The commander of the Indo-Pacific Command told Congress that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is already using artificial intelligence to enhance the combat power of its forces.
“I think they see AI’s power from a targeting standpoint, mass data analytics, to quickly discern where the target is, given the covariance among all the factors that come into various sensors,” Adm. Samuel J. Paparo told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a hearing Tuesday.
“I think they see the power of AI for strategic decision making, to know the game that you’re playing, to be able to suss out what an adversary’s intentions are, I think they’re right to see that,” he said.
The four-star admiral, who sees his major mission as deterring war with China, said whoever masters AI technology, and more importantly, the adoption of it, “is the one that’s going to have the offset advantage in the 21st century.”
In terms of whether the U.S. military or the PLA has greater AI capabilities, Adm. Paparo said the U.S. has “product superiority” in AI agentic tools and large learning models.
The U.S. side also has product superiority in computing power, while the Chinese have key advantages in robotics.
“We’ve got to move faster, and those robotics can be employed for cheap, at scale, kill capabilities, and we have to increase our game on that,” he said.
“And I think that our lead is a tenuous lead of six months to 12 months at the most, and we’ve got to maintain and advance that lead with an emphasis on data, on compute, on application, including AI application, and most importantly, on human adoption.”
Asked if the PLA has access to more advanced AI technology, whether it would likely improve warfighting capabilities at the expense of American service members,” Adm. Paparo said: “Not likely, undoubtedly.”
“Increasing with AI, the ability to compute better and faster, is the ability to think better and faster. And every other form of warfare, whether it is drone warfare, missile warfare, all of those forms of warfare are commoditized, and so the overarching factor around all of it is compute and decision superiority,” he said.
