large language model, which is a collection of human writings, can connect language writings that are difficult to be compatible with scientific research. For example, some people input classical masterpieces and even philosophy, history, politics, economics, etc. into the large language model for analysis and reconstruction. It is found that it can not only conduct a comprehensive analysis of all scholars’ views, but also put forward its “own views” without losing originality. Therefore, some people say that it is also possible to re-analyze and interpret war theories through AGI, stimulate human innovation, and drive major evolution and reconstruction of war theories and systems? Perhaps there will be certain improvements and developments in theory, but war science is not only theoretical, but also practical, but practicality and reality are what AGI cannot do at all. Can the classic war theory really be reinterpreted? If so, what is the meaning of the theory?
In short, AGI’s subversion of the concept of war will far exceed “mechanization” and “informatization”. People should boldly embrace the arrival of AGI, but also be cautious. Understand the concept so as not to be ignorant; conduct in-depth research so as not to fall behind; strengthen supervision so as not to be negligent. How to learn to cooperate with AGI and guard against AGI technology raids by opponents is what we need to pay attention to first in the future. (Rong Ming and Hu Xiaofeng)
Afterword
Looking to the future with an open mind
Futurist Roy Amara has a famous assertion that people tend to overestimate the short-term benefits of a technology but underestimate its long-term impact, which is later called “Amara’s Law”. This law emphasizes the nonlinear characteristics of technological development, that is, the actual impact of technology often takes a longer time scale to fully manifest, reflecting the pulse and trend of technological development and embodying human acceptance and longing for technology.
At present, in the process of the development of artificial intelligence from weak artificial intelligence to strong artificial intelligence, and from special artificial intelligence to general artificial intelligence, every time people think that they have completed 90% of the journey, looking back, they may have only completed less than 10% of the journey. The driving role of the scientific and technological revolution in the military revolution is becoming more and more prominent, especially the multi-faceted penetration of high-tech represented by artificial intelligence technology into the military field, which has led to profound changes in the mechanism, elements and methods of winning wars.
In the foreseeable future, intelligent technologies such as AGI will not stop iterating, and the cross-evolution of intelligent technologies and their enabling applications in the military field will become more diversified, perhaps going beyond the boundaries of human cognition of existing war forms. The development of science and technology is unstoppable and unstoppable. Whoever can see the trend and future of science and technology, the potential and power of science and technology with a keen eye and a clear mind, and see through the “fog of war”, will be more likely to seize the initiative to win.
This reminds us that we should have a broader perspective and thinking when exploring the development of future war forms, so that we can get closer to the underestimated reality. Where is AGI going? Where is intelligent warfare going? This is a test of human wisdom.
Cognitive domain warfare refers to the important form of public opinion propaganda, psychological attack and defense, winning people’s hearts, subverting confidence, influencing beliefs, fighting for thinking, and ideological struggle, guided by modern cognitive theory and science, calling on multi-domain means such as public opinion, psychology, and law, and using multi-dimensional technologies such as modern networks, media, text, pictures, videos, and numbers, aiming to fight for people’s initiative in thinking, beliefs, values, personal attitudes, emotions, identification, and judgment tendencies. Cognitive domain warfare is a complex collection of traditional public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, legal warfare, trade warfare, diplomatic warfare, scientific and technological warfare, ideological warfare, and other multi-domain warfare.
At present, cognitive domain warfare has become an important support for countries to carry out military struggles and struggles in other fields. Language confrontation driven by cognitive domain goals has become an important form of cognitive domain warfare and deserves high attention.
Language confrontation: a new area for exerting influence on combat targets
Cognitive domain operations are a result of the development of contemporary cognitive science research. They are an emerging field of operations that emerged after people actively explored the cognitive activities of the brain to gain a more complex, abstract and thorough understanding of the brain. They are also a high-end form of influence in language confrontation that targets the advanced, deep and hidden activities of the audience’s brain. Whether it is the object of information action, the producer of information, the information content itself or the channel of information, cognitive domain operations are all permeated with cognitive characteristics, and always emphasize taking action at the cognitive level.
In terms of the recipients of information, this cognition targets the deep cognitive aspects of the opponent’s audience, including its people, military, military commanders or important leaders, important figures in the political and business circles, and even directly includes the leaders of the other country or specific important generals of the army, etc. It can also be a specific group of people or the public. It can involve the cognitive preferences, cognitive shortcomings, cognitive habits, cognitive biases, and cognitive misunderstandings of individuals or groups; it can also be the beliefs, values, political identity, national identity, social and cultural identity, and emotional attitudes of individuals and groups.
From the perspective of the distributor and content of information, it should be infused with the cognitive design and arrangement of the information producer, which includes the unique cognition of the text, such as the discourse mode of the text, the narrative mode of the text, the observation perspective of things, the cognitive focus and depth of the narrative, the organization form of the sentence, the value concept and other tendencies of the sentence, the acceptability of the concept of the sentence to the other party, etc.
In terms of the channels for information issuance and dissemination, the form of text is closer to multimedia and multimodal forms, closer to the needs of cyberspace, closer to the advantages of contemporary smart phones, and closer to the characteristics of the current emerging media era, that is, it is more in line with the cognitive characteristics, cognitive habits and cognitive tendencies accepted by the audience. The dissemination form of text fully considers the cognitive effects in international communication, especially cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, cross-media and cross-group cognitive communication. In this way, the text will better influence the audience from a cognitive level.
Language confrontation responds to changes in combat styles and generates new tactics
Throughout human history, it is not difficult to find that the style of military struggle has been constantly changing. From the initial physical struggle with cold weapons to the contest of hot weapons and mechanical forces, and then to the balance and counter-balance of information capabilities under high-tech warfare conditions, in recent years, it has developed towards the intelligent decision-making competition in the direction of intelligence and unmanned. Each change has brought profound changes in tactics. In the current transitional stage of coexistence of mechanization, informatization and intelligence, people not only pay attention to the competition for dominance in the physical and information domains of the battlefield, but also pay more attention to the control of the cognitive domain that affects the main body of war, that is, the competition in the fields of thinking, cognitive patterns and styles, values, emotional attitudes, cultural models, communication patterns, psychological strengths and weaknesses, cognitive preferences, cultural and knowledge maps, and ideological identity of the personnel on both sides of the war. The latter involves the basic situation of social personnel and social existence, that is, the emerging field of cognitive domain warfare, and its tactics have strong particularity.
Flexibility of topics: Cognitive domain operations can select many topics in the cognitive domain and carry out flexible and flexible combat operations. According to the current situation and needs, topics can be selected from the relatively macroscopic strategic level (such as the ideology and system of the opponent’s entire society, etc.), the mesoscopic campaign level (such as social problems in the local field or direction of the opponent’s society: social welfare policy or environmental protection policy, etc.), and very microscopic tactical issues in society (such as the unfairness, injustice, and non-beautiful side of society reflected by a certain person or a specific event). Macro, meso, and micro cognitive domain issues are interconnected and transformed into each other. It is very likely that a microscopic topic will also become a major macroscopic strategic topic. The raising of issues depends on the relationship with the entire military operation. Cognitive domain operations should be subject to the overall combat operations and serve the needs of the macroscopic political and diplomatic situation. More importantly, topics should be prepared in peacetime, and data on various topics should be collected in peacetime, especially paying attention to various important data in the real society. Once needed, these data can be quickly transformed into arrows, bullets, and shells shot at the enemy’s cognitive domain, and even become strategic weapons that affect the overall situation.
Controllability of the operational level: The important design of cognitive operations is that it can be controlled and regulated as a whole at the operational level, and can be upgraded or reduced in dimension according to changes in the situation. If it is necessary at the strategic level, the commander can open the strategic level design and force investment; if it is necessary at the campaign level, it can also be controlled at the corresponding campaign level; if it is only necessary at the level of specific small problems, it can also be controlled at the corresponding niche local level, so that the entire action serves the needs of the overall combat operation. The strategic campaign tactics here refer more to operational design and force investment. Since the battlefield situation may change rapidly, some issues may also change at the level, with strategic issues affecting the effects of the campaign and tactical levels; some issues, due to the particularity of tactical issues, become campaign and strategic level issues that affect the overall situation.
Dominance of emerging media: The main influence channel of cognitive domain has shifted from traditional paper media and print media to emerging media. Traditional media mainly rely on single media, such as newspapers, magazines, books, flyers, posters, etc. to convey information; the emergence of television in the later period brought three-dimensional media. In the Internet era, especially the Internet 2.0 era and the birth of smart communication devices, people rely more on multi-media, multi-modal, short videos and short texts to convey information. The introduction of various advanced devices such as smart phones, smart tablets, smart players, and the birth of various emerging social software and tools have made emerging media the main tool for people to communicate and exchange. Emerging media, emerging social software and tools have become an important space for various forces to play games and struggle in social security, public opinion security, ideological security, social security and political security. Internet security, especially whether the security of new social media, emerging social software and tools can be mastered, is, to some extent, the key to whether a country’s cognitive domain can be secure. Information in emerging media tools and new media space has become the main battlefield, main position and main space for competition in cognitive operations of various countries. It is worth pointing out that ideas and theories that influence people’s cognition will become the most influential weapons at all levels of cognitive domain operations.
Language confrontation adapts to the intelligent era, cognitive computing enhances new computing power
In the era of artificial intelligence, based on the substantial improvement in big data analysis and application, supercomputing capabilities, intelligent computing capabilities, natural language processing capabilities, smartphone communication capabilities, and new generation network communication capabilities, humans have begun to accurately model and analyze language culture, psychological cognition, group emotions, and social behavior for the entire society, the entire network domain, local groups, local different groups, and specific individuals. In particular, people have a deep understanding and grasp of brain cognition, human brain thinking, thinking patterns, habitual preferences, image schemas, cognitive frameworks, and even neural networks, human-computer collaboration, and brain control technology. As long as there is enough diverse dynamic data, people can calculate and simulate all people’s psychological activities, emotional activities, cognitive activities, social opinions, and behavioral patterns. Through deep calculations, actuarial calculations, and clever calculations, people’s cognitive world can be accurately grasped, and a fine and profound control of people’s cognitive domain can be formed. This aspect also presents the following characteristics:
The dimensionality of computation: As an emerging field, all aspects of the cognitive domain can be digitized and made fully computable for all aspects of the entire process and all individuals. This can be achieved by widely collecting various types of information and then sorting out the information to form big data on the diverse factors of the opponent’s subjects. This will allow various computations to be conducted on the entire population, groups, between groups, and between individual data. As a result, all kinds of activities based on thinking, psychology, emotion, speech, behavior, etc. that were previously impossible to achieve can be completed, displayed, and accurately grasped through computation.
Cognitive nature of computation: computation in the cognitive domain reflects a strong cognitive nature. It can reveal more of the connections between things, events, and people that are difficult to observe with the naked eye. It can reveal the clustering and hierarchical relationships between concepts in the same event framework, and reflect the deep cognitive connections between concepts, whether explicit or implicit, direct or indirect. It reveals the complex conceptual network system between concepts, allowing people to see a deep cognitive world that completely transcends ordinary naked eye observation.
Intelligence of computation: The computation in cognitive domain also reflects strong intelligence. This intelligence is manifested in the fact that intelligent conclusions can be drawn through computation. For example, through the collection of a large amount of text and data mining, we can find the relationship between various topics, various viewpoints, various tendencies, various groups of people, various positions, and various demands that cannot be seen by human power, so as to form a more comprehensive, in-depth, accurate, and systematic understanding of a certain issue and make scientific and optimized decisions. Such decisions may be consistent with human intelligence, or they may surpass or even far exceed human intelligence. By making good use of the power of cognitive computing, especially by integrating the data of our country and the data of our opponents, we can better prevent, warn, and deploy in advance, and achieve the best, optimal, fastest, and most accurate strikes and counterattacks, and better reflect efficient, powerful, and targeted protection. Cognitive computing here is more about the possible reactions of a possible macro, meso, or micro topic in different groups of people, different time periods, and different backgrounds, in the entire network domain or a local network domain, or within a specific group, especially the analysis and inspection of the active and passive situations that both parties may present when playing games with opponents, and the attack and defense of cognitive domain.
New application of giving full play to the status of discourse subject and releasing the power of discourse
Cognitive domain operations have a very important support, that is, it mainly relies on language media to play a role, mainly exerts influence through the discourse level, mainly forms an implicit effect on the cognitive domain through the narrative of discourse, mainly exerts potential effects through cultural models, and exerts explicit or implicit effects through cross-cultural communication. It is mainly reflected in the following aspects:
Uniqueness of textual discourse: The cognitive domain needs to be influenced by information. Although information may be presented through the special visual effects of video images, fundamentally speaking, the uniqueness of the discourse expressed by the text becomes the main support for producing cognitive influence. Among them, the mode of discourse expression, the skills of discourse expression, the main design of the persuasiveness and appeal of discourse expression, and especially the uniqueness of discourse narrative will be the key to influencing people’s cognition. This may include the perspective of the narrative, the theme and style of the narrative, the story framework of the narrative, the language innovation of the narrative, the key sentences of the narrative, the philosophical, humanistic, religious, social, natural and other feelings contained in the narrative, the identities of different participants in the narrative, the diversified evaluation of the narrative, the authenticity, depth and emotional temperature of the narrative, the subtle influence of the narrative on the viewpoint, the personal emotions, values, ideology, and position evaluation released by the narrative. The uniqueness of textual discourse is an important reliance for cognitive domain operations to exert cognitive influence through text. Making full use of the complexity of the text, giving play to the respective advantages of diverse texts, and giving play to the role of implicit and explicit cognitive influence of the text connotation have become the key to cognitive domain operations of textual discourse. The most important thing is to innovate the text discourse, win readers with newer words, more novel expressions, and more unique expressions, so that readers can understand and feel the ideas in the text imperceptibly, and accept the ideas of the text silently.
Potentiality of cultural models: In cognitive domain operations, we must deeply grasp the characteristics and models of different countries and national cultures. Different countries and different nationalities have different cultural models. Their philosophical thinking, traditional culture, religious beliefs, customs, and ways of thinking are all obviously different. Citizens of different cultures also have different national psychology and national cognitive models. They should also have typical cognitive preferences belonging to their own national culture, as well as corresponding shortcomings and weaknesses. Some of them obviously have a huge difference in understanding from other nationalities in their own country, and even misunderstandings and hostility. Therefore, cognitive domain operations at the cultural level are to grasp the overall cultural models of different countries, build cultural models of different groups in different countries, build different cognitive models of different countries on different things, and fully grasp the overall attitude and behavior of a country on a series of things and issues, especially for some typical cases, cultural taboos, religious requirements, spiritual pursuits, and overall concepts. With the help of existing theories and discoveries, we should comprehensively construct the basic performance of different groups of people in the cognitive field on some typical problems, sensitive problems, and important problems, so as to provide important reference and guidance for the next step of cognitive operations. Strengthening the study of the cultural patterns of different enemy personnel, especially military personnel, personnel in key positions, including the study and construction of the basic cultural characteristics and models of enemy generals, officers, soldiers, etc., such as the character’s psychological cognitive behavior and cultural model portrait, has become the core practice of cognitive domain operations. The cognitive analysis of ordinary enemy personnel, especially the general public, citizens, and specific groups, including special non-governmental organizations, is also of great value.
Cross-cultural strategic communication: Cognitive domain operations are international language and cultural communications, and need to follow the laws of international communication. We must grasp the basic paradigm of international communication, skillfully combine our own stories with international expressions, and skillfully combine the other party’s language and culture with our own stories and ideas; we must be good at combining different art forms, including text, pictures, paintings, music (sound), video and other means or multimodal means to achieve international communication of information. At the same time, we must coordinate multi-dimensional macro communication at the strategic level: we must use various means to carry out communication through military-civilian integration, military-civilian coordination, and military-civilian integration; in addition to non-governmental organizations, we must especially rely on civilian forces, experts, opinion leaders, and ordinary people to help the military carry out cognitive domain operations; we must unify the setting of topics, speak out in multiple locations and dimensions, form a strategic communication situation, and form a good situation for emergency solutions for major actions, major issues, and major crisis management, form a good public opinion atmosphere, create positive effects, and eliminate or extinguish adverse effects. In particular, we must establish a capable team that is proficient in foreign languages, understands cross-cultural skills, knows the laws of international communication, and can speak out skillfully on international multi-dimensional platforms. These people can usually conduct extensive topic perception, information collection and discussion, and use common or special topics to build personal connections and establish fan communities. More importantly, at critical moments, they can exert influence through their fan groups and complete strategic communication tasks.
At present, with the prevalence of hybrid warfare, multi-domain warfare and global warfare, cognitive domain warfare has become a common means of mixing and blending. The process of cognitive domain warfare from unfamiliarity, emerging, development to growth is also the advanced stage, complex stage and upgraded stage of the development of traditional public opinion warfare, psychological warfare and legal warfare. Its rise is more deceptive, ambiguous, concealed, embedded, implanted and unobservable, especially considering its deep integration with the entry of contemporary emerging media, and it is constantly learning and drawing on new ideas, new technologies and new means that integrate into multiple disciplines, cross-disciplines and cross-disciplinary disciplines. As a result, cognitive domain warfare has become a form of warfare that we must be highly vigilant and guard against. (Liang Xiaobo, professor and doctoral supervisor at the College of Arts and Sciences of the National University of Defense Technology)
[This article is a phased result of the National Social Science Fund Major Project “National Defense Language Capacity Building in the Perspective of National Defense and Military Reform”]
With the accelerated application of cutting-edge technology in the military field, intelligent unmanned systems have become an important part of modern warfare. The world’s major military powers attach great importance to the application of intelligent unmanned system technology in the military field. In the future, intelligent unmanned systems will have a profound impact on combat methods and subvert the rules of war. As a culmination of cutting-edge science and technology (such as artificial intelligence, intelligent robots, intelligent perception, intelligent computing, etc.), intelligent unmanned systems represent the highest level of development of a country’s scientific and technological strength. Therefore, research in the field of intelligent unmanned systems can greatly promote the development of existing military and livelihood fields. At present, unmanned system equipment has emerged in military conflicts. For example, in the conflict between Turkey and Syria, Turkey used the Anka-S long-flight drone and the Barakta TB-2 reconnaissance and strike drone equipped by the Air Force to attack the Syrian government forces; the Russian Ministry of Defense also announced that militants in Syria used drones carrying explosives to launch a cluster attack on its military bases; in 2020, the United States used an MQ-9 “Reaper” drone to attack a senior Iranian military commander and killed him on the spot. Unmanned combat is coming, and intelligent unmanned systems, as a key weapon on the future battlefield, will determine the victory of the entire war.
Image from the Internet
The development of intelligent unmanned systems will not only promote the upgrading and progress of existing military technology, but also drive the intelligent development of civilian technology, including intelligent transportation systems, smart home systems, intelligent manufacturing systems and intelligent medical systems. In order to develop intelligent unmanned systems more scientifically and rapidly, major scientific and technological powers have introduced a series of plans and routes for the development of intelligent unmanned systems, striving to seize the initiative and commanding heights in the development of intelligent unmanned systems. Related ones include the United States’ integrated roadmap for autonomous unmanned systems, Russia’s national weapons and equipment plan, the United Kingdom’s defense innovation technology framework, China’s new generation of artificial intelligence development plan, and Japan’s medium- and long-term technology plan. In recent years, from air to space, from land to sea, various types of intelligent unmanned systems have emerged in large numbers. The world’s major powers have gradually deployed intelligent unmanned systems into the military, and in some regional conflicts and anti-terrorism battlefields, the key role of intelligent unmanned systems is increasing. Therefore, this article will focus on the military needs of the future battlefield, based on the challenges of the actual complex environment faced by the future battlefield, analyze the key technologies required for the development and application of intelligent unmanned systems, and analyze the key technologies of individual enhancement and cluster enhancement from a military perspective, and explain the development trend of intelligent unmanned systems.
