21 November 2018

The future of war Robots, drone swarms, lasers, hypersonic missiles . . . The US military is in a race to devise the next generation of weaponry before China beats America to it

By Katrina Mason. Photographs by Jason Koxvold

Above: Lockheed Martin test pilot Billie Flynn in an F-35 simulator at the company’s in HQ Arlington, Virginia

Below: President Xi Jinping, dresssed in military fatigues, reviews the Chinese naval fleet in the South China Sea this year

Couscous might not be the most obvious harbinger of World War III. But in the corner of a spartan army warehouse on the coast of Maryland, I find myself eyeballing a pallet of 48 boxes of the foodstuff more usually associated with peacenik vegans.

Jason Pusey, a mechanical engineer, thinks these dry particles, when shot through with air, will fluff up enough to approximate the conditions of water without electrocuting him in the process. That will help him in his quest to develop the perfect set of gaits for his military robot. “I’m trying to develop the fundamental technologies, transitioning between walking to trotting to galloping to maybe bounding or to jumping,” he says. “What if I want to run through water? When a lifeguard runs out into the water, he high-steps.”

The autonomous military vehicles of the future — whether tanks, robots or drones — may have legs rather than tracks or wheels. Besides humans on the beach, Pusey avidly watches nature documentaries to help translate the speed of a cheetah, the energetic burst of a greyhound or the dexterity of a jumping lemur to one single, extraordinarily capable robot. “Our legs are very intelligent things,” he tells me.

I am in the depths of Aberdeen Proving Ground, which is home to a sprawling high-security army research base dedicated to reshaping the military 50 years into the future. “Making today’s army and the next army obsolete,” goes its tagline. Created as a bomb-testing site in the first world war, it became a hub for biochemical weapons in the 1990s. Today it hosts the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the sole US location for emerging tactical offensive warfare in cyber and electronics.

This is ground zero for the weaponry of World War III, a war that — if it happens — many believe will be fought by robots. At research centres such as this one, the US military machine is developing futuristic weapons to rival even the most adventurous inventions of sci-fi writers. The advance of artificial intelligence brings with it the prospect of robot-soldiers battling alongside humans — and one day eclipsing them altogether.

Other weapons under development in the US include hypersonics — missiles that travel at five times the speed of sound. Then there are electronic weapons such as the railgun, which will fire bullets with an electromagnetic force that far exceeds conventional firepower, and directed energy weapons such as lasers that travel at the speed of light and could one day zap missiles, drones, aircraft and satellites silently from a distance. “You [could] kill multiple inbound missiles with a single laser,” says Trey Obering, former head of the Missile Defense Agency, who as a boy watched films about aliens with lasers for eyes. “The speed of warfare would be blinding.”

The war of the future will look completely different to conventional ideas of battle. Jammers could block satellites that militaries depend on for intelligence and navigation. Cyber warfare could target electricity grids, water networks, financial systems, hospitals and the families of military commanders. As attacks on infrastructure become more likely, scientists hope that quantum computing will offer the best chance of defence; in the nearer term, quantum navigation could relieve militaries of reliance on GPS satellites and space.

More than 20,000 people are based at the Aberdeen Proving Ground’s 72,000-acre complex. It is an incongruous spot for warfare, with children’s playgrounds, leisure boats and tree-lined boulevards beside the Chesapeake Bay. But with names such as Tank Street, Radar Road and Combat Drive, it is also unmistakably the martial face of research.

One team is testing precisely how a bullet bursts through material. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game: each time the enemy makes a better bullet, we have to make better protection,” says physicist Michael Zellner. Another is immersed in developing a mechanical frame to give soldiers a “third arm” — the world’s only known exoskeleton research project aimed at the upper body. Zachary Wingard, the mechanical engineer who co-conceived the contraption, tells me the aim is to offset the recoil and weight of tomorrow’s higher-performance weapons.

Meanwhile, in a bomb cave never before entered by journalists, scientists are testing the next generation of explosive materials. Reminiscent of an air-raid shelter, the cave has thick metal walls pitted with the marks of repeated attacks as researchers painstakingly record and assess data on potential compounds.

Back in Pusey’s warehouse, a baby robot known as the Minitaur scuttles across the floor, bending its mechanised knees with a determined stamp that evokes insect, dog and horror movie all at once. The Minitaur’s offspring may one day scout out dangerous combat zones, deploy bombs or fire weapons. Researchers here are working to deliver an autonomous system that relies on artificial intelligence so that dextrous and capable robots can execute orders based on commands from soldiers in the field. “When we really have legged, intelligent machines operating on the battlefield, that will be a serious step . . . You can use your imagination as to what a pack of these things can do to an enemy tank,” says Alexander Kott, chief scientist at ARL. Kott, who has studied artificial intelligence for more than 30 years, says we are watching a new generation of intelligence unfold. “Robots probably will fight robots, absolutely, there’s no question about it.”

Couscous, it turns out, is playing a role in a rapidly accelerating technological arms race that will change the way wars are fought for ever. And it is a prospect that is bringing China and the US head to head.

Predictions of a third world war have been around since the conclusion of the second. In today’s imaginings, the chief enemy is China, and the US is on the back foot. Peter Singer’s 2015 novel Ghost Fleet, co-written with August Cole, envisages a war in which China strikes early, disabling sophisticated US communications in space and forcing America to rely on a near-defunct fleet of ships, while China relies on a “central nerve cell” of hackers.

Defence officials seized on the book’s central message. The authors have briefed military chiefs, the White House and special operations. Singer has seen many of his predictions come true. “August and I often have a ‘Ghost Fleet’ moment of the day — when something in the real world happens from the novel,” he says. “They’re coming pretty fast and furious now from the technological aspect.”

Over whisky at a bar near the Pentagon, a senior national security official tells me that the US has wasted years on wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. “We’ve been occupied by fighting low-tech conflict against people who lob rockets out the back of trucks, and all along China has got savvy and crept up on us. That’s now our focus.”

Above: An advanced combat helmet is placed in a 3D X-ray device at the US Army Research Lab before being subjected to rifle fire to test for improvements

Right: The Minitaur, part of a project under way at the US Army Research Lab to create robots capable of carrying out battlefield tasks

Below: Zachary Wingard, an engineer at the US Army Research Lab, demonstates the prototype of the ‘third arm’ load-bearing exoskeleton, which aims to help soliders carry and fire heavy weapons for extended periods

Defence officials say China deliberately studied the US approach to conflict as far back as the Gulf war in the 1990s. They say Beijing determined that while it could never match American air power, it could boost its own missile capabilities and invest in technologies of the future that specifically target American vulnerabilities.

An edgy US defence establishment is now responding. Today, China has top billing in the Trump administration’s national security and defence strategies. Increasingly, the US is realising it is no longer the world’s only superpower — a humiliating climbdown that military planners have been slow to embrace. Many believe the days of great power competition — and the prospect of full-blown war between technologically advanced and nuclear-armed states — are back. “[China] is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own,” says the US national security strategy, issued in December. The document accuses China of spreading “features of its authoritarian system” and rejects Beijing’s protestations that it has sought only a “peaceful rise”.

US defence secretary Jim Mattis warned at the launch of the national defence strategy in January that the US was losing its military edge “in every domain of warfare”, citing air, land, sea, space and cyberspace. That was in part aimed at an ultimately successful push for Congress to vote through more military spending, which at $700b this year eclipses China’s growing defence budget by more than three to one. But Donald Trump has also plunged his administration into an explicit and all-consuming rivalry with China. He is determined to ensure that the country of 1.4bn people with a $14tn economy can never “be bigger than us” — pushing back on trade, intellectual property, industrial espionage and soft power as well as US reliance on Chinese chips and chemicals for its defence-industrial base.

The US is also worried that China is more effective at co-opting commercial know-how for military purposes as part of its “military-civil fusion” and for its extensive new scientific endeavours. “Twenty years ago [the state of Chinese research was] a joke,” Kevin McNesby, an army research chemist, tells me. “But all their students have been training with our professors . . . They’re no joke now.”

By 2035, some in the US assess that it may be unable to stop Beijing if it launches military operations off the Chinese mainland. China has already developed a barrage of precision-guided missiles of a range and sophistication the US has never fought before. An incoming hypersonic missile could destroy a ship or give American missile defences at home only six minutes to respond to an attack, say experts. The US has no way to defend against them yet. Worse, a hypersonic missile could theoretically carry a nuclear warhead.

“The US has never had to fight against an adversary that has been able to throw as deep and as dense as the US,” says Bob Work, former deputy defence secretary. He argues that the use of guided munitions in any future war will be so “widespread and profound” that it will make “a lot of sense to be the one to shoot first”. The prospect of a pre-emptive attack represents a huge shift for the US war-fighting machine, which he says maintains clear superiority today only with its submarine fleet. Even then China’s fleet may overtake America’s by 2030. The US, for its part, has never shied away from wielding its military might. Some worry that it is America’s focus on weapons development and fear of China’s rise that could goad the world towards war rather than Beijing’s ambition. The US already has troops in 177 countries. It drops more than 20,000 bombs a year on the Middle East and has 14,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, its longest-running conflict. Rather than accommodate China’s rise, Washington still largely believes in domination. The US remains far and away the most powerfully equipped fighting force in the world, and public martial spirit is strong. It is the only country to have detonated a nuclear bomb in wartime.

“We’ve been in an arms race for 10 years,” Dr Frank Hoffman tells me over lunch at the National Defense University in Washington DC. A retired marine officer and military strategist, he researches the future of war and helps train the next generation of generals. “There are a lot of reasons why the next 20 years are going to be a lot more unstable than the last 20 were on balance. It doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have a war, but the likelihood is far higher than it has been in the past.”

While strategists do not expect China or the US to launch a direct attack on each other, they fear that a battle for regional hegemony — over Taiwan or the South China Sea — could trigger a wider conflict. The US is selling arms to Taiwan, a self-governing island democracy that China regards as a rogue province and a potential flashpoint between the two countries. James Fanell, a retired US navy captain and China hawk, told Congress he believes China is actively thinking about invading Taiwan by 2030 as part of a bid for regional and global supremacy.

China has taken an increasingly assertive line in public. In October last year, President Xi Jinping called for China to embrace a “new era” and move “closer to centre stage”. He wants to build a world-class military by 2049, the centenary of Communist party rule. Last month, clad in camouflage, he told military commanders to prepare “for fighting a war”, part of his bid to build a combat mindset. China has boosted military spending, expanded air and maritime training and increased Chinese participation in UN peacekeeping operations, exposing its soldiers to combat for the first time since the 1970s. Last year it established its first overseas military base, in Djibouti. (The Chinese Ministry of National Defence did not respond to the FT’s request to comment on its military ambitions.) Pentagon officials say in private how alarmed they are at Xi’s overhaul of the constitution in March, when he scrapped term limits, giving the president, they say, a mantle of power approaching that of “emperor”.

China has developed its own stealth fighter jets and put missiles and bombers on a string of disputed artificial islands in the South China Sea, despite a promise from Xi to Barack Obama in 2015 that China did not intend to “pursue militarisation”. Those reinforcements make it harder for US military bases in the Pacific, from Guam to Japan to Hawaii, to be confident they could mount a successful attack on the Chinese mainland so far away from home. While America has 11 aircraft carriers to China’s two, US defence officials worry that China could use its militarised island bases as vast floating aircraft carriers, and would quickly seize the upper hand in any fight off the Chinese mainland.

Perhaps most importantly for America’s military planners, China has vowed to draw equal with the US in artificial intelligence within two years, overtake it by 2025 and become the dominant world force by 2030. This is no small ambition. “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world,” predicted Russian president Vladimir Putin last year.

For Jim Mattis, the question is what such technological advances will do to the very nature of war. He wonders whether, one day, AI, machine learning and robots might remove that most human of qualities from battle — fear. Mattis has studied the early 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who argues that the best victories come from wars fought deep inside enemy territory, and that surprise in combat is often elusive.

Like Clausewitz, Mattis sees uncertainty and fear as essential ingredients of war. But he has spent long enough contemplating the coming shift in warfare to know he cannot yet comprehend it. “I’m not there yet in my own thinking about it,” he tells me, in his first one-on-one interview with a national newspaper since he took office.

We are aboard his “doomsday” plane — so advanced it doubles as a flying nuclear bunker, so old-school it has defunct ashtrays and the 1980s upholstery to match. A retired four-star marine general who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mattis takes a thoughtful yet unforgiving approach to warfare. Known for his pithy bons mots — “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet” — he still revels in a call sign his colleagues once gave him: Colonel Has An Outstanding Solution, aka “Chaos”. Nowadays he is often hailed as a warrior monk.

The day we speak, in early September, he is on a 22-hour flight to India to sign new military co-operation agreements that will bed down a US hope of Delhi becoming a high-tech military counterweight to Beijing. But he does not think the US is headed for war with China. “I’m not one of those who thinks there is automatically a conflict in the future,” he tells me, referring to former Pentagon official Graham Allison’s notion of a Thucydides trap — in which a rising power displaces an incumbent through war.

Earlier in the year, Mattis attended a banquet, topped with a late-night serenade, among military dignitaries in Beijing. “They throw me a party like you won’t believe,” he recalls. Amid the niceties, however, China declared it would not yield “even one inch” of the South China Sea. Mattis had earlier accused China of “intimidation and coercion”, days after he abruptly cancelled Beijing’s participation in large-scale naval exercises in the Pacific. A senior security official told me that Mattis privately warned his counterparts they would be at a disadvantage against an adversary so experienced as the US, playing on Chinese fears of combat inadequacy. Things deteriorated fast. In October, Mattis cancelled a second trip to Beijing amid rising military tensions after a US destroyer narrowly avoided collision with a Chinese warship in the South China Sea. Last week the two sides tried again — defence minister General Wei Fenghe, who last month trotted out standard warnings of Chinese military action “at all costs” to preserve Taiwan, flew to Washington to meet Mattis.

