China Power | Security | East Asia

China’s Military Is Now Using AI to Plan Strike Operations

What does that mean for the future of human control in war – including a war over Taiwan? 

PLA aircraft rehearse for China’s military parade, held in Beijing on Sep. 3, 2025.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force now uses an AI system that draws up plans for large-scale strike operations. Instead of being released with great fanfare, the system appeared in a CCTV documentary released in early August to mark the PLA’s 99th anniversary. The system is described as prioritizing targets from a pool of hundreds, coordinating dozens of formations, and assigning tasks to more than 100 tactical units. According to the documentary, it has already been used in multiple missions.

The timing lines up neatly with Xi Jinping’s instruction in late July that the PLA must strengthen the military application of unmanned intelligent technologies and gradually build an intelligent military system. As China has been pursuing this very goal for years, Xi’s remarks are not new. The level of emphasis, however, is high: Beijing wants steady progress toward the modernization goals set for 2027, which marks the 100th anniversary of the PLA’s founding.

The AI system is described to handle a volume of decisions that would otherwise overwhelm human planners as, so goes the argument, traditional calculation methods cannot keep up when large numbers of aircraft and targets move at high speed. This indeed is a fair assessment and is far from being unique to China. 

Unlike autonomous weapon systems, the software does not select and engage targets directly. Its significance lies higher in the command chain. It helps plan air campaigns by recommending how aircraft, electronic warfare assets, and supporting capabilities should be combined before commanders authorize execution. In other words the system is described as a support tool that helps commanders and pilots – but humans remain responsible for the final decisions.

As is often the case with great powers and military AI, there is a catch in China’s posture and the potential operation realities. On the surface, Beijing has long maintained that artificial intelligence should support human judgment rather than replace it. China’s statements on lethal autonomous weapon systems at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons emphasize that AI should support rather than replace human decision-makers.

On the other side of the AI coin, however, the system’s apparent ability to compress hours of complex campaign planning into minutes risks reducing human authority to barely more than a formal rubber stamp, thus creating a sharp tension between China’s diplomatic posture and its operational realities.

Beijing’s logic is understandable. Decision superiority has become an increasingly important determinant of military effectiveness alongside the quality and quantity of platforms and weapons. Compressing the planning cycle allows commanders to adapt faster to changing battlefield conditions and exploit fleeting opportunities. The problem is that even if humans remain formally in control, AI can alter the pace of conflict enough to reshape how that control is exercised.

When planning happens in minutes, the room for independent human assessment shrinks together with the time frame. Even for pre-validated targets the system works with, judging whether it is military or civilian, whether the expected civilian harm is proportionate, and whether the attack is necessary all require time. 

Under high tempo operations, like executing a coordinated air offensive across the Taiwan Strait, the human role can become little more than rapid approval of options the AI........

© The Diplomat