Current research status at home and abroad
The concept of intelligent unmanned system has only been proposed recently. At present, its research is still in its early stages, and there is no unified definition in the world. It is temporarily defined as: an organic whole composed of an unmanned platform and several auxiliary parts, with the ability to perceive, interact and learn, and capable of autonomous reasoning and decision-making based on knowledge to achieve the goal. Intelligent unmanned systems can be divided into three major parts: land unmanned systems, air unmanned systems and marine unmanned systems according to the spatial scope of their functions. Among them, land unmanned systems mainly include reconnaissance unmanned vehicles, transport unmanned vehicles, combat unmanned vehicles, obstacle removal unmanned vehicles, bomb disposal unmanned vehicles, unmanned vehicle formations and command systems, etc.; air unmanned systems mainly include reconnaissance drones, combat drones, logistics transport drones and drone formations, etc.; marine unmanned systems mainly include reconnaissance unmanned boats, combat unmanned boats, logistics transport unmanned boats, patrol search and rescue unmanned boats, reconnaissance unmanned submarines, combat unmanned submarines and shore-based support systems, etc. This section will explain the current research status of intelligent unmanned systems at home and abroad from the above three parts. ⒈ Current status of foreign intelligent unmanned system research ⑴ Land unmanned system Land unmanned systems are mainly used in intelligence collection, reconnaissance and patrol, mine clearance and obstacle removal, firepower strike, battlefield rescue, logistics transportation, communication relay and electronic interference. As the advantages of land unmanned systems in combat become more and more prominent, research on them has attracted more and more attention from various countries. The United States launched the “Joint Tactical Unmanned Vehicle” project in November 1993, which is the predecessor of the “Gladiator” unmanned combat platform project. In 2006, the United States completed the design of the entire system of the “Gladiator” unmanned combat platform and officially equipped the Marine Corps in 2007. The “Gladiator” tactical unmanned combat platform is the world’s first multi-purpose combat unmanned platform. It is equipped with sensor systems such as day/night cameras, GPS positioning systems, and acoustic and laser search systems. It is also equipped with machine guns, submachine guns, tear gas, sniper systems, biological and chemical weapons detection systems, etc. It can perform reconnaissance, nuclear and biological weapons detection, obstacle breakthrough, anti-sniper, firepower strike and direct shooting in different weather and terrain. The Gladiator unmanned combat platform is equipped with a highly mobile and survivable chassis. For this platform, a portable handheld control system has also been developed, and a series of development work has been completed around the technical issues of the control system’s anti-interference, network interoperability, miniaturization and ease of operation. However, due to the weak armor protection capability of the Gladiator unmanned combat platform and the poor concealment of its mission, its long-range reconnaissance and control system faces more interference. In addition, the US Army has also put some other land unmanned systems into service, such as the Scorpion robot and the Claw robot. In 2017, the US Army formulated the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) Strategy, which provides a top-level plan for the construction of unmanned combat capabilities. Figure 1 shows the US land unmanned system.
Figure 1 US land unmanned system Israel, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany have also successively carried out the development of land unmanned systems and developed a series of advanced products. The product list is shown in Table 1. For example, the “Guardian” series of autonomous unmanned vehicles developed by Israel can combine the sensors and fusion algorithms on board to autonomously detect and identify dangerous obstacles, and perform patrol, surveillance and small-scale fire strike tasks; the MARSA-800 unmanned vehicle developed by Russia can perform tasks such as transportation and logistics support, tracking and surveillance, and can realize autonomous path planning and avoid obstacles during the execution of tasks. The unmanned vehicle has been deployed on the Syrian battlefield. The United Kingdom and Germany also started research on land unmanned systems earlier. The United Kingdom launched a trolley bomb disposal robot in the 1960s, and later launched the Harris T7 tactile feedback robot for performing dangerous tasks such as bomb disposal and bomb disposal; the “Mission Master” ground armed reconnaissance unmanned vehicle developed by Germany’s Rheinmetall is mainly used to perform tactical surveillance, dangerous object detection, medical evacuation, communication relay and fire support tasks.
Table 1 Land unmanned systems of various countries
⑵ Aerial unmanned systems Aerial unmanned systems are mainly based on single drone platforms and drone clusters. Due to their advantages such as wide field of view, freedom of flight, and good equipment carrying capacity, drones are widely used in the military field and have played a great role in military conflicts in recent years. The main functions of aerial unmanned systems include: intelligence gathering, reconnaissance and surveillance, decoy target aircraft, target tracking, tactical strikes and air rescue. In 2000, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory proposed the concept of autonomous combat for unmanned aerial vehicles, quantified the degree of autonomy of unmanned aerial vehicles, and formulated a development plan. The quantitative content and development stage of the degree of autonomy of unmanned aerial vehicles are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Autonomous control level and the trend of autonomous
unmanned aerial vehicles In 2003, the United States merged the unmanned combat aircraft system projects of the Air Force and the Navy, launched the “Joint Unmanned Combat System” (J-UCAS) project, and began research on the unmanned combat aircraft X-47B. In 2006, the U.S. Navy proposed the “Navy Unmanned Combat Air System” (N-UCAS) project, which aims to introduce unmanned combat aircraft to the aircraft carrier-based aircraft wing and continue to conduct research on the X-47B. Between 2012 and 2014, the aircraft carrier catapult, landing, touch-and-go and other tests were completed many times, and the autonomous aerial refueling test was completed in 2015. The X-47B attack drone is an autonomously maneuverable, stealthy, and land-based and ship-based unmanned combat aircraft. It has the characteristics of high range and high flight time, and is equipped with advanced sensors such as illumination radar, optoelectronic guidance system, and aperture radar. Its main functions include intelligence reconnaissance, target tracking, electronic warfare interference, and firepower strikes. Other unmanned aerial systems developed by the United States, such as the Global Hawk, Predator, Hunter, and Raven, have also been in service in the military, as shown in Figure 3. The “Harpy” drone developed by Israel is equipped with anti-radar sensors, optoelectronic guidance systems and missiles, and can autonomously attack enemy radar systems, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 Aerial Unmanned Systems of Various Countries
A single aerial unmanned system is easily interfered with and attacked when performing a mission, resulting in mission failure, while an aerial unmanned system cluster can make up for this defect and give full play to the advantages of aerial unmanned systems. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States has successively launched the “Gremlins” low-cost drone project, the low-cost drone cluster project, the “Perdix” micro-drone airborne high-speed launch demonstration project, and the offensive swarm enabling tactics (OFFSET) project for aerial unmanned system clusters. By developing and testing the architecture, communication system and distributed control algorithm for unmanned system clusters, an autonomous control system for drone clusters has been developed, and cutting-edge scientific and technological technologies such as artificial intelligence, situational awareness, virtual reality and augmented reality have been used to enhance the comprehensive combat capability of aerial unmanned system clusters on the battlefield.
⑶ Marine unmanned systems Marine unmanned systems include two types: surface unmanned systems and underwater unmanned systems. Among them, surface unmanned systems mainly refer to surface unmanned boats (hereinafter referred to as “unmanned boats”), which are mainly used to perform tasks such as maritime search and rescue, reconnaissance and surveillance, firepower strikes, patrol security, electronic interference, logistics support and decoy target ships; underwater unmanned systems mainly refer to unmanned submersibles. Compared with manned submarines, they have the advantages of no casualties, high concealment and high autonomy, and are mainly used to perform intelligence collection, target monitoring, combat deterrence and firepower strikes. In 2018, the US Navy released the “Navy Department Unmanned System Strategic Roadmap”, and in 2019, it released the “Navy Artificial Intelligence Framework”, which provides route planning and guidance for the development of naval operations and marine unmanned systems. In terms of surface unmanned systems, the United States proposed the “American Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration Project” (ACTD), one of whose important tasks is to carry out research on the “Spartan Scout” unmanned boat. The project was completed in 2007 and tested in the Iraqi theater. The “Spartan Scout” unmanned boat is equipped with an unmanned driving system and a line-of-sight/beyond-line-of-sight communication system, as well as advanced sensors such as electro-optical/infrared search turrets, high-definition cameras, navigation radars, surface search radars, and global positioning system receivers, as well as weapons such as naval guns, anti-ship missiles, and anti-submarine sensors. It is mainly used to perform intelligence collection, target monitoring, information reconnaissance, anti-mine and maritime security tasks, and has a certain degree of autonomy. The “Sea Hunter” unmanned boat developed by the United States is equipped with sonar and optoelectronic sensors, as well as short-range and long-range radar detection systems and expandable modular sonar systems. It is mainly used to perform tasks such as identifying and monitoring suspicious targets and guiding fire strikes. The US marine unmanned system is shown in Figure 4. The “Protector” unmanned boat developed by Israel is mainly used to perform intelligence reconnaissance, suspicious target identification, tactical interception, electronic interference and precision strikes (Figure 4). The unmanned surface reconnaissance boat developed by Russia can perform rapid patrol tasks under the command of the mother ship and inspect and monitor designated areas to search for intelligence.
Figure 4 Marine unmanned systems of various countries
In terms of underwater unmanned systems, the nuclear-powered unmanned submarine “Poseidon” developed by Russia can carry conventional and nuclear warheads to perform reconnaissance and strategic nuclear strike missions, as shown in Figure 4. The “Knifefish” unmanned submarine developed by the United States can scan suspicious objects and search for intelligence by emitting low-frequency electromagnetic waves; the “Tuna”-9 unmanned submarine developed by the United States can carry a variety of standard payloads and can be used to perform offshore exploration, anti-mine, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and other tasks.
⒉ Current status of domestic intelligent unmanned system research In recent years, China’s military intelligent unmanned systems have developed rapidly. This article will explain the three aspects of land unmanned systems, air unmanned systems and marine unmanned systems. In terms of land unmanned systems, the National University of Defense Technology and Sany Heavy Industry Co., Ltd. jointly developed the “Desert Wolf” land unmanned light platform, which is powered by tracks and equipped with weapon systems such as grenade launchers and machine guns. It can be used to perform logistics transportation, wounded transportation, reconnaissance monitoring, firepower strikes and other tasks. The “Longma” series of unmanned vehicles developed by Sunward Intelligent Group have strong transportation and obstacle crossing capabilities. The “Shenxing-III” military ground intelligent robot system developed by Nanjing University of Science and Technology has strong autonomous navigation and intelligence reconnaissance capabilities. The unmanned nuclear reconnaissance vehicle jointly developed by the National University of Defense Technology and Harbin Institute of Technology has high mobility and armor protection capabilities. The weapon system it carries can perform fire strikes and has certain autonomous capabilities. In terms of aerial unmanned systems, the “Wing Loong” series of unmanned aerial vehicles developed by Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group has fully autonomous horizontal take-off and landing capabilities, cruise flight capabilities, air-to-ground coordination capabilities, and ground relay control capabilities. It is equipped with multiple types of optoelectronic/electronic reconnaissance equipment and small air-to-ground precision strike weapons, and can perform intelligence reconnaissance, target tracking, fire strikes and other tasks. The “Rainbow” series of unmanned aerial vehicles developed by China have medium-altitude and long-range navigation capabilities, can carry electronic jamming systems and a variety of weapon systems, and can perform fire strikes, intelligence reconnaissance, communication jamming, radio wave jamming and other tasks; the attack 11 type unmanned aerial vehicle developed has extremely strong stealth capabilities and can carry precision-guided missiles for ground attack missions. China’s aerial unmanned systems are shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5 China’s aerial unmanned systems
In terms of surface unmanned systems of marine unmanned systems, the “Tianxing No. 1” unmanned boat, developed by Harbin Engineering University, uses oil-electric hybrid power, with a maximum speed of more than 92.6km/h and a maximum range of 1,000km. It is currently the fastest unmanned boat in the world. The boat integrates technologies such as autonomous perception, intelligent control, and autonomous decision-making, and can achieve rapid situation information recognition and danger avoidance of the surrounding complex environment. It can be used to perform tasks such as meteorological information monitoring, landform mapping, alert patrol, intelligence reconnaissance, and firepower attack. The “Jinghai” series of unmanned boats developed by Shanghai University have semi-autonomous and fully autonomous operation capabilities, and can perform tasks such as target reconnaissance, ocean mapping, and water quality testing. The “Haiteng 01” intelligent high-speed unmanned boat developed by Shanghai Maritime University is equipped with sensors such as millimeter-wave radar, laser radar, and forward-looking sonar. It can perform suspicious target monitoring, underwater measurement, maritime search and rescue, and other tasks, and has fully autonomous and semi-autonomous navigation capabilities. The JARI intelligent unmanned combat boat developed by Jiangsu Automation Research Institute is equipped with detection equipment such as photoelectric detectors and four-sided phased arrays. At the same time, it is also equipped with weapon systems such as missiles and torpedoes, which can perform tasks such as intelligence collection, enemy reconnaissance, and precision firepower strikes. The “Lookout II” unmanned missile boat jointly developed by Zhuhai Yunzhou Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. and other units is equipped with a fully autonomous unmanned driving system and missiles and other weapons, which can perform tasks such as enemy reconnaissance, intelligence collection, and precision firepower strikes. China’s marine unmanned system is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6 China’s marine unmanned system
In terms of underwater unmanned systems of marine unmanned systems, the “Devil Fish” unmanned submersible developed by Northwestern Polytechnical University is a bionic manta ray unmanned submersible that has completed a deep-sea test of 1025m. The “Wukong” full-sea depth unmanned submersible developed by Harbin Engineering University has successfully completed a deep dive and autonomous operation test of 10,896m. Deep-sea submersibles such as “Qianlong No. 1” and “Seahorse” developed by China have successfully completed deep-sea exploration missions.
⒊ Summary of the current state of technology At present, intelligent unmanned systems have been gradually applied to various fields of military applications, and with the development of cutting-edge science and technology, the application of intelligent unmanned systems in the military field will increase day by day. However, in the use of intelligent unmanned systems, autonomy and intelligence have not yet been fully realized. At present, the application status of intelligent unmanned system technology in the military field can be mainly divided into the following three parts:
① From the perspective of combat missions: combat missions have developed from simple reconnaissance and surveillance to mainstream confrontation operations; battlefield confrontation has changed from human confrontation to human-machine confrontation, and then to machine-machine confrontation; the application environment has changed from structured environment and laboratory environment to real battlefield environment, and will gradually develop into an augmented reality environment combining real environment and virtual reality in the future. ② From the perspective of command and control: the control method has developed from simple remote control and program control of a single machine to intelligent fusion and interactive control of human-machine, but autonomous control has not yet been fully realized; the system architecture has developed from specialization and singularity to generalization, standardization, and interoperability. ③ From the perspective of perception and decision-making: the decision-making method has changed from relying solely on people to relying mainly on people and supplemented by human-machine intelligent interactive decision-making; the perception method has changed from relying solely on sensors to obtain feature information and people to judge target attributes to target recognition and feature information acquisition based on artificial intelligence.
Key technologies of intelligent unmanned systems
As a culmination of multidisciplinary fields, intelligent unmanned systems involve many technologies, perform diverse tasks, and have complex and changeable application scenarios. For example, the air environment is rainy and foggy, with low visibility, strong winds, and light interference; the land environment has complex terrain, obstacles, interference, and dangerous pollution areas; the sea environment has wind and wave interference, ship swaying, inconspicuous targets, and irregular coastlines. Different environments and uses pose huge challenges to the research and performance of intelligent unmanned system technology. In order to adapt to the restricted and changing environment, the key technologies of intelligent unmanned systems can be summarized as autonomous perception and understanding technology in complex environments, multi-scenario autonomous skill learning and intelligent control technology, multi-task cluster collaboration technology, human-computer interaction and human-computer fusion technology, decision-making planning technology and navigation and positioning technology. This section will mainly use marine unmanned systems as examples to elaborate on the key technologies of intelligent unmanned systems.
⒈ Autonomous perception and understanding technology in complex environments Autonomous perception and scene understanding of the environment in complex environments is a prerequisite for intelligent unmanned systems to operate autonomously and form combat capabilities, which will directly affect whether the mission can be successfully completed. In view of the complexity and variability of the actual environment, especially the difficulties of wind and wave interference and ship shaking in the sea environment, intelligent unmanned systems need to complete the goals of autonomous target selection perception, obtain multimodal information, and abstract and complete understanding of information. Therefore, the autonomous perception and understanding technology of the environment of intelligent unmanned systems in complex environments needs to break through the autonomous perception technology of multimodal sensor fusion, as well as the complex scene target recognition and understanding technology.
⑴ Multimodal sensor fusion autonomous perception technology At present, the information acquisition sensors carried by intelligent unmanned systems mainly include navigation radar, millimeter wave radar, laser radar, optoelectronic payload, etc. A single sensor cannot directly obtain high-precision, dense three-dimensional scene information. It is necessary to study the autonomous environmental perception technology of multi-sensor fusion to provide support for scene understanding. Multi-sensor fusion is to carry out multi-level and multi-space information complementation and optimization combination processing of various sensors, and finally produce a consistent interpretation of the observed environment. In this process, it is necessary to make full use of multi-source data for reasonable control and use, and the ultimate goal of information fusion is to derive more useful information based on the separated observation information obtained by each sensor through multi-level and multi-faceted combination of information. By taking advantage of the mutual cooperation of multiple sensors, the data of all information sources are comprehensively processed to improve the intelligence of the entire sensor system. The natural environment of the ocean is more complex than that of land and air. Faced with special challenges such as violent swaying of ships, wind and wave interference, uneven lighting, and inconspicuous targets, the marine intelligent unmanned system needs to perform multi-sensor information fusion processing on the designated target based on the unique attributes of each sensor, and then combine the electronic chart information of the internal navigation unit of the unmanned system and the shore-based support system to build a multi-dimensional three-dimensional situation map of the sea surface environment, perform tracking, detection, identification and cognition tasks for the designated target, and finally realize the autonomous perception and complete understanding of the sea surface environment by the marine intelligent unmanned system.
⑵ Complex scene target recognition and understanding technology The key to the operation autonomy of intelligent unmanned systems lies in the ability to effectively understand the scene and target information, and accurate understanding of scene information mainly includes the construction of target semantic information and the description of scene text information. Compared with land and air environments, the natural marine environment faces unique difficulties such as wind and wave interference and violent swaying of the hull, which brings challenges to the intelligent unmanned system to fully understand the environmental information and accurately identify the designated target. Using sensors such as laser radar and high-definition cameras carried by intelligent unmanned systems, the original point cloud information and image feature information of the marine environment scene can be obtained. Using three-dimensional target detection methods based on point clouds, point clouds and image fusion, and three-dimensional scene semantic segmentation methods, etc., the intelligent unmanned system can fully recognize the scene information and accurately identify the designated target. There are mainly two types of point cloud-based methods: grid-based or voxel-based methods, and point-based methods. The grid-based or voxel-based method uses voxels or bird’s-eye views to convert the irregular point cloud of the acquired sea surface into a regular representation method, and then extracts the point cloud features. The point-based method directly extracts target features from the acquired original point cloud of the sea surface. The three-dimensional target detection method based on point cloud and image fusion combines the precise coordinates of the target in the sea scene obtained by the laser radar with the environmental texture and color information provided by the sea surface image, which is more conducive to the intelligent unmanned system to accurately identify and accurately and completely understand the target of the ocean scene.
⒉ Behavior decision-making and trajectory planning technology In actual and complex war scenes, for the complex mission environment and multiple tasks faced by intelligent unmanned systems, it is necessary to break through the behavior decision-making technology in multi-source heterogeneous environments, trajectory planning technology in dynamic/static environments, and trajectory tracking technology in complex scenes.
⑴ Behavior decision-making technology in multi-source heterogeneous environments Behavior decision-making is the key to the realization of autonomous control of intelligent unmanned systems. In the complex environment of different speeds, different relative distances, and different data types of unmanned boats, it is necessary to accurately extract effective information to make safe and reliable control instructions for the next decision of the unmanned boat. First, extract representative environmental feature information and establish a sufficient number of accurately calibrated learning data sets; then, construct a decision maker based on a deep neural network and use the established database for learning; finally, use machine learning algorithms to optimize the constructed decision maker to further improve the decision accuracy. ⑵Trajectory planning technology in dynamic/static environment Trajectory change is the most basic behavior of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines. In a complex battlefield environment, planning a feasible and reliable trajectory according to different environmental conditions is the key to the intelligent driving of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines. This technology mainly includes trajectory planning technology based on polynomials, trajectory planning technology based on multi-objective constraints, and trajectory planning technology based on positive and negative trapezoidal lateral acceleration.
⑶Trajectory tracking technology in complex scenes Tracking the planned ideal trajectory is an important task for unmanned boats and unmanned submarines. The key lies in solving the problem of high-precision and high-stability control when unmanned boats or unmanned submarines track target trajectories. The main solution is: according to the kinematic and dynamic models of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines, the corresponding actuator control quantity is output to achieve real-time and accurate tracking of the specified target, and under the premise of ensuring tracking accuracy, the autonomous intelligent steering of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines and the coordinated control of multiple actuators of each drive module are realized.
⒊Autonomous navigation and positioning technology The navigation and positioning system is a key component of the intelligent unmanned system, which can provide accurate and reliable information about the speed and position of unmanned boats or unmanned submarines. The navigation system is generally composed of gyroscopes, accelerometers, satellite receivers, etc., some of which are supplemented by visual modules, or are equipped with prior spatial position maps and physical information sensors based on actual complex environmental conditions. In order to achieve accurate execution of tasks, intelligent unmanned systems must break through navigation and positioning technology based on inertial/satellite deep information fusion, navigation and positioning technology based on inertial/astronomical information fusion, navigation technology based on visual tracking, and geophysical assisted navigation technology.
⑴ Navigation and positioning technology based on inertial/satellite deep information fusion This technology introduces the inertial information of the unmanned boat into the satellite carrier/code loop, and then uses fully autonomous, short-term, and high-precision inertial information to assist the update of satellite receiver signals, thereby realizing the complementary advantages and optimal fusion of the inertial navigation and satellite navigation of the unmanned boat.
⑵ Navigation and positioning technology based on inertial/astronomical information fusion The astronomical-based navigation system has the advantages of high autonomy and low susceptibility to interference. By using the information output by astronomical navigation and the information provided by the initial position, the position of the unmanned boat can be calculated. The fusion of inertial navigation information and astronomical navigation information can improve the robustness of astronomical navigation positioning. Inertial/astronomical combined positioning technology based on astronomical navigation assistance has become a key part of the field of autonomous navigation of unmanned systems.
⑶ Navigation technology based on visual tracking Due to the complexity of the actual battlefield environment, unmanned boats will be in a complex working environment and are easily interfered by the outside world, resulting in GPS denial, which makes the navigation system unable to be in a combined state. A single inertial navigation system has low accuracy and is prone to accumulating errors. Long-term pure inertial navigation will make the unmanned boat lose the ability to perform tasks. However, the vision-based method does not have time error accumulation. It only needs to extract the key features of the image obtained by the high-definition camera to obtain the position information of the unmanned boat and the unmanned submersible through visual algorithms and prior knowledge. The vision-based navigation algorithm is not easily interfered with, has strong robustness, and can make up for the error accumulation caused by pure inertial navigation in a GPS denial environment, and is widely used.
⑷ Geophysical assisted navigation technology Due to the unique environment of the ocean, unmanned submersibles need to sail underwater for a long time, resulting in the inability to obtain real-time and accurate satellite signals and astronomical information. In addition, due to problems such as weak underwater light, vision-based navigation methods are also limited. Therefore, by obtaining a priori spatial position map inside the ocean and using the field scene information obtained by the physical sensors carried by the unmanned submersible and matching them, high-precision autonomous navigation of the unmanned submersible can be achieved. The temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of the inherent geophysical properties of the surveyed ocean can be used to produce a geophysical navigation spatial position map. By matching the physical feature information obtained by the physical property sensor carried by the unmanned submersible with the pre-carried spatial position map, the high-precision positioning of the unmanned submersible can be obtained, and the high-precision autonomous navigation of the unmanned submersible can be realized.
⒋ Multi-scenario autonomous skill learning and intelligent control technology Multi-scenario intelligent control technology is a key technology for intelligent unmanned systems to solve complex, changeable and unstable control objects. It is an effective tool for intelligent unmanned systems to adapt to complex task requirements. In a complex marine environment, if intelligent unmanned systems want to complete real-time and accurate regional monitoring, target tracking, information acquisition and precision strikes, they must break through the autonomous skill learning technology of tasks, autonomous operation interactive control technology, and unmanned system motion control technology of human-like intelligent control.
⑴ Autonomous skill learning technology of tasks Autonomous skill learning refers to the process of learning based on prior knowledge or rules to complete tasks in the process of interaction between unmanned systems and the outside world. The autonomous learning of unmanned system operation skills is essentially a partial process of simulating human learning cognition. Intelligent unmanned systems use deep reinforcement learning-based technology to combine the perception ability of deep learning with the decision-making ability of reinforcement learning, and can achieve direct control from high-latitude raw data information input to decision output in complex sea environments. The autonomous skill learning of intelligent unmanned systems mainly includes three aspects: first, describing the complex environment of the ocean surface and the interior of the ocean, and obtaining the initial state data information of the surrounding environment; second, based on the description of the intelligent unmanned system and the complex environment of the ocean surface and the interior, mathematical modeling of deep reinforcement learning is carried out to obtain key information such as the state value function and control strategy function of the autonomous skill learning process; third, using the data information obtained by the interaction between the intelligent unmanned system and the complex environment of the ocean surface and the interior, the state value function and the control strategy function are updated to enable the marine intelligent unmanned system to learn a better control strategy.
⑵ Autonomous operation interactive control technology In the process of autonomous learning and control of tasks, the intelligent unmanned system needs to contact with the ocean surface and the complex internal environment to form a good coupling system to ensure the real-time and accurate acquisition of information on the ocean surface and the complex internal environment, and correctly and quickly carry out navigation planning, autonomous navigation control and autonomous collision avoidance of unmanned boats and unmanned submersibles. The tasks of the interactive control technology of autonomous operation of intelligent unmanned systems mainly include: the design of interactive rules and control strategies of intelligent unmanned systems; modeling methods of complex environments on the surface and inside of the ocean; online modeling and correction of the dynamics of unmanned boats, unmanned submarines and operating objects; dynamic generation and shared control methods of virtual force constraints in complex environments on the surface and inside of the ocean.
⑶ Motion control technology of unmanned systems with humanoid intelligent control The motion control technology of unmanned systems with humanoid intelligent control combines artificial intelligence with traditional control methods to solve the problem of stable and precise control of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines in actual complex marine battlefield environments. It mainly includes two aspects: the design of intelligent control algorithms for unmanned systems and the design of intelligent control strategies for unmanned systems. The design of intelligent control algorithms for unmanned systems mainly includes: hierarchical information processing and decision-making mechanisms; online feature identification and feature memory; open/closed-loop control, positive/negative feedback control, and multi-modal control combining qualitative decision-making with quantitative control; the application of heuristic intuitive reasoning logic. The design of intelligent control strategies for unmanned systems is to design reasonable solutions for unmanned boats or unmanned submarines to meet actual mission requirements.
⒌ Unmanned cluster collaborative control technology In actual combat scenarios, due to the complexity of the battlefield environment and the diversity of tasks, a single unmanned boat or unmanned submarine usually cannot meet the needs of actual tasks. The number of equipment carried by a single unmanned boat or unmanned submarine is limited, and the perception perspective and regional range are not comprehensive enough, resulting in insufficient precision and thoroughness in performing complete intelligence detection, target tracking, battlefield environment perception and comprehensive firepower strike tasks. Therefore, it has become an inevitable trend for a cluster of intelligent unmanned systems composed of multiple unmanned boats and unmanned submarines to collaboratively perform tasks. To complete the control of the intelligent unmanned system cluster, it is necessary to break through the local rule control technology of the intelligent unmanned system cluster, the soft control technology of the intelligent unmanned system cluster, the pilot control technology of the intelligent unmanned system cluster, and the artificial potential field control technology of the intelligent unmanned system.
⑴ Local rule control technology of intelligent unmanned system cluster The control technology based on local rules is the basic method for intelligent unmanned systems to control unmanned boats and unmanned submarines. It mainly lies in the designation of individual local control rules within the cluster of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines. Local rule control technology has achieved intelligent control of marine unmanned system clusters to a certain extent, but a large number of experiments are needed to obtain the parameters between the behavior of marine unmanned system clusters and the cluster model, and the values of the parameters are also very sensitive. Therefore, to achieve complete intelligent control of intelligent unmanned systems, other technologies are needed.
⑵ Soft control technology of intelligent unmanned system clusters The soft control technology of intelligent unmanned system clusters is mainly based on two requirements: First, in the intelligent unmanned system cluster, the control rules between individuals are very important. For example, the control and internal function of each unmanned boat and unmanned submarine are necessary conditions for the group behavior of the entire marine intelligent unmanned system cluster; second, the intelligent unmanned system cluster adopts a local communication strategy. With the increase of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines in the cluster system, it will not affect the state of the entire intelligent unmanned system cluster.
The soft control method is to add one or more new unmanned boats or unmanned submarines without destroying the individual rules of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines in the intelligent unmanned system cluster. These unmanned boats or unmanned submarines participate in the actions of the entire intelligent unmanned system cluster according to the same local rules, but they are controllable and can receive external instructions. After receiving the command, these unmanned boats or unmanned submarines will independently complete the corresponding tasks. The soft control method of the intelligent unmanned system cluster is to add a controllable unmanned boat and unmanned submarine on the basis of the local control rules of the unmanned system, so that it can affect the entire unmanned system cluster, and finally complete the control of the entire intelligent unmanned system group.
⑶ Intelligent unmanned system cluster navigation control technology The basic content of the intelligent unmanned system cluster navigation control technology is: under the premise that the individuals of the entire marine intelligent unmanned system cluster maintain local rules, a small number of unmanned boats and unmanned submarines in the cluster have more information and stronger information processing capabilities, and interact with other unmanned boats and unmanned submarines through local information to play a leading role, so as to achieve the purpose of controlling the entire intelligent unmanned system cluster.
