🎖️ China claims AI-powered electronic warfare breakthrough (1 Viewer)

[Beijingwalker]

China claims AI-powered electronic warfare breakthrough​

Device reputedly capable of real-time monitoring and analysis of wider electromagnetic spectrum, key for decoding enemy signals and making battlefields transparent

By GABRIEL HONRADA
FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Chinese scientists claim to have developed an advanced military surveillance device that could significantly enhance China’s electronic warfare capabilities, a high-tech realm where future conflicts will increasingly be fought and potentially decided, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.

The device is small in size, high in performance and low in power consumption, the SCMP report said. It will allow the Chinese military to detect and lock on to enemy signals at unprecedented speeds, decode their physical parameters almost instantly and effectively suppress them while ensuring the smooth flow of their communications, the report said.


The technology was previously considered a pipe dream due to the enormous amount of data to be processed in the heat of combat. However, Yang Kai, a professor from the School of Information and Electronics at the Beijing Institute of Technology and lead scientist on the project, gave SCMP a glimpse into the strides his team has reportedly made in the area.

The real-time analysis bandwidth of traditional spectrum monitoring systems is generally restricted to a range of 40-160 MHz. However, the new Chinese equipment has supposedly extended the frequency range into the gigahertz zone, covering the frequency range used by amateur radio enthusiasts and even Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.

This improvement in covered range means that even if the US military suddenly switched to civilian frequencies and emitted a pulse signal in a short period, it could still be captured and analyzed by the Chinese military, the SCMP report says.

Yang’s team says it introduced artificial intelligence (AI) into the most critical data analysis process, enabling the Chinese military to achieve unprecedented information perception capabilities at a lower cost. The scientists were quoted by SCMP as saying the device will cause “a profound shift in the art of war.”

The development may have been motivated by the emergence of “transparent battlefields” in the Ukraine war, with both sides having near-omniscient knowledge of each other’s positions and movements, which has contributed largely to the ongoing stalemate and attrition.

In a November 2023 essay for The Economist, former Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhnyi succinctly describes the transparent battlefield, saying that modern sensors can identify any concentration of forces and modern weapons can destroy it.

“The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock, we need something new, like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other,” Zaluzhnyi wrote.

Elaborating on that insight, Brennan Deveraux and John Thomas Pelter IV mention in a January 2023 Real Clear Defense article that in a transparent battlefield, the proliferation of long-range precision munitions and improvements in man-portable munitions such as first-person-view (FPV) drones and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM) should force a rethink of current US Army doctrine emphasizing combined arms and maneuver warfare.

Deveraux and Pelter note that a transparent battlefield will expose armor formations to long-range precision fire and deny sanctuary for refueling and resupply, with the democratization of intelligence from assets to technology dramatically improving tactical and strategic-level targeting.

They also say that the proliferation of precision-guided munitions means belligerents can destroy high-value targets with relative ease. They mention potent man-portable systems such as FPV drones and ATGMs can allow small, dispersed infantry forces to mass effects against convoys, bulk fuel areas and other critical targets essential for mechanized warfare.

A transparent battlefield also provides new targeting techniques on the battlefield, exploiting modern militaries’ dependence on electronic communications and dual-use civilian technology.

In January 2023, Sky News reported that both Russia and Ukraine have used mobile networks to target each other’s forces, describing the use of mobile phones on the battlefield as the digital equivalent of carelessly lighting a cigarette at night.

Sky News notes that both sides have been using cell-site simulators to trick mobile phones into measuring the strength of cell sites around the area, which allows their exact location to be triangulated and targeted for artillery strikes.

The source also says that a mobile phone’s exact location on the battlefield can be determined by accessing its internal GPS and other methods, which are often closely guarded military secrets.

Given those advancements, the US military is also preparing to fight on a transparent battlefield, adopting its doctrines, tactics, techniques and procedures.

In a November 2022 article for National Defense Magazine, Stew Magnusson says that the US Army is training to fight on a transparent, congested, degraded or area-denied battlefield. Magnusson mentions that in a transparent battlefield, the US Army must operate in an era of persistent overhead surveillance from satellites or drones.

He states that transparency is a two-way street, with the US using electronic warfare to find, fix and destroy enemy forces. In training to fight in a congested, degraded, or area-denied battlefield, Magnusson states that the US Army is practicing how to “drop down” to analog or alternative navigation or timing systems when GPS is denied.

Transparent battlefields raise new questions about whether the element of surprise is still relevant at the strategic level and, if so, how it could be achieved.

In the 1993 book “The Science of War: Back to the First Principles”, Brian Holden Reid writes that while new technologies may have made it more challenging to achieve surprise on the transparent battlefield, it remains a critical element of military operations.

Reid says that surprise could be achieved by the unexpected use of new technologies and innovative battlefield doctrines, noting that technology could be the source of surprise. He notes that achieving absolute surprise on a transparent battlefield is unnecessary, mentioning that a “bolt from the blue” situation is rare.

Instead, he points out that surprise is achieved by a failure to process rather than sense information, with cognitive dissonance, misconceptions about enemy capabilities, confirmation bias, indecision and technological overconfidence being vulnerabilities.