These scenarios form the basis of what a significant new Army intelligence report describes as emerging Chinese Concepts of Operation regarding long-range precision attack . This Chinese tactic, or ambition, is identified in a detailed Army Training and Doctrine Command G2 intelligence assessment referring to what it calls China’s “intelligentized C2 and ISR structure.”
“The PLA is exploring longer-range precision strike systems enabled by a robust, informatized (current) to intelligentized (future) C2 and ISR structure that enhance their anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities. These are tenants of the PLA’s core operational concept known as Multi-Domain Precision Warfare (MDPW),” TRADOC G2 told Warrior, referring to its published report … The Operational Environment 2024-2034 Large-Scale Combat Operations.” (US Army Training and Doctrine Command, G2),
The G2 report, which includes a published analysis of current and anticipated future wars, closely examines technological trends and innovations to best characterize the expected “operational” warfare environment in the coming 10 years. The text of the report explains this Chinese strategy as “Multi-Domain Precision Warfare. (MDPW). When asked by Warrior about discussions of China’s growing ambition to improve “ultra-long-range precision-strike” as explained in the intelligence report, TRADOC G2 further explained China’s apparent technological intent and concept of operation.
“MDPW is intended to leverage a C4ISR network that incorporates advances in big data and artificial intelligence to rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities,” TRADOC G2 told Warrior in a written statement.
This seems quite significant in a number of respects pertaining to long-range attack, operationalized AI and multi-domain networking. Perhaps most of all, China’s “intelligentized” MDPW appears like somewhat of a copycat effort to replicate the Pentagon’s now-being-implemented Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort, yet with an arguably more aggressive concept of leveraging AI for offensive, lethal attacks with long-range projectiles.
The main difference between China’s MDPW and DoD’s JADC2 seems to relate to ethics, target-strike-accuracy and concepts of operation.
The Pentagon and military services are already using AI to network critical information across domains for targeting, yet the exercise of lethal attack requires human command and control. Through its Project Convergence experiment, for example, the Army has shown an ability to operationalize AI to shorten sensor-to-shooter attack windows from 20 minutes … down to a matter of seconds.