⑷ Artificial potential field control technology of intelligent unmanned system In the control of intelligent unmanned system clusters, control technology based only on local rules is difficult to achieve accurate and real-time perception of the battlefield, as well as the collection and acquisition of intelligence information, tracking and identification of suspicious targets, and precise strikes on enemy areas. Artificial potential field control technology introduces the concept of potential field in physics into the control of intelligent unmanned system clusters, and uses potential functions to simulate the internal and external effects that affect a single unmanned boat or unmanned submarine. The single unmanned boat or unmanned submarine in the system cluster acts under the action of the potential function, and finally realizes the control of the entire intelligent unmanned system through the potential function.
⒍Natural human-computer interaction technology In the actual battlefield environment, intelligent unmanned systems face problems such as complex operation tasks, low level of operation intelligence, high training risks and costs, and low equipment use and maintenance efficiency. In this case, it is necessary to improve the controllability and intelligence of intelligent unmanned system equipment, and it is necessary to break through the human-computer interaction technology of intelligent unmanned systems, augmented reality and mixed reality technology of intelligent unmanned systems, and brain-computer interface technology of intelligent unmanned systems.
⑴Human-computer interaction technology of intelligent unmanned systems Human-computer interaction technology of intelligent unmanned systems refers to the command platform obtaining the image and voice information of officers and soldiers through image and voice sensors, and then using algorithms such as image segmentation, edge detection, and image recognition to extract key information such as gestures and eye gestures of officers and soldiers, and then using algorithms based on deep learning to obtain the voice information of officers and soldiers and pass it to the command platform, so as to issue the officers and soldiers’ instructions to lower-level combat units. The human-computer interaction technology of intelligent unmanned systems can improve the intelligence of task operations and the fault tolerance and robustness of the operation process, so that the officers and soldiers’ instructions can be issued to combat units more stably and effectively.
⑵Augmented reality and mixed reality technology of intelligent unmanned systems Augmented reality technology of intelligent unmanned systems is to superimpose computer-generated images on real complex combat environments, and mixed reality technology of intelligent unmanned systems is to present information of virtual scenes in actual combat scenes, and set up an interactive feedback information loop between the virtual world and officers and soldiers in a real combat environment, thereby increasing the officers and soldiers’ sense of reality in the combat environment experience. As an important development direction of immersive human-computer interaction technology, virtual reality and augmented reality for intelligent unmanned systems have a variety of different real combat application scenarios, which can effectively reduce the cost and risk of training and improve the use and maintenance efficiency of equipment during combat.
⑶ Brain-computer interface technology for intelligent unmanned systems The main function of the brain-computer interface is to capture a series of brain wave signals generated by the human brain when thinking. In actual combat environments, the brain-computer interface technology of intelligent unmanned systems extracts features and classifies the brain wave signals of commanders and fighters, thereby identifying the intentions of commanders and fighters and making corresponding decisions to cope with complex combat tasks and emergencies. The brain-computer interface technology of intelligent unmanned systems can enhance the cognitive and decision-making capabilities of commanders and fighters, greatly improve brain-computer interaction and brain control technology, and give commanders and fighters the ability to control multiple unmanned boats, unmanned submarines and other unmanned combat equipment while relying on thinking.
Future development trend of intelligent unmanned systems
Due to its advantages of unmanned, autonomous, and intelligent, intelligent unmanned systems will appear in every corner of the future battlefield. As they undertake more battlefield tasks, they will participate in different war scenarios, which will lead to a number of key problems for intelligent unmanned systems, restricting their development. The key problems faced by intelligent unmanned systems are mainly:
① Highly complex environment. The specific application environment of intelligent unmanned systems will face more and more factors. The numerous shelters in unstructured environments, the limited perception viewpoints and ranges, etc., put forward higher requirements on the environmental perception ability of intelligent unmanned systems. ② High game confrontation. The battlefield game of intelligent unmanned systems is an important means to gain battlefield advantages. The fierce mobile confrontation between the two sides of the war, as well as the many interferences caused by the enemy and the battlefield environment, have put forward new challenges to the mobile decision-making ability of intelligent unmanned systems. ③ High real-time response. In the future battlefield, the combat situation will change dramatically, the combat mode will be more flexible and changeable, and it is necessary to respond to battlefield emergencies in a timely manner, which puts forward new requirements for the real-time response ability of intelligent unmanned systems. ④ Incomplete information. In the future battlefield, due to the limitations of the battlefield environment and the existence of enemy interference, the information acquisition ability of the intelligent unmanned system will be restricted, resulting in incomplete situational awareness, loss and attenuation of battlefield situation information data, and the inability to fully obtain information on both sides of the enemy. ⑤ Uncertain boundaries. The unmanned combat mode of the intelligent unmanned system has subverted the traditional combat mode. The integration of land, sea, air and space in the future unmanned combat, as well as the social public opinion brought about by the high degree of integration with society, will have an impact on the unmanned combat of the intelligent unmanned system, thus causing uncertainty in the combat boundary.
Based on the various difficulties that will be faced above, the development of intelligent unmanned systems in the future will focus on two aspects: individual capability enhancement and cluster capability enhancement. Individual capability enhancement is mainly reflected in individual cognitive intelligence, individual autonomous operation and algorithm chipization; cluster capability enhancement is mainly reflected in improving interoperability through a universal architecture, as well as cross-domain collaborative operations, network security and human-machine hybrid intelligence.
⒈ Cognitive intelligence adapts to complex task environments In order to improve the adaptability of intelligent unmanned systems in highly complex environments, it is necessary to enhance the individual cognitive intelligence of intelligent unmanned systems. The enhancement of individual cognitive intelligence is mainly reflected in the transformation from individual perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence. The comprehensive acquisition of multi-source sensor information enables intelligent unmanned systems to have human semantic understanding, associative reasoning, judgment analysis, decision planning, emotional understanding and other capabilities. The development of individual cognitive intelligence of intelligent unmanned systems will be based on brain science and bionics, and will achieve intelligent understanding and accurate application of acquired information by combining knowledge graphs, artificial intelligence, knowledge reasoning, decision intelligence and other technologies, thereby improving the high real-time response capabilities of intelligent unmanned systems to emergencies.
⒉ Autonomous operation improves the task capability of single machines In order to solve the problem of highly complex tasks faced by intelligent unmanned systems in highly complex environments, it is necessary to improve the autonomous operation capabilities of single machines. This includes developing decision-making methods based on deep reinforcement learning, autonomous environmental perception and interaction methods based on multi-source information of vision and other sensors, autonomous motion planning methods for robots based on neurodynamics, and autonomous operation methods based on artificial intelligence, so as to improve the autonomous environmental modeling and positioning capabilities, autonomous decision-making capabilities, autonomous planning capabilities and autonomous control capabilities of individuals in intelligent unmanned systems, so that intelligent unmanned systems can adapt to complex environments and carry out autonomous operation tasks.
⒊ Algorithm chipization achieves high real-time response The complex environment faced by intelligent unmanned systems places high demands on algorithms and computing power. It is necessary to be able to accelerate computing in real time to achieve high real-time response to battlefield emergencies. To solve this problem, it is necessary to improve the chipization level of individual algorithms of intelligent unmanned systems, that is, to develop a new architecture of storage and computing integrated chips to improve the computing power of chips and the level of algorithm chipization. New chips based on artificial neural technology can be studied. By changing the binary computing method of digital chips and exchanging gradient signals or weight signals, the chips can work in a simulated neuron manner, simulating the parallel computing flow of the brain to effectively process large amounts of data, and obtaining the parallel computing capabilities of supercomputers, thereby greatly improving the computing power of chips and the level of algorithm chipization, and solving the problem of high real-time response of intelligent unmanned systems.
⒋ Universal architecture improves cluster interoperability In order to improve the adaptability of intelligent unmanned systems facing highly complex environments and the maintenance and support efficiency of intelligent unmanned systems, intelligent unmanned systems will continue to develop standardized command and control frameworks in the future, improve the intelligence of human-machine collaboration, and improve the modularity of the system. It is mainly reflected in:
① Developing a general artificial intelligence framework to support autonomous, precise, and real-time good coupling and collaboration between humans and machines; ② Improving the modularity and component interchangeability of intelligent unmanned systems to support rapid maintenance and configuration upgrades of intelligent unmanned systems and their members in future battlefields; ③ Improving the level of data transmission integration and the anti-interference capability of data transmission on future battlefields to reduce the rate of data interception.
⒌ Cross-domain collaboration breaks the boundaries of cluster applications
In order to improve the adaptability of intelligent unmanned systems in highly complex environments and solve the problem of uncertain boundaries during combat, it is necessary to improve the cross-domain collaborative combat capabilities of intelligent unmanned systems to make up for the lack of capabilities in a single combat domain. Through the cross-domain collaborative combat of intelligent unmanned systems, the advantages of various components can be complemented. That is, by utilizing the advantages of large search range and long communication distance of air unmanned systems, as well as long endurance and strong stability of land unmanned systems and marine unmanned systems, the advantages of different components are combined to increase the multi-dimensional spatial information perception capabilities of intelligent unmanned systems, and form a heterogeneous multi-autonomous collaborative system, thereby improving the ability of intelligent unmanned systems to complete complex tasks.
⒍ Secure network guarantees reliable application of clusters Intelligent unmanned systems face the problems of incomplete information and high game confrontation on future battlefields. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the network security protection capabilities of intelligent unmanned systems in high confrontation environments, improve flexibility in dealing with highly complex and highly variable tasks, and improve stability in the face of high-intensity network attacks. The improvement of network security protection capabilities in adversarial environments is mainly reflected in the following aspects:
① Plan reasonable data permissions to ensure data security and flexibility of task execution; ② Improve information protection capabilities, develop and upgrade information protection products for intelligent unmanned systems, and record response decisions for information explosion situations; ③ Increase the network’s deep defense capabilities, unify network security standards and levels, build network defense autonomy, and improve the network’s ability to resist attacks under network attacks.
⒎ Human-machine hybrid intelligence improves adversarial capabilities In order to solve the problem of high real-time response faced on future battlefields and improve the adaptability of intelligent unmanned systems in highly complex environments, it is necessary to combine the advantages of humans and machines to form a new hybrid intelligent mode of human-machine collaboration, that is, to develop human-machine hybrid intelligence for intelligent unmanned systems. Human-machine hybrid intelligence of intelligent unmanned systems is a new intelligent scientific system that combines physics and biology in which human, machine, and environmental systems interact. In response to the problems of high-complexity environments and high real-time responses faced by intelligent unmanned systems on future battlefields, the development of human-machine hybrid intelligence in the future is mainly reflected in the following aspects: ① Information intelligence input. At the input end of information acquisition, the information data objectively collected by the sensors of the unmanned system equipment is combined with the subjective perception information of the combat commanders to form a multi-dimensional information acquisition and information input method. ② Intelligent information fusion. After obtaining multi-dimensional data information, a new data understanding method is constructed by integrating the computer’s calculation data with the information cognition of the combat commanders. ③ Intelligent information output. After the data information is fused and processed, the computer’s calculation results are matched with the value decisions of the combat commanders to form an organically combined probabilistic and regularized optimization judgment.
IV. Conclusion Due to its autonomy, intelligence and unmanned characteristics, intelligent unmanned systems will play an increasingly important role in the future battlefield. The development of intelligent unmanned systems will also drive the development of intelligent computing, intelligent transportation, intelligent manufacturing, smart medical care, brain-like science and other disciplines. In the future, we should be guided by the mission requirements of actual complex battlefield environments, combine advanced technologies in cutting-edge disciplines such as artificial intelligence, and make overall top-level planning for intelligent unmanned systems; verify reliable airborne intelligent perception and intelligent computing equipment on different unmanned system combat platforms in land, air and marine unmanned systems, and develop reliable and stable key technologies such as unmanned system autonomous control, intelligent perception, intelligent decision-making and intelligent interaction, overcome the key difficulties of intelligent unmanned systems, and continuously improve the autonomous control, intelligent perception and intelligent decision-making capabilities of intelligent unmanned systems.
China Military Network Ministry of National Defense Network
Friday , August 13, 2021
Since the 21st century, global scientific and technological innovation has entered an unprecedented period of intensive activity. A new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is reshaping the global innovation landscape and reshaping the global economic structure. Some people therefore call the current era the era of “deep technology”.
The military field is the most sensitive to technological change. At present, some major disruptive technologies are constantly emerging, showing a trend of cross-integration and group leaps. Their military applications will bring about sudden and revolutionary consequences, and even bring about a new form of war.
Artificial Intelligence: Opening the Door to Intelligent Warfare
Artificial intelligence was born in 1956. Its essence is to simulate the human thinking process, that is, to make machines understand, think and learn like humans, form experience, and generate a series of corresponding judgments and processing methods. In the past 10 years, with the continuous development of new theories and technologies such as big data, neural networks, and deep learning, artificial intelligence has pressed the fast-forward button and started to develop rapidly, bringing fundamental changes to all areas of human society.
In 2016, the artificial intelligence program AlphaGo defeated the world Go champion Lee Sedol. By 2020, the latest algorithmic programs can teach themselves to play Go, chess and other games without even being told the rules of the game.
As a strategic technology leading a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, the application of artificial intelligence in the military field has accelerated the transformation of warfare from informationization to intelligence. This transformation will be full-dimensional and full-spectrum, involving almost all links in the military chain. The most prominent impacts basically include the following aspects:
——Assisting unmanned combat. The rapid development of artificial intelligence will greatly enhance the collaborative and autonomous combat capabilities of various unmanned combat systems. This will undoubtedly promote structural changes in the composition of combat forces, and unmanned combat mode will gradually become the “main theme” of war. In a simulated confrontation in August 2020, an intelligent system funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency controlled a fighter jet and defeated experienced air force pilots. The trend of unmanned combat seems to be increasingly unstoppable.
——Reshape command and control. Complex adaptive systems supported by artificial intelligence, such as swarm systems, will have increasingly strong self-organizing capabilities, thereby breaking the traditional strict hierarchical command system and incubating a new command and control model. The action control of a swarm composed of thousands of unmanned systems will be completed by an intelligent and efficient algorithm system, which can achieve a high degree of decentralization and dynamic aggregation, demonstrating a new concept of group intelligent combat.
——Achieve intelligent decision-making. That is, generate intelligent evaluation and auxiliary decision-making capabilities, realize automatic generation, dynamic optimization, and real-time adjustment of combat plans, and enable combat planning to flexibly adapt to changes in the mission environment and battlefield uncertainties. At present, the new generation of artificial intelligence technology is in a stage of vigorous development, and new technologies will continue to emerge.
Quantum technology: writing the winning code in “entanglement”
Quantum is the smallest, indivisible unit of energy. The biggest feature of quantum technology is that it can break through the physical limits of existing information technology, play a huge role in information processing speed, information capacity, information security, information detection accuracy, etc., and thus significantly improve human ability to obtain, transmit and process information, providing strong impetus for the evolution and development of the future information society.
Quantum theory has gone through more than a hundred years of development since its birth. The development of quantum technology has directly given rise to modern information technology. Nuclear energy, semiconductor transistors, lasers, nuclear magnetic resonance, high-temperature superconducting materials, etc. have come into being, changing human production and life. In recent years, the continuous combination of quantum mechanics and information technology will usher in a new quantum technology revolution, impacting the traditional technology system and even causing the reconstruction of the traditional technology system.
Compared with the macroscopic physical world, quantum has many wonderful properties, the most representative of which are quantum superposition and quantum entanglement. Quantum superposition means that a quantum can be in different states at the same time, and can be in a superposition of these states. A vivid metaphor is the cat in a state of “both dead and alive” imagined by physicist Schrödinger. Quantum entanglement means that independent particles can be completely “entangled” together. No matter how far apart they are, when the state of one quantum changes, the other will change accordingly like “telepathy”.
These special properties of quantum contain great military potential. In quantum detection, quantum communication, quantum imaging, quantum computing, etc., they are gradually showing great military application value. For example, by taking advantage of the characteristics of quantum state superposition and the inability to accurately copy unknown quantum states, quantum codes that cannot be deciphered can be developed.
In addition, based on the characteristics of quantum entanglement, the high correlation between two microscopic particles with a common source can be utilized, and entangled photons can be used as light sources to achieve quantum imaging, which can greatly improve the resolution and anti-interference ability of imaging.
Gene technology: a new weapon that can be “edited”
Genes are the genetic information that controls various characteristics of organisms and are known as the “master switch” of various life activities of organisms. Gene editing is equivalent to a pair of “gene scissors”, which can accurately achieve gene “modification” such as insertion, removal, and replacement of specific target genes of organisms, thereby achieving control over the genetic information of organisms.
In 2012, researchers from the United States and Sweden found a very effective pair of “gene scissors”, namely the CRISPR/Cas9 system, which can cut any genome at any desired location. Since then, the development of gene editing technology has achieved unprecedented “acceleration”, realizing gene editing of fruit flies, mice, pigs, sheep, rice, wheat and other organisms, and also providing new medical means for treating diseases such as tumors, AIDS, and thalassemia.
While genetic technology is gradually unlocking the mysteries of life, it will also cause unpredictable military security issues. If gene editing is used in the development of biological weapons, it means that developers can modify genes to obtain new pathogenic microorganisms according to their own needs, or implant biological gene fragments with different characteristics and transform existing biological warfare agents, or even artificially design and synthesize new viruses that do not exist in nature. These may produce new biological weapons that humans cannot prevent and control, and even use the precision of genetic technology to make attacks more targeted. This new coronavirus epidemic has made the world suspicious of Fort Detrick and more than 200 American overseas biological experimental bases. The United States should disclose more facts and give an explanation to the international community.
Brain science: heading towards the battlefield of “brain control”
The human brain is a highly complex information processing system that consists of billions of neurons that communicate with each other and complete a variety of cognitive tasks in an overall coordinated manner.
The brain’s complex neural information processing and cognition are so complex that even supercomputers pale in comparison. Therefore, brain science research is regarded as the “ultimate frontier” of natural science research, and the International Brain Research Organization believes that the 21st century is the “era of brain science.”
In recent years, major countries in the world have announced the launch of brain science research programs. With the emergence of new imaging technologies, convergence technologies, and computing and information communication technology platforms, brain science research has made new breakthroughs in the fields of neural circuits, brain-like intelligence, and brain-computer interfaces.
As a branch of cognitive science, the “brain-computer interface” technology was born in the 1970s. It collects the EEG signals generated by the activity of the cerebral cortex nervous system, and converts them into signals that can be recognized by computers through methods such as amplification and filtering, so that external devices can read the brain’s neural signals, identify people’s true intentions, and achieve effective control of external physical devices. In other words, a certain operation is performed by the human brain without the need to complete it through the body.
As a new type of human-computer interaction, brain-computer interface technology provides a new intelligent development direction for the control of weapons and equipment. Realizing the direct control of weapons and equipment by the human brain and giving them the intelligent features of “moving at will” are becoming the goals pursued by Western military powers. In 2013, the US Department of Defense disclosed a research project called “Avatar”, which plans to control remote “machine warriors” through thoughts in the future to replace soldiers in the battlefield and carry out various combat tasks.
If the above research is regarded as “brain control”, then the use of “brain-computer interface” and other technical means to interfere with, destroy or even control people’s neural activities and thinking abilities is the so-called “brain control”. For example, electromagnetic waves and sound waves are used to affect the normal activities of human brain cells, and even suggestions and commands are directly “projected” into the human brain. In March 2018, a Western country proposed the “Next Generation Non-Invasive Neurotechnology (N3)” plan to develop a new generation of non-invasive two-way brain-computer interfaces to further improve the high-level interaction capabilities of soldiers and weapons and equipment.
In the future, the rapid development of brain science will give rise to a new cognitive domain combat model centered on the brain, and “brain control” will also become a new battlefield for the competition in the cognitive domain.
At present, a new round of scientific and technological revolution and military revolution is in a “qualitative change period”. Science and technology have never had such a profound impact on national security and military strategy as today. In the face of the rapid development of science and technology, we must vigorously enhance our scientific and technological cognition and acumen, strive to seize the commanding heights of science and technology, seek military competitive advantages, and seize the initiative in future wars.
Professor Liu Yangyue from the College of Arts and Sciences at the National University of Defense Technology
●To understand the laws of intelligent warfare, we must grasp the foundation of intelligence and autonomy, the key of building a war knowledge and action system, and the essence of the changes in the connotation of war power.
●War leaders must examine intelligent warfare dynamically, keenly capture the new elements spawned by intelligent warfare, correctly analyze the changes in the relationship between the new elements, and constantly re-understand intelligent warfare.
President Xi pointed out that we should seriously study the military, war, and how to fight, and grasp the laws of modern warfare and the laws governing war. Today, the intelligent characteristics of war are becoming increasingly prominent, and intelligent warfare has already shown its early form. In order to seize the initiative in future intelligent warfare, we should actively follow the development of modern warfare, keep close to the actual military struggle preparations, proactively understand the laws of intelligent warfare, deeply grasp its guiding laws, focus on answering questions such as “what is it” and “how to do it”, and constantly innovate war and strategic guidance.
Answering the question “What is it?” and understanding the laws of intelligent warfare
Comrade Mao Zedong pointed out: “The laws of war are a problem that anyone who directs a war must study and must solve.” Today, as intelligent warfare begins to emerge, we should proactively understand “what” intelligent warfare is. Otherwise, we will not be able to solve “how to do it,” let alone control future wars.
The laws of intelligent warfare are the reconstruction of the war knowledge and action system. The laws of intelligent warfare, like the laws of cold weapon warfare, hot weapon warfare, mechanized warfare, and information warfare, are the inherent and essential connections between the elements of war. The difference is that it has new elements and new modes of composition between elements. It is essentially the reconstruction of the war knowledge and action system caused by the intelligent revolution. Today, to understand the laws of intelligent warfare, we must grasp the foundation of intelligence and autonomy, grasp the key to building a war knowledge and action system, and grasp the essence of the change in the connotation of war power. Mastering these laws can overcome the chaos and uncertainty in future wars and find order and certainty from them. This is the objective requirement for dealing with intelligent warfare.
The laws of intelligent warfare are the basis of the laws of war guidance. In “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War”, Mao Zedong first analyzed the characteristics of China’s revolutionary war and revealed the laws of war, and then “derived our strategies and tactics from this”, that is, the laws of war guidance; in “On Protracted War”, he first explained “what it is”, and then turned to the question of “how to do it”, reflecting a logical order of the cognitive process. Today, the study of intelligent warfare should still follow this order, and neither put the cart before the horse, nor reverse the order; nor add, reduce or replace links. On the basis of mastering the fundamental law of intelligent autonomy, we must reveal the laws of war guidance such as autonomous perception, autonomous planning, autonomous implementation, autonomous linkage, and autonomous evaluation.
If you don’t understand the laws of intelligent warfare, you can’t guide the war. “Sun Bin’s Art of War” points out: “Know, win” and “Don’t know, don’t win.” Tao is the law of war. If you master it and act in accordance with it, you can win; otherwise, you will lose. Mao Zedong also emphasized: “If you don’t know the laws of war, you don’t know how to guide the war, and you can’t win the war.” Similarly, mastering the laws of intelligent warfare is the premise for correctly guiding intelligent warfare. Otherwise, it is inevitable to be confused by the superficial phenomena of intelligent warfare. Today, we need to analyze the basic, long-term and subversive impact of intelligent technology groups on war, and study what intelligent warfare looks like? What are the laws? How should it be fought? These are all major issues that must be answered in the guidance of intelligent warfare.
Solve the “how to do it” problem and reveal the guiding principles of intelligent warfare
The guiding laws of intelligent warfare are the medium for guiding practice by using the laws of intelligent warfare, playing the role of “bridge” and “boat”. We should solve the problem of “how to do it” on the basis of answering “what is it” and propose the “swimming skills” of intelligent warfare.
The guiding laws of intelligent warfare are the laws of applying the laws of war. The purpose of understanding the laws of war is to apply them. Marx pointed out: “Philosophers only interpret the world in different ways, but the problem is to change the world.” Similarly, intelligent warfare itself forces commanders to discover the laws. Once discovered, they will combine initiative and use the laws to serve winning the war, which will inevitably lead to the emergence of guiding laws for intelligent warfare. Today, war is the continuation of politics, which is still the law of intelligent warfare. From this, it can be concluded that intelligent warfare must obey the guiding laws that serve politics; soldiers and civilians are the basis of victory, which is still the law of intelligent warfare. From this, it can be concluded that the guiding laws of mobilizing the people in the broadest possible way are derived, and so on. These guiding laws for intelligent warfare are derived from the laws of war and are “swimming skills in the sea of intelligent warfare.”
Give full play to the active role of people in intelligent warfare. Engels said: “It is people, not guns, who win the battle.” The guiding laws of intelligent warfare are the laws of practice and use. It is not a simple “transfer” or “copying” of the laws of intelligent warfare, but it can be transformed into the guiding laws of war with the addition of people’s subjective initiative. Today, military talents who master artificial intelligence are not only the operators of intelligent weapons, but also the creators of artificial intelligence. People still occupy a dominant position in the intelligent human-machine system and are the decisive factor in the victory or defeat of intelligent warfare. Commanders should give full play to their initiative on the basis of mastering the laws of intelligent warfare and adhere to the “technology + strategy” combat theory generation model, so as to change from answering “what is” to solving “how to do”.
The laws governing intelligent warfare are constantly evolving. War is a “chameleon”. Intelligent warfare itself will also go through different stages such as germination, development, and maturity, which will inevitably lead to the development of laws governing intelligent warfare. War leaders must dynamically examine intelligent warfare, keenly capture the new elements of intelligent warfare, correctly analyze the changes in the relationship between the new elements, and constantly re-recognize intelligent warfare. We must keep up with the historical process of the accelerated advancement of war forms towards intelligence, grasp the direction of development of intelligent warfare and the pulse of the times, push the research on the laws governing intelligent warfare to a new level, and seize strategic initiative and opportunities on future battlefields.
Keep a close eye on the “initiative” and continue to innovate intelligent warfare and strategic guidance
As the military is ever-changing, water is ever-changing. As intelligent warfare has already arrived, we must follow the laws and guidance of intelligent warfare, keep close to the actual military struggle preparations, strengthen research on opponents and enemy situations, take the initiative to design “when”, “where” and “who to fight”, innovate war and strategic guidance, and firmly grasp the strategic initiative of future wars.
You fight yours, I fight mine. The highest realm of the art of war guidance is that you fight yours, I fight mine. “Each fights his own” requires commanders to use their own forces independently and autonomously in future intelligent wars, no matter how complex and difficult the environment is. In particular, enemies with high-tech equipment may cause a temporary local situation where the enemy is active and we are passive. At this time, we must use comprehensive means such as politics, economy, and diplomacy to make up for the disadvantages in weapons with an overall favorable situation, quickly reverse this situation, and restore the active position. If you are led by the nose by your strategic opponent, you may suffer a great loss.
Seize the opportunity and use the troops according to the time. The Six Secret Teachings pointed out: “The use depends on the opportunity.” Jomini emphasized: “The whole art of war lies in being good at waiting for the opportunity to act.” On the one hand, if the time is not right, do not force it. Be cautious about the opportunity, and have great patience before the opportunity comes to prevent strategic blind action. On the other hand, the time will not come again, so don’t miss the opportunity. Be good at seizing the opportunity, and once you encounter a favorable opportunity, you must resolutely use it and avoid being timid. It should be pointed out that we should look at the issue of the maturity of the opportunity dialectically. The future intelligent war is changing rapidly, requiring quick decision-making, but in the face of uncertain factors, we must make careful decisions. Sometimes making a decision early may be more effective than making a more perfect decision tomorrow. Therefore, we must dare to take a little risk, otherwise we will sit back and watch the loss of the opportunity for success.
Different domains are different, and operations are based on the local conditions. Clausewitz pointed out: “War is not like a field full of crops, but like a field full of trees. When harvesting crops, you don’t need to consider the shape of each crop, and the quality of the harvest depends on the quality of the sickle; when chopping down trees with an axe, you must pay attention to the shape and direction of each tree.” Different strategic spaces lead to different wars, and war guidance is also different. At present, the battlefield space is constantly expanding from traditional spaces such as land, sea and air to new spaces such as space and the Internet. War leaders should explore new intelligent war laws and guidance laws based on the characteristics of multi-domain, three-dimensional, and networked.
Aim at the opponent and win by taking advantage of the enemy. The Art of War by Sun Tzu states: “Follow the enemy and decide the battle.” Jomini also said: “No matter who you are, if you don’t understand the enemy, how can you know how to act?” Looking to the future, smart strategists should classify combat targets into primary combat targets and general combat targets, actual combat targets and potential combat targets according to their importance and urgency, and comprehensively and objectively understand the strategic intentions, force deployment, combat concepts, etc. of different combat targets, propose new intelligent war guidance laws that can give full play to the advantages of their own combat power, and implement correct war actions.
In short, the laws of intelligent warfare are the laws of the cognitive process, solving the problem of “what”; the guiding laws are the laws of the practical process, solving the problem of “how”. The two are dialectically unified and inseparable, forming a complete chain of understanding and guiding intelligent warfare. “Victory is not repeated, but should be formed in infinity.” Today, war and strategic leaders should, based on objective conditions, deeply explore and flexibly apply the laws of intelligent warfare and the laws of war guidance, and innovate war and strategic guidance in line with the times.
(Author’s unit: Academy of Military Science, Institute of War Studies)
Source: Liberation Army DailyAuthor: Hao Jingdong Niu Yujun Duan FeiyiEditor-in-charge: Wang Feng2021-03-16 10:12
