The strategic competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is increasingly defined by the race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy. This contest extends far beyond technological one-upmanship, representing a fundamental clash of military doctrines, organizational structures, and philosophical visions for the future of warfare. This report provides a comparative analysis of China’s multi-faceted military AI initiatives—collectively termed the “Military Brain”—and the United States’ efforts to secure a decisive technological edge. While the U.S. currently maintains a foundational lead in key technologies such as advanced semiconductors and aggregate computing power, China possesses a more cohesive, expansive, and arguably more revolutionary strategic vision. Beijing’s approach is not merely to field new weapons but to fundamentally alter the character of conflict, shifting the central arena from the physical battlefield to the cognitive domain. This presents a unique and asymmetric challenge that U.S. strategy, currently focused on achieving “decision advantage” within existing warfighting paradigms, is not yet fully configured to meet. Overcoming this requires the United States to not only accelerate its own technological integration but also to broaden its strategic vision to compete and win in the cognitive contest that has already begun.

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I. Deconstructing the ‘China Military Brain’: From Cognitive Warfare to Intelligentization

The concept of a “China Military Brain” is not a single, monolithic program but rather a strategic constellation of advanced doctrine, ambitious technology projects, and novel operational concepts. It represents a “whole-of-society” endeavor aimed at achieving a revolutionary leap in military affairs, moving beyond the physical and informational to target the cognitive faculties of an adversary. This holistic vision is underpinned by a new warfighting paradigm, specific technological pursuits in brain-machine science, a focus on cognitive dominance, and a state-directed system for harnessing national innovation.

The Doctrine of Intelligentized Warfare (智能化战争): Charting the PLA’s New Paradigm

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is formally charting a new military paradigm centered on AI, viewing it as a historical shift on par with mechanization and informatization.¹ PLA theorists conceptualize this evolution as a progression of military enhancement: mechanization extended the military’s “limbs,” informatization sharpened its “senses” (eyes and ears), and intelligentization will now augment its “brain”.⁴ This is not seen as a mere technological upgrade but as a fundamental change in the character of war.

Core to this doctrine is the concept of “intelligentized warfare” (智能化战争), which PRC writers describe as a new stage of conflict based on the extensive use of AI and autonomy, creating a hybrid of human and machine intelligence.¹ This paradigm is built on three pillars: data, which is considered the “new oil”; algorithms, which will turn warfare into a contest between competing code; and massive computing power.⁵ In this vision, intelligent systems are expected to augment and, in some cases, partially replace human command functions to achieve unprecedented speed and efficiency.⁶

This doctrine extends into highly advanced theoretical constructs. One such concept, articulated by China’s Ministry of Defense, is “Dissipative Warfare” (耗散战). This framework views future conflict as a comprehensive, integrated confrontation across the physical, information, and cognitive domains.⁷ It explicitly merges military offense and defense with political maneuvering, economic competition, and cultural conflict, shifting the strategic center of gravity from an adversary’s military forces to its entire social system.⁷ This reveals a holistic approach to national power where victory is achieved by inducing systemic collapse in an opponent.

The ultimate culmination of this thinking is what PLA theorists call “Meta-War” (元战争). This concept links the physical battlefield with a parallel virtual battlefield and, most critically, the “brain battlefield” (头脑战场) of human perception and cognition.² In this framework, human soldiers and their weapons function as “dual entities,” existing simultaneously in the physical world and as digital twins in a virtual space, able to switch between these realities to simulate, predict, and engage in combat.²

The China Brain Project (中国脑计划): The Technological Pillars

The technological heart of this strategic vision is the “China Brain Project” (中国脑计划), a 15-year national initiative approved in 2016.⁹ Its structure is deliberately dual-use, described as “one body, two wings.” The “body” is the core scientific goal of understanding the fundamental principles of the human brain. The “two wings” represent the project’s co-equal applications: treating brain disorders and developing brain-machine intelligence technologies.¹⁰ This structure provides a benign, publicly acceptable facade for research that directly feeds advanced military capabilities. By framing half of the initiative around medical benefits, Beijing gains access to international scientific collaboration and talent that a purely military program could not, while its Military-Civil Fusion strategy ensures all breakthroughs are immediately evaluated for defense applications. This represents a strategically shrewd approach to pursuing paradigm-shifting asymmetric capabilities.

