US military urged to act faster on interlinked warfare system as China catches up

Liu Zhen

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The United States must speed up the building of its interlinked warfare system as China pursues its own version to counter the US platform, American media reported its defence officials as saying.

The so-called Chinese Multi-Domain Precision Warfare (MDPW) was mentioned by the US Department of Defence in its annual China Military Power Report last November.

The MDPW aims to align all Chinese forces “from cyber to space”, US military website C4ISRNET.com reported last week.

US officials say the effort is “fuelled by a need to counter” the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative (JADC2), it added.

The People’s Liberation Army first tested the MDPW in 2021 to interlink command and control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to quickly coordinate firepower and expose foreign weaknesses, according to the Pentagon report in November.

The PLA sees “systems destruction warfare as the next way of war”, C4ISRNET quoted an anonymous senior US defence official as saying last year.

“Basically, it’s a way that they’re thinking about looking across domains to identify vulnerabilities in an adversary’s operational system and then to exploit those to cause its collapse,” the official was quoted as saying.

China has for years pursued a more informatised military. The Pentagon report last year said the PLA was speeding up its incorporation of command information systems, providing forces and commanders with enhanced situational awareness and decision support to more effectively carry out joint missions and tasks to win informatised local wars.

The Pentagon is trying to realise JADC2, a connect-everything-everywhere campaign for communications and international collaboration, in order to maintain an advantage over technologically savvy adversaries, especially its current number strategic threat China, the website said.

The connection would link once-disparate troops and databases across land, air, sea, space and cyber – through which the US military can strike faster, more efficiently and from farther away, the country’s defence officials say.

A Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet is recorded flying close to a US Air Force RC-135 aircraft in international airspace over the South China Sea, according to the US military. Photo: Handout via Reuters

The JADC2 also focuses on artificial intelligence and sophisticated computing to speedily sift through mountains of data and inform battlefield decisions, which is also the Chinese MDPW’s approach as described by the China Military Power Report.

Also essential to US aims is building an information-sharing alliance with its allies in the region, including Australia, India, Japan and South Korea. This would create a so-called mission-partner environment where data from a spectrum of foreign sources can be collected, secured and distributed, to contain China’s international ambitions, C4ISRNET said.