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Could PLA’s AI-powered kill web evolve to a Skynet?
China’s battlefield network can deform under attack and reassemble to original state even after huge damage, making it almost unbreakable
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Stephen Chenin Beijing
In the Terminator films, humanity launches an all-out assault in 2029 on Skynet’s central node deep within Cheyenne Mountain – only to realise that the artificial intelligence has no single point of failure.
Skynet is not a monolithic system, but a distributed, self-healing network, capable of surviving total infrastructure collapse and resurrecting itself almost instantly.
Today, China appears to be building a real-world analogue – a highly resilient, AI-driven combat kill web composed of thousands of uncrewed aerial, surface and underwater platforms.
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This network is designed to persist through destruction, bearing an unsettling resemblance to Skynet’s structure and survivability.
At a defence technology conference in Tianjin this month, engineers from Tianjin 712 Communications & Broadcasting Co – a key supplier of military communication systems – revealed breakthroughs in elastic mesh networking for unmanned combat clusters.
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Field test results suggest the new battlefield network is so robust and adaptive that it could continue even after suffering massive damage – the first time such data has been released to the public.
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