The project is focused on three key research areas:

1. Brain-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (BI-AI, 类脑智能): This research seeks to move beyond current machine learning by emulating the actual neuronal functioning and architecture of the biological brain, not just mimicking its behavioral outputs. The goal is to create AI that is far more efficient and capable of the high-order tasks that humans perform effortlessly.⁹
2. Connectomics (“Brain Mapping,” 人脑连接组): This involves the empirical and computational effort to map and replicate the brain’s complex structure and functioning. AI is used both to test the resulting simulations and to interpret the vast amounts of data generated from imaging brain sections.⁹
3. Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI, 脑机接口): This is the most direct military application, aiming to create high-bandwidth pathways between the human brain and external machines.⁹ PLA-affiliated writings describe using BCIs to allow soldiers to control drones and other robotic systems with their thoughts, to have their sensory perception augmented with digital sensor data (achieving “千里眼,” or thousand-mile eyes), and even to enable a form of battlefield “telepathy” for silent, covert communication in high-risk environments.²

Cognitive Domain Operations: The War for the Mind

Perhaps the most ambitious and potentially disruptive element of China’s strategy is its explicit focus on the cognitive domain. The ultimate goal is to achieve “mind dominance” ¹² by “controlling the brain” of an adversary to subdue their will to fight, thereby realizing Sun Tzu’s ancient ideal of winning without a single battle (“不战而屈人之兵”).⁸

This effort is a supercharged extension of the PLA’s long-standing “Three Warfares” doctrine, which targets public opinion, psychological states, and legal frameworks.⁸ AI and big data are seen as the catalysts that can elevate these concepts to a new level of precision and scale. By harvesting and analyzing massive datasets on populations, the PLA aims to conduct cognitive warfare at a granular level, crafting influence operations at machine speed that are tailored to specific demographics, groups, or even key individuals to shape perceptions, sow discord, and disrupt societal cohesion.⁸

This ambition extends to the development of what U.S. intelligence and PLA writings refer to as “neuro-strike” or “brain-control weaponry” (脑控武器).¹³ While the technological maturity of such concepts is uncertain, the clear intent is to research capabilities that can directly interfere with human cognitive functions, disrupt leadership decision-making, and demoralize entire populations. This represents a profound asymmetric threat that seeks to bypass conventional military strength entirely.

Military-Civil Fusion (MCF): The Engine of Advancement

The engine driving this entire enterprise is China’s national strategy of Military-Civil Fusion (MCF, 军民融合). Personally overseen by Xi Jinping, MCF is a state-directed, whole-of-society effort to eliminate all barriers between China’s civilian research institutions, its commercial technology sector, and its military-defense industrial base.¹⁶ The explicit goal is to ensure that any and all national innovation, particularly in dual-use fields like AI, directly serves the PLA’s modernization.¹⁹

Under MCF, the PLA is able to leverage China’s unique advantages, including its vast, state-accessible data resources for training AI models ²¹, and to tap into the dynamism of its private technology companies.¹⁹ The strategy also facilitates the acquisition of foreign technology and expertise through a variety of means, both licit and illicit, including talent recruitment programs, academic collaboration, and outright theft.¹⁶ While MCF faces its own internal bureaucratic and cultural hurdles ²³, its top-down, state-directed nature provides a powerful mechanism for mobilizing national resources toward a singular strategic goal, creating a stark contrast with the U.S. innovation model.

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II. The American Pursuit of Decision Advantage

The United States’ approach to military AI is philosophically and structurally distinct from China’s. It is rooted in a more pragmatic, capability-focused vision aimed at empowering the human warfighter rather than fundamentally redefining the nature of war. This vision is being pursued through a massive networking initiative, foundational research programs focused on trustworthiness, and a unique public-private innovation ecosystem that is both a source of immense strength and significant friction.

The JADC2 Imperative: A Networked Vision of Warfare

The central organizing concept for the U.S. military’s AI-enabled future is the pursuit of “Decision Advantage”.²⁵ The core premise is that in a future conflict against a peer adversary, victory will belong to the side that can most rapidly and effectively execute the decision cycle: sensing the battlefield, making sense of the information, and acting upon it.²⁷

The primary vehicle for achieving this is Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2). JADC2 is not a single weapon system but a broad, conceptual approach to connect sensors, platforms, and personnel from all branches of the military—Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Space Force—into a single, unified, AI-powered network.²⁹ The goal is to break down traditional service stovepipes and deliver the right information to the right decision-maker at the “speed of relevance,” enabling commanders to act inside an adversary’s decision cycle.²⁷ This effort is being built upon service-specific contributions, including the Army’s Project Convergence, the Navy’s Project Overmatch, and the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS).²⁹ Recognizing the importance of coalition warfare, the concept is evolving into

Combined JADC2 (CJADC2), which aims to integrate the command and control systems of key allies and partners into this network architecture.³¹

The U.S. approach is thus focused on perfecting its existing doctrine of joint, all-domain operations by developing a new set of technological capabilities. Where China’s doctrine speaks of a new conceptual state of being (“intelligentized warfare”), the U.S. focuses on a measurable, operational outcome (“decision advantage”). This makes the U.S. vision more pragmatic and quantifiable, but also potentially less strategically ambitious than China’s revolutionary aims.

Foundational Programs: From Maven to DARPA’s Moonshots

The technological underpinnings of JADC2 are driven by several key initiatives. Project Maven, officially the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, has served as a critical pathfinder for operationalizing AI.³³ Its initial focus was on applying machine learning and computer vision to autonomously detect and classify objects of interest from the massive volume of full-motion video and imagery collected by ISR platforms.³⁴ Project Maven has demonstrated real-world utility, having been used to support the 2021 Kabul airlift and to provide intelligence to Ukrainian forces, proving its value in turning data into actionable intelligence.³³

While Maven operationalizes existing AI, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) pushes the technological frontier. DARPA’s multi-billion-dollar “AI Next” campaign was designed to move the field beyond the limitations of current (second-wave) machine learning toward a third wave of AI capable of “contextual reasoning,” with the goal of transforming AI from a mere tool into a true partner for human operators.³⁶ Building on this, the subsequent

“AI Forward” initiative has pivoted to address what the Department of Defense (DoD) sees as the most critical barrier to widespread adoption: the need for trustworthy AI.³⁸ This effort focuses on developing AI that is explainable, robust, and reliable, with an emphasis on foundational theory, rigorous AI engineering, and effective human-AI teaming.³⁸ This deep institutional focus on trust and explainability represents a core philosophical divergence from China’s approach, which prioritizes performance and political control.

The Public-Private Ecosystem: Harnessing Commercial Innovation

The U.S. military AI strategy relies heavily on leveraging the nation’s world-leading commercial technology sector, a stark contrast to China’s state-centric MCF model.²¹ Programs like Project Maven have been built through partnerships with private industry leaders such as Palantir, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services.³³ This model provides the DoD with access to cutting-edge innovation, a dynamic and competitive ecosystem, and a massive advantage in private R&D investment, which dwarfed China’s by nearly a factor of ten in 2023 ($67.2 billion vs. $7.8 billion).²¹

However, this reliance on the private sector also introduces unique challenges. The cultural and ethical divides between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon can create friction, as exemplified by the employee protests that led Google to withdraw from Project Maven.³³ It necessitates new and flexible partnership models, such as the General Services Administration’s landmark agreement to provide OpenAI’s enterprise tools across the federal government, to bridge these gaps.⁴²

Implementation Realities: The Hurdles to a Unified Network

Despite its technological strengths, the full realization of the JADC2 vision is hindered by significant, primarily non-technological, barriers. The central U.S. challenge is not a lack of innovation but a persistent difficulty with integration. The DoD’s vast, federated structure has proven resistant to the kind of top-down, unified approach that JADC2 requires.

Key implementation hurdles include:

• Inter-service Stovepipes: Deep-seated cultural and budgetary divisions between the military services have led to each developing its own interpretation of JADC2, resulting in a lack of alignment, common standards, and true interoperability.⁴³
• Data Governance and Sharing: A pervasive culture of “data ownership” within individual services and agencies prevents the free flow of information that is the lifeblood of JADC2. Shifting to an enterprise-wide “data stewardship” model has proven to be a major cultural and policy challenge.⁴³
• Bureaucratic and Acquisition Inertia: The DoD’s traditional, slow-moving acquisition system is ill-suited for the rapid, iterative development cycles of software and AI. Overcoming this inertia and moving away from legacy systems is a persistent struggle.⁴⁵
• Over-classification: The tendency to over-classify information creates unnecessary barriers to sharing data both within the joint force and with crucial international partners, directly undermining the goals of CJADC2.⁴⁴

Reports from the Government Accountability Office confirm that the DoD remains in the early stages of defining the detailed scope, cost, and schedule for JADC2, underscoring the immense difficulty of implementing such a sweeping vision across a complex and often fragmented organization.⁴⁶ This reveals the core asymmetry of the competition: the United States excels at creating superior individual components but struggles to integrate them into a coherent whole, whereas China’s state-directed model is designed for integration but faces challenges in innovating those foundational components.

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III. Comparative Assessment: A Tale of Two Visions

A direct comparison of U.S. and Chinese military AI efforts reveals a complex landscape of asymmetric advantages. The question of “who is more advanced” cannot be answered with a single verdict; rather, it requires a multi-layered assessment of technology, data, integration, and strategic vision. The two nations are not simply running the same race at different speeds; they are pursuing fundamentally different goals, driven by divergent philosophies of warfare and national power.

Who is More Advanced? A Multi-Layered Analysis

The leadership in military AI is contested and varies significantly depending on the metric of evaluation:

• Foundational Technology (Advantage: USA): The United States maintains a decisive lead in the most critical enabling technologies. This includes a multi-generational advantage in high-end semiconductor design and fabrication, a critical bottleneck for China.⁴⁸ Furthermore, the U.S. possesses a substantial lead in aggregate compute capacity, which is essential not only for training advanced AI models but also for deploying and integrating them at scale across the military enterprise.⁴⁹ While Chinese models are rapidly closing the gap on performance benchmarks, America’s underlying hardware and systems integration capacity provide a more durable and comprehensive advantage.⁴⁹
• Data Resources (Advantage: China): China possesses a significant advantage in the sheer volume of data available for training AI models. Its large population, centralized data collection systems, and lax privacy regulations create a vast reservoir of information, particularly for developing surveillance and recognition algorithms that have direct military applications in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and automated targeting.²¹
• Operational Integration and Procurement (Advantage: Contested/Leaning China): Analysis from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) suggests the PLA has made “extraordinary progress” in procuring AI systems for combat and support functions, with annual spending estimated to be on par with that of the U.S. military.⁵¹ China’s state-directed MCF model may enable faster and more focused adoption of specific capabilities, such as drone swarms and autonomous undersea vehicles, compared to the bureaucratically encumbered U.S. JADC2 effort.⁵⁰ However, some Chinese defense experts express their own concerns that the PLA remains behind the U.S. in fielding and effectively using AI-enabled systems, indicating this is a highly contested area.⁵³
• Doctrinal Absorption (Advantage: China): The PLA appears to be more deeply and holistically integrating AI-centric concepts into its highest levels of military doctrine and strategic thought.¹ Concepts like “intelligentized warfare” are central to the PLA’s vision of the future. In contrast, the U.S. is still largely focused on fitting new AI capabilities into its existing doctrinal frameworks, wrestling with the organizational changes required for true transformation.⁴⁶

Breadth and Logic of Vision: Holistic Transformation vs. Decisive Advantage

The most significant divergence lies in the scope and ambition of each nation’s strategic vision.

• China’s Vision (Broader): China’s vision is a “whole-of-society” endeavor that is demonstrably broader and more holistic.²⁰ It fuses military objectives with economic, political, and cognitive strategies, aiming not just for battlefield victory but for “mind dominance” and the systemic paralysis of an adversary.⁷ The logic is totalistic: to leverage every instrument of national power, amplified by AI, to achieve strategic goals and reshape the international order.¹⁵ Its primary strength is this top-down strategic alignment; its potential weakness is the rigidity and fragility inherent in a system dependent on a single point of political control.
• U.S. Vision (More Focused): The U.S. vision is more focused, pragmatic, and centered on a military-operational problem: achieving “decision advantage” to win on the future battlefield.²⁶ The logic is to use superior technology to sense, process, and act on information faster than an adversary, empowering human commanders to make better, quicker decisions.²⁷ Its strength lies in its alignment with democratic values, its emphasis on human agency, and its ability to harness a dynamic commercial innovation base. Its primary weakness is its potential narrowness, which risks underestimating and failing to prepare for the broader cognitive and political dimensions of the competition that China is actively prioritizing.

The Ethical Divide: Political Control vs. Principled Responsibility

The ethical frameworks governing military AI in each country represent a fundamental and strategic point of contrast.

• China’s Approach: The PLA’s primary ethical consideration is internal and political: how to reconcile the operational necessity of AI autonomy with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) non-negotiable demand for absolute political control over all military assets.⁵⁵ The PLA’s approach is highly pragmatic and opaque; “ethical” behavior is ultimately defined as that which aligns with Party guidance and maintains Party control.⁵⁵ While China engages in international discussions on AI ethics, its core driver remains political reliability, not abstract principle.⁵⁷
• U.S. Approach: The DoD has publicly adopted a formal, principles-based framework for Responsible AI (RAI).⁵⁹ This framework is explicitly grounded in pre-existing legal commitments, including the Law of War, and established ethical norms.⁶⁰ It emphasizes concepts such as meaningful human control over lethal force, transparency, traceability, and accountability. The United States is actively promoting this framework on the world stage, seeking to establish it as a global standard for responsible military innovation.⁶²

The question of which nation has the “best” or most logical vision is therefore contingent on one’s theory of future great power conflict. If that conflict remains primarily a contest of military force where the speed and precision of effects are decisive, the U.S. vision is well-calibrated. However, if future conflict is primarily a cognitive and political struggle where societal cohesion and the will to fight are the main targets, China’s doctrine is more explicitly designed for this reality. A truly resilient and logical strategy must be able to compete and win in both arenas. Currently, China’s vision is more comprehensive in its definition of the problem, creating a strategic imperative for the United States to broaden its own.

Table 1: Comparative Framework of U.S. and Chinese Military AI Strategies

Attribute	People’s Republic of China	United States
Overarching Doctrine	Intelligentized Warfare / Meta-War	Decision Advantage / JADC2
Core Vision	Holistic transformation of warfare; achieving “mind dominance”	Empowering human decision-makers; achieving speed and precision
Key National Program	China Brain Project (BI-AI, BCI)	DARPA AI Next / AI Forward (Trustworthy AI)
Organizational Model	Military-Civil Fusion (State-Directed)	Public-Private Partnership (Commercially-Led)
Primary Focus	Cognitive domain, BCI, swarm autonomy, systems destruction	Networked C2, data fusion, human-machine teaming, ISR
Ethical Framework	Pragmatic; driven by the need for CCP political control	Formalized Responsible AI (RAI); driven by legal/ethical principles
Key Strengths	Top-down strategic alignment; rapid resource mobilization; vast data access	Foundational tech leadership (chips); superior compute; dynamic innovation ecosystem
Key Weaknesses	Technological chokepoints (chips); potential for systemic rigidity; the paradox of control	Bureaucratic hurdles to adoption; inter-service stovepipes; integration challenges

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IV. The Path Forward: A Five-Year Strategy for the United States

To counter China’s comprehensive strategy and secure a durable advantage in the AI era, the United States must pursue a multi-pronged strategy over the next five years. This strategy must address its primary internal weaknesses in integration while simultaneously expanding its asymmetric strengths and broadening its strategic vision to meet the full scope of the cognitive challenge.

Recommendation 1: Solidify the Foundations – Win the JADC2 Battle at Home

The most significant impediment to U.S. military AI dominance is the failure to effectively integrate its superior technological components. This internal challenge must be the first priority.

Actions:

• Empower a JADC2 Authority: Establish a JADC2 “czar” or a fully empowered joint program office with genuine budgetary and requirements authority over the services’ JADC2-related programs. This body must be empowered to enforce common standards, break down stovepipes, and ensure true interoperability.⁴³
• Mandate Enterprise-Wide Data Sharing: The Secretary of Defense should issue a directive mandating a shift from a culture of “data ownership” to one of “data stewardship.” This must be enforced by a central DoD data governance body with the authority to compel services to make data assets visible, accessible, and intelligible across the joint force.⁴³
• Reform AI Acquisition: Aggressively expand the use of agile acquisition pathways, such as Other Transaction Authority (OTA), for all AI and software-intensive programs. This will create streamlined mechanisms to rapidly transition cutting-edge commercial innovation from the private sector to the warfighter, bypassing legacy bureaucratic hurdles.⁴⁵

Recommendation 2: Expand the Asymmetric Advantage – Compute, Talent, and Alliances

The U.S. must widen its lead in the foundational elements of AI power where China remains most vulnerable and where the U.S. holds a distinct advantage.

Actions:

• Dominate the Semiconductor Race: Double down on policies like the CHIPS and Science Act and coordinate with allies to not only onshore manufacturing but to accelerate R&D into next-generation semiconductor design and advanced packaging. The goal should be to maintain a multi-generational technological lead in the hardware that powers AI.²¹
• Launch a National Defense AI Talent Initiative: Create a concerted national effort to attract and retain the world’s best AI talent. This should include streamlining security clearance processes for AI experts, establishing new talent exchange programs between the DoD and private industry, and reforming immigration policