The Path to China’s Intelligentized Warfare: Converging on the Metaverse Battlefield
By Josh Baughman
| December 19, 2024
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) modernization strategy follows three overlapping phases: mechanization, informatization, and intelligentization. Mechanization, aimed to be broadly completed by 2020, focused on incorporating advanced machinery, vehicles, and equipment. The informatization phase introduced networks, information systems, and data to all aspects of military operations, including command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and cyber operations. Since 2019, while still pursuing the aims of informatization, intelligentization endeavors to incorporate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum, big data, virtual and augmented reality, cloud computing, autonomous systems, and the internet of things (IoT). Recent PLA writings describe the culmination of intelligentization as leading to "Metaverse War" or Meta-War. In this vision, the metaverse becomes central not only to China's broader societal transformation under “Digital China” (the world’s first digital grand strategy)—which aims at “winning the future”—but also a defining feature of future warfare. PLA literature has extensively explored building a military metaverse, or “battleverse,” and is now focused not only on how metaverse wars will be fought, but also how they will be won spanning both near- and long-term time horizons.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE