China’s navy reveals future air warfare plans

An internal Chinese military report has revealed that the People’s Liberation Army is placing a heavy emphasis on waging advanced air war using stealth, drones and high-technology weapons.

The report, “How Will the Form of Air Warfare Change in the Future?” was published in September in the Liberation Army News, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission.

It was translated by the U.S. Air Force think tank China Aerospace Studies Institute, which described the report as having “the imprimatur of orthodoxy.”

The Chinese report was written by Chai Shan, a military author who has previously written about PLA air power control.

“The future form of air warfare is ultimately and inevitably intelligentized aerial combat,” the report stated.

It asserted that combat weapons and equipment will form system clusters leading with “intelligentized” uncrewed combat systems that use independent, self-adaptable, and self-coordinating system-of-systems operations under the control of artificial intelligence decision-making and management systems.

The report also said future air warfare for the PLA will evolve toward uncrewed weapons platforms, autonomous weapons platforms, distributed operations, and swarms, aerial combat will employ crewed aircraft backed by drone formations that will provide sensors and enhance manned warplane weapons.

China’s forces already are moving toward the goal of “distributed aerial combat with stealth, hypersonic [propulsion], and beyond-visual-range attacks as the primary means,” the report said.

“Stealth aircraft carrying long-range, air-launched stealth missiles and hypersonic missiles will become operational endpoints within an aerospace system-of-systems network, where they will disperse and deploy across a broad area, widely participating in each operational stage of reconnoiter, search, strike, and assess [akin to ’find, fix, finish, and assess’], and with the support of integrated aerospace sensing systems, they will execute long-range strikes against the enemy from outside visual range.”

Current development of the PLA new form of air warfare is “fast and ferocious,” the report said.

A key to air warfare will be the combining of both physical and information domains to produce a hybrid of conventional and cognitive power to attack enemies.

“Aerial combat actions with ’striking vital points’ firepower warfare and ’pretending to be foolish while smart’ information warfare as primary characteristics, as well as air warfare system of systems, by executing ‘hard kills’ against the enemy’s key smart weapons and equipment as well as ’soft kills’ by methods such as deep fakes, algorithmic fog, virus infections, etc., will make the enemy’s cognitive environment complex, ultimately causing the cognitive collapse and degradation of the enemy’s air warfare system of systems,” the report said.

It went on to assert that the PLA is developing these types of air warfare capabilities with hypersonic munitions, advanced battle management systems and other high technology that are “rapidly developing” along with new types of warfare, which the report described as “decision-centric warfare,” “mosaic warfare,” and “algorithmic warfare.”

“In the not-too-distant future, they could appear on the battlefield,” the report said.