China’s Vision of the Future Networked Battlefield: Emerging Military-Technological Challenges to the United States

This chapter examines the intersection of China’s evolving C4ISR architecture with the cyber, space, and electronic warfare asymmetric challenges posed by China to the United States on the future network-centric battlefield. Compared to China’s conventional weapon systems, far less ink has been spilt on Chinese thinking in the development of the critical support architecture that enables and enhances China’s technologically advanced war-fighting capabilities. A central argument this chapter makes is that China’s war-fighting capabilities networked by C4ISR posed greater threats to the United States than the sum of their parts. It describes the contours of a discourse within the U.S. defense community that interpreted these ‘systems of systems’ as specifically designed to exploit U.S. military vulnerabilities in the Western Pacific. This emerging C4ISR military paradigm increased the incentives for both sides to strike first and preemptively against the other C4ISR systems, which during the Obama presidency perceptibly worsened strategic stabilizing in the Asia-Pacific.