China prepares for the wars of the future

Even though the wars of the future are unlikely to be fought as those of the past or the present, China will tie all knots on its way to military superiority. The country is currently preparing to fight and most likely win the battles that will come on Earth, space and cyberspace.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will conduct military maneuvers next month, during which it intends to test “new types of combat forces, including units that use digital technology”, as reported on Wednesday by Xinhua news agency.

The exercise will take place in late June at the Zhurihe Base, -the largest military training camp in the country, located in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region-, as announced by the General Staff. The goal is to “conform to war with information technology.”

“It will be the first time the PLA maneuvers focus on combat forces with digital units, special operations forces, military aviation and electronic response forces”, said the Army.

The announcement comes at a time of growing concern in the United States and other countries about cyber attacks from China, a theme that President Barack Obama plans to address during the meeting that he will hold next week with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

The Pentagon has revealed concerns about computer incursions from the Asian country in a report to Congress this month. In it, the US military accuses Beijing of using cyber espionage to modernize its army, and states that the U.S. government has been hacked by intruders that appear to be linked “directly to the government and military of China.”

But Pentagon spokesman George Little and other Defense Department officials have downplayed and have called outdated and exaggerated a report published on Tuesday by the Washington Post, which ensures that Chinese hackers gained access to more than 20 designs of major weapons systems from the United States.

The newspaper quoted a confidential report of the Defense and Science Committee (DSB), a renowned expert group formed by civilian and government people. The committee does not point to China as the author of the theft of the designs, but accusations seem to be coming from Army officials and officers of the arms industry with knowledge of the infiltration.

Although Washington accuses Beijing of military intelligence espionage and is concerned about the increasingly assertive stance of China in the Asia-Pacific region, the military of the two powers have continued to strengthen ties in the past two years. The approach is intended to reduce the risk of a potential conflict between the two nuclear powers, increase mutual knowledge and collaboration on non-controversial topics such as disaster prevention and control of diseases.

But mutual distrust remains in subjects like cyber-espionage, the possibility of an arms race in space, the U.S. support for Taiwan and the Chinese distrust of Obama’s strategy to swing attention to Asia and increase the military presence in the Pacific.