FPI / April 25, 2022
Geostrategy-Direct.com
While no one currently can really say what the metaverse actually is, communist China nevertheless views it as a future battlefield for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
China’s leadership sees the PLA waging high-tech warfare in the metaverse, according to a report by the Air Force China Aerospace Studies Institute, a U.S. Air Force think tank.
Once thought to be limited to the realm of science fiction, the report by states that China sees the metaverse as a realm to conquer.
The official military newspaper PLA Daily stated in a report last month that the metaverse represents the “new heights of future cognitive warfare.” China defines cognitive warfare as the blending of unmanned systems with artificial intelligence to produce new fighting capabilities.
“The concept includes the use of drone swarms, electronic warfare, hypersonic missiles, biomaterial-infused ‘invisibility’ cloaks, and battlefield-print 3D payloads and parts,” security correspondent Bill Gertz noted in a Washington Times report.
The Air Force report states that the authors of the March PLA report on metaverse warfare are from the Institute of Military Political Work at the Academy of Military Sciences, the PLA’s senior-most research institute under the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, the country’s preeminent power organ.
“The metaverse provides a parallel cognitive space that digitally twins real combat scenarios, where cognitive warfare can be advanced efficiently and enhanced at a fast pace,” the PLA report said, noting the domain will be used in the future for attack and conflict.
“By attacking an adversary’s metaverse (and in cognitive war more broadly) one can ‘affect the opponent’s thinking, cognition and action decision making,’” the report said.
The PLA anticipates three types of metaverse confrontation. The first is “platform confrontation” involving hostile forces using the metaverse for cognitive attacks or defense to disrupt, delay, deter, destroy and eliminate opposing forces metaverse.
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