“It just seems to me there is an anti-domination tension for both of us,” Mat-tis says. But he points to China’s aggressive authoritarian streak, framing the tension as a face-off between two systems with vastly different values. “[As] they come of age and they find you can’t just go in and take over other people’s harbours, collateral and stuff, there’s going to be a discipline.”

Ultimately, he says, it is critical for the two countries to “look at what kind of relationship we can develop” and — without saying explicitly that he expects China and the US to trade places — points to the fact that, when the US finally overtook the UK as global power in the early part of the 20th century, the pair managed to avoid a military showdown because they largely shared the same values. However, none of this has stopped Mattis from preparing the US for war. He tells me of extensive efforts to determine which futuristic technologies show “the most promise or could be the biggest game-changer . . . We have truly got a rocket scientist to do the further-out stuff,” he says with pride.

Mattis means Michael Griffin, chief technical officer at the Pentagon. The former head of Nasa is tasked with bringing the US war machine into the next age. He is rushing to deliver the military hardware of the future, and wants to avoid “a man-on-man fight” with China. “That’s not the kind of fight we wish to have, and we probably can’t win that fight,” says Griffin. Instead, he is charged with delivering breakthroughs in mind-boggling new technologies — not only artificial intelligence but also hypersonics, quantum science, lasers, nuclear weapons and electronic warfare.

Outpacing China will require speeding up development cycles. At the moment, says Griffin, it takes the US on average 16 years to deliver an idea to operational capability, versus fewer than seven for China.

“This is not behaviour of which we should be proud,” Griffin tells me when we meet at the Pentagon. “The Chinese have tested several dozen hypersonic attack vehicles over the last 10 years, and most have been successful. There’s no doubt in our mind that such a capability . . . is designed to, and will, keep our carriers out of the fight.”

But all that is about to change. “We have no choice but to respond in kind,” he says. “We will be weaponising from a position of catch-up. But we will catch up, OK?”

In an anonymous colossus of reflec- tive glass in Arlington, Virginia, scientists at a US government agency are working on the next breakthrough for military technologies. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), part of the Department of Defense’s innovation arm, was brought to life in a hurry after the Russians came up with Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, in 1957. Dedicated to preventing and initiating strategic surprise, this “genius factory” went on to invent the precursor to the internet. “They’re focused on what is the best and most innovative thing that can be done with the physics and technology that we have,” says Griffin.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 helmet, which streams real-time imagery from six infrared cameras mounted around the aircraft and displays the information on the visor

Right: Billie Flynn tests the Lockheed Martin F-35 jet, which is designed to ‘outsmart’ adversaries

Some at Darpa work on quantum science in a bid to secure the cryptography breakthroughs of the future; others worry over new types of command and control. Jean-Charles Ledé, an engineer, is entrenched in autonomous flying systems. US-based ground controllers of drones already drop bombs and collect intelligence in Afghanistan, Somalia and beyond. But swarms of drones, coordinated via artificial intelligence at lightning-fast speeds, could offer the prospect of mass attacks of hundreds of combat robots that can make targeting decisions as a team on the fly. Together they could theoretically overwhelm much larger fighter jets or even aircraft carriers.

In his otherwise nondescript office, Ledé is flanked by a mini-parachute and a broken propeller. “We don’t have a monopoly [on drone-swarm technology], other people will eventually get it,” he tells me. “What then? How am I going to protect myself against people who might try to use it against me?” His idea is that drones carrying nets could effectively “catch” rival drones. (Beyond the homeland, where preventing civilian casualties is paramount, lasers might be a more appropriate means of attack.)

The broken propeller serves as a reminder of quite how many failures it takes to succeed. Ledé and his team have spent years trying to develop a fast-flying autonomous reconnaissance drone that can find its way around a building without a human operator, a map or any connection to navigation systems such as GPS, which he says has now become a “major vulnerability” because of how easy it is to jam.

The availability of drones on the commercial market means he can afford to go through many cheap parts. “[We] basically don’t leave the test until all the airplanes are broken. If it works, then I say ‘Go faster; find out when it doesn’t work!’” The aim is for the drone to learn its environment and transmit a map back to base without human or navigational help. “The project itself was about developing the algorithms,” he says. His team’s research, a world first, is another step on the ladder to the sort of machine learning that can underpin wars of the future. It will soon transfer to the US Army Research Lab for further testing.

In August, US satellites came under attack. Senior airmen at a base in Colorado speedily repositioned them, without moving them so far that they had to abandon their function. This time around, the attack was a simulation, played out from behind computer screens. Such exercises are common across the military, but these were the first focused on space.

The US military establishment has traditionally thought of space as a “benign” environment, with its hundreds of military satellites focused on intelligence, weather, communications and radar. The young operators who control their movements are more used to worrying about evading some of the 500,000 pieces of flying debris than an enemy attack. But all that has changed.

This year, Trump decided to split off space as a separate, sixth branch of the military. “We have to be able to fight,” General John Raymond, head of Air Force Space Command, told a conference in September. “I am convinced that if we are up against a peer adversary, we are going to have to fight for space superiority.”

The twice-yearly space exercises started only last year. In 2019 there will be three of them — a sign of how much more quickly the US wants to train its space operators. “It’s more like chess — you’re trying to think a couple of moves ahead, but it plays out all in orbit . . . It’s tough,” says Stuart Pettis, a colonel at Air Force Space Command, a building that looks like a cross between a rudimentary rocket and a sardine can, surrounded by a string of mountains in the Colorado desert.

While the prospect of turning space into a war zone horrifies many, some inside the Air Force lament that the US has been slow to come to that conclusion. Russia and China both say they are pursuing only peaceful applications in space, but the US fears either could target some of its greatest assets — and vulnerabilities. In 2007, China shot a ballistic missile more than 500 miles into space, destroying one of its own ageing weather satellites. US military officials took it as a sign China could shoot down their satellites too. “We thought those days were over after the end of the cold war,” Pettis tells me of US assessments over whether China would ever develop anti-satellite weapons. “But 2007 kind of settled that.”

Fears have only risen since. Heather Wilson, the top civilian Air Force official, said this year that Russia and China are developing ways to “disable our satellites”. Rick Ambrose, who leads Lockheed Martin’s space division, says satellites need to become “much smarter”. Today’s incorporate almost no AI, but the next generation will change or add functions in the same way that a smartphone downloads a new app. Automation will be a sine qua non in space, says Ambrose. “ . . . no person’s going to be able to be in the loop,” he says, adding that systems will self-correct and auto-adjust at speed.

In a recent top-secret annual war game that was set 10 years in the future, the US and its allies battled a great power (the Air Force won’t say which, but it was most probably China). The conflict quickly escalated. “The adversary saw they could gain an advantage in space and they tried to take that action early . . . They definitely tried to escalate very robustly,” Pettis said. “They are very, very capable.”

The allies eventually responded in several other arenas — an indication that war between well-armed countries would spread into many dimensions, and fast. “We have to get out of these chauvinistic, little, simplistic paradigms we have,” says Frank Hoffman, who with Mattis first outlined the concept of “hybrid warfare”. He argues that conflict with China would not take place solely in Asia as many planners like to imagine. “The game is probably going to be back in the US,” he tells me.

Some fear China might target drone operators sitting in their bunkers in the US desert, or threaten the homeland with a mass cyber attack on the electric grid, water system, banking or medicine in order to deter the US from intervening in a fight. Pettis hopes exercises will knit US war planning together, sending a signal to potential enemies: “My hope is that nobody is crazy enough to try to take us on.”

That hope — a fundamental calculus for many military strategists — is at the heart of whether increasing signs of aggression between China and the US ever spill into outright conflict. “I worry that Chinese strategists may overestimate their ability to diagnose what we would consider worth fighting over,” says Jacqueline Deal, China expert and chief executive of the Long Term Strategy Group, which advises the Department of Defense. “China may calculate we would not be willing to go to war for some small country that they are interested in, and will try to make it look to the American public that we would be silly to risk WWIII for, in their words, ‘a bunch of rocks’.”

She also points to China’s far from peaceful record, citing its 1962 invasion of India, ambushing Russia in 1969, wars in Korea and Vietnam. “If you look at the record of their use of force since 1949, in every case China has launched the aggression.”

Elsa Kania, a scholar of Chinese military doctrine who has briefed the Pentagon, concurs that China’s primary effort is to force the US out of a fight, rather than provoke a direct one. “If China can convince the US it might face the loss of an aircraft carrier or space capabilities, then it could prevent the US from becoming fully involved in the first place,” she says. “China is making an effort to win without fighting — to deter the US from committing to a full-on war if it makes a move over Taiwan or the South China Sea.”

Elsewhere, preparation for combat continues. At a Lockheed Martin facility in Arlington, a visor snaps over my head. Below me, fields and waterways stretch out beyond Washington DC. Green lines and numbers fill my vision. Disappearing into the helmet of the F-35 stealth jet is to submerge oneself in the most futuristic — and frighteningly real — of computer games. “It’s Tony Stark, it’s Iron Man,” test pilot Billie Flynn tells me.

The $400,000 headgear renders a pilot more machine than man. Six infra-red cameras embedded around the plane feed into a single, fused vision, giving the pilot the ability to “see through the skin of the aeroplane”, says Flynn.

The plane relies on stealth — the defining feature of “fifth-generation” aircraft — to outsmart the enemy. It is shaped and painted to avoid radar detection, and carries its weapons and fuel inside to minimise detectable heat output. It is loaded with four weapons — two missiles and two bombs — and can jam enemy radars via electronic attack. But its real strength is as a flying data-collection and distribution centre that enables it to co-ordinate any battle and get the better of a lesser adversary. Packed with 8.6m lines of code, and working in formation, planes can creep deep in and out of enemy territory, share information among themselves on a short stealthy link and send and receive data long-distance to mission command, ships or missiles over hundreds of miles. The stealth jet, in Flynn’s words, “takes the workload away from the human”.

“We fly now in a sanctuary where no one sees us but we see absolutely everybody, everything that exists,” says Flynn, one of 15 F-35 test pilots, adding that he can see 300km to the horizon at some 9,000m in the air. “We operate with impunity and we attack what we want . . . and no one ever knows we’re there,” he says. “An invisible attack is going to take [the enemy] down; they’re just going to have aircraft disintegrate.”

America’s new flagship fighter jet is intended to last 50 years, giving the US and 13 allies a lasting advantage over China. More than 2,000 of them are due to be manufactured over the next two decades, including 330 already delivered.

China is snapping at the winged heels of the F-35, in part thanks to stolen US military blueprints that Beijing allegedly relied on to design its own version. Flynn, however, says his jets are 15 to 20 years ahead, and will continue to evolve. “We don’t even have a definition for sixth-generation yet,” he says. One future innovation may include sensors that see in different spectrums, well beyond the range of radar.

A little over 100 years ago, commentators predicted that weapons of war had become so technologically advanced, and so lethal, that no one would ever resort to using them. Many couched the relentless arms race as part of an economic effort to stimulate the domestic industrial base, and discounted that such jostling would ever lead to conflict. The first world war proved them wrong on both counts.

In the macabre race to find better ways of killing, today’s military experts mostly still assume that improved technology will save lives, and that the flashes of a third world war could be over within weeks. They argue that outsourcing the risk to robots should reduce the human cost. “Hundreds of years ago, people fought face-to-face with swords; today, most soldiers never see the other soldier,” says Kott, pointing to a drop in battlefield deaths over the ages. “Most likely, more intelligent things on the battlefield will reduce further the mortality of humans on the battlefield.”

But today’s Pentagon officials worry that the US would absorb a tremendous number of casualties if it went to war with China, even if it ultimately prevailed. “The future battlefield is going to be extraordinarily lethal and the tempo will be 24 hours a day, all day, all weather, just no rest,” Bob Work, the former deputy defence secretary, tells me. “It’s going to be our AI against their AI. One side is going to get inside the command system and shut down everything,” he adds. “You could find yourself in situations in which literally your weapons don’t work.”

Robots might also fall short. US officials are unclear whether AI decades into the future could deliver the creative spark necessary for battle supremacy and be capable of holding territory, or whether machines might ultimately pursue different values from the humans who thought they were in charge, with disastrous impact.

Mattis does not expect there to be a single silver bullet when it comes to a defining weapon of the future. “They’re fusing all the advances together, from intel input and observation and missiles and everything,” he says of today’s military planners. “[It] takes time to put together and talk about it . . . Each war is unique.” He argues that this kind of synergy, rather than specific weapons alone, will deliver victories.

Such a shift needs a new military orthodoxy of a sort that has never been put to the test, turning over vast amounts of data at speed to reach life-and-death decisions. Mattis takes his lessons from history. “The Germans didn’t have the best tank going into World War II. The French did. But the Germans knew how to integrate it,” he says, adding that the introduction of a radio and air cover gave them far superior power. The warfare of tomorrow will likely play out differently from the way anyone might expect. “It may be artificial intelligence, or robots using hypersonic weapons.”

But Mattis also acknowledges some things may have so profound an effect that he cannot be sure how war will change. Human control over artificial intelligence — so fundamental to the work being done at the Pentagon and elsewhere — could ultimately ebb. “For the near future, there’s going to be a significant human element, obviously. Maybe for 10 years, maybe for 15,” he tells me. “But not for 100.”

Katrina Manson is the FT’s US foreign policy and defence correspondent

China has obtained the big screen software used by Nato and the United States for war room mapping, putting its forces on an equal organisational footing with some of the West’s elite military operations.

Luciad, a defence contractor based in Leuven, Belgium, is selling the Chinese government high performance software used for situational awareness by the military commands of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, according to information from Chinese government contractors verified by the South China Morning Post.

The package includes LuciadLightspeed, a programme that can process real-time data, including that from fast-moving objects, with speed and accuracy.

Situational awareness is the ability to know what is happening in a target environment and use that intelligence to defeat the enemy. In warfare, the situation is so fluid it can change in seconds.

Planners use data from sources like drone feeds, satellite imagery, radar, sensor plots, weather forecasts and platoon status. Traditional software can introduce errors as large as 500 metres (1,600 feet) in the positioning of moving targets from different datastreams.

Luciad’s software can analyse data and generate seamless visuals at a speed of 100 calculations a second, 75 times faster than its closest competitor, with accuracy to within 3cm (one inch) and on a global scale, according to American graphics technology company Nvidia.

This allows planners to visualise and analyse changes in enemy positions or assess target information in real time and adjust mission parameters accordingly, according to Nvidia.

The same software is used by the United States Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, where covert missions for the US government – including the raid that assassinated al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, originated.

Under Chinese law, a foreign vendor supplying software to the Chinese government must disclose every line of source code to authorities for a security check. It was unclear whether Luciad has complied with that requirement. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Adopting technology used by Nato in military command may not be without risk to China, according to a Beijing-based information security expert who has worked with the government.

The software might contain hidden codes. “It can lead to unauthorised infiltration of the brain of Chinese military operations,” the researcher said.

Although the military network was physically isolated from the internet and protected by firewalls, there was “always a possibility of finding a way in and bypassing all security checks”, he said.

Alternatively, studying the software, especially at source-code level, would offer China a perspective on the war room operations of Western powers.

“Sometimes a comment [an explanation or annotation in the source code of a computer program] can tell a story,” the researcher said.

China operates one of the world’s largest military intelligence gathering systems and its sophistication is increasing. It has an expanding network of satellites – most of which serve the government or the People’s Liberation Army – that is second in number only to the US.

Monitoring devices are planted in the world’s oceans from the South China Sea to the American West Coast. Conventional weapons such as landmines are evolving with the use of artificial intelligence.

The Chinese military and intelligence services monitor civilian sectors including the internet, surveillance camera networks and social media for information and threat analysis.

This creates a large and urgent demand for advanced data processing software, according to industry experts.

“Luciad is the Ferrari of GIS software. It comes to the right place at the right time,” said a geospatial information engineer from an aerospace company in Beijing.

Over the past few months, senior technical staff with the Chinese government and major contractors have taken crash courses on the new software in Beijing.

One was hosted in June by Key Mapper, a geospatial information service provider in China. In one exercise, a tutor from Luciad provided data on San Francisco to demonstrate the software’s function.

“Through this training, the participants not only have a deep understanding of Luciad’s full range of products, but can also independently use the products to develop related applications,” the company said on its website.

Key Mapper confirmed on Monday that it was an official reseller of Luciad software licensed to Chinese government clients.

The Beijing-based company declined to disclose further details because of the sensitivity of the technology.

Luciad was established by Dr Lode Missiaen, a senior scientist who had worked at the Nato Consultation, Command and Control Agency in The Hague, the Netherlands, in the 1990s.

Missiaen, responsible for the development and application of modern software technologies for Nato’s air traffic control and airspace management, recognised the lack of commercial software that could combine geographic and real-time information.

He left Nato and founded Luciad in 1999 to fill the gap, but it was not until 2008 that Nato fully adopted the new technology at its command centres to generate pictures for big screen display in war rooms.

Luciad’s software is now used not only by Nato member nations but also by major arms contractors, including Boeing, Airbus Defence and Space, Lockheed Martin and Thales.

The company was bought last year by Hexagon, a technology group based in Sweden.

Hexagon has established ties with the Chinese military and defence industry. Its technology has been used by the manufacturer of China’s stealth aircraft.

It was unclear whether the Luciad software sale in China occurred after the acquisition. Hexagon did not respond to the Post’s queries.

Professor Wu Lun, director of the geographic information systems department at Peking University and a senior adviser to the Chinese government on geospatial information technology, said the most popular foreign GIS platform in China at present was ArcGIS, a commercial software developed by the Environmental Systems Research Institute in California.

While it had some military application, “ArcGIS is mainly used for civilian projects”, he said.

For security concerns, the Chinese government has promoted home-grown GIS software for government and military applications, and some suppliers such as SuperMap and MapGIS had come up with “quite capable and competitive products”, he said.

“But different clients have different demands. Foreign and domestic software will coexist for a long time,” Wu said.

Planners with China’s ground forces must not be caught out by the rapid evolution of warfare and technology in the 21st century and must prepare to move beyond a strategy of simple self-defence, the People’s Liberation Army said.

China’s leadership has stressed the need for combat readiness and increased training. In a tour of the Southern Theatre Command last month, President Xi Jinping said the military should “concentrate preparations for fighting a war”.

Better planning would allow the military to anticipate and control the course of land warfare, the PLA said in a commentary on its social media account. It called for greater recognition of the need for closer cooperation with the air force and the development of cyberwarfare capabilities in response to evolving threats on new battlefields.

The Chinese military has long stuck to its credo of self-defence – a position seen as calming suspicions among other nations – but there are calls to adjust the directive as China is expanding its interests abroad and facing rising tensions over territorial disputes and from the United States.

“Proactive planning could break the passive situation and completely control how warfare should come out,” the PLA said.

“If a land war is fought according to pre-designed plans, troops … can strike enemies by surprise and make maximum use of weaponry, bringing the possibility of victory closer in leaps and bounds.”

As China’s interests abroad had expanded, bringing it in closer contact with the US and the world’s largest military, simple self-defence was no longer enough, the PLA said.

The article stressed the Chinese army’s need to embrace technology. The use of drones that could supply planners with real-time battlefield information and remain in the air for days at a time was “inevitable” as technology changed the face of combat.

China’s military has undergone great changes in the past two years, its seven military regions have become five theatre commands and units have been merged to streamline operations.

The rising strength of the Chinese military has triggered concerns overseas. A report this week to the US Congress on the national security implications of the US-China trade and economic relationships said China would be able to contest US operations throughout the entire Indo-Pacific region by 2035 – if not sooner.

Hong Kong-based military commentator Song Zhongping said the article was in line with the PLA’s reform programme and suggested how the Chinese army might develop.

“In future warfare, Chinese ground forces might be required to fight on islands or in deep mountains, thus requiring the army to master greater abilities to better collaborate with other military services,” Song said.

A source close to the Chinese military said the article showed how the army had already been transformed.

“The Chinese army has encountered problems and difficulties during reform,” the person said. “The land force is exploring its role in military reform and changes in strategy.”

China will be able to contest US operations throughout the entire Indo-Pacific region by 2035 – if not before, according to a commission that advises the US Congress on the national security implications of the US-China trade and economic relationship.

In a report to be delivered to the US Congress on Wednesday, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission said China could already contest US operations in the ground, air, maritime and information domains within the “second island chain”.

The second island chain is a strategic defence line for the United States formed by the Ogasawara Islands, Japan’s Volcano Islands, the Mariana Islands and Palau.

That military capacity presented fundamental challenges to the US armed forces’ long-standing assumption of supremacy in these areas in the post-cold war era, the report said.

The conclusions were based on classified and unclassified hearings with witnesses from government, academia and the private sector, as well as research trips to Taiwan and Japan. Commission members were not granted visas to visit China to conduct research.

The report said that under the administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping, China had significantly accelerated its military modernisation.

“As military modernisation progresses and Beijing’s confidence in the People’s Liberation Army increases, the danger will grow that [US] deterrence will fail and China will use force as a regional hegemon,” it said.

The PLA’s Strategic Support Force, a unit established in late 2015, poses a fundamental challenge to the US ability to operate effectively in space, cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum, according to the report.

And after years of development, China’s missiles also presented “serious strategic and operational challenges for the US and its allies and partners throughout the Indo-Pacific”, the report said.

China’s coastguard had also removed all civilian functions and helped Beijing advance its maritime interests, it said.

Beijing has ramped up development and upgrades weapons across all military services, from unmanned underwater vehicles and amphibious aircraft to laser guns and supersonic fighter jets.

In addition, China has built several artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea, installing missiles and constructing airstrips in a challenge to the US presence in the region.

China’s DF and HN series missiles have a range of up to 15,000km, putting the entire United States within their reach.

In late September, a Chinese destroyer nearly collided with a US warship in the disputed waters after making what the Americans described as an “unsafe and unprofessional” manoeuvre in an attempt to warn it to leave the area.

And in late October, Xi ordered the military region responsible for monitoring the South China Sea and Taiwan to assess the situation it faced and boost its capabilities so it could handle any emergency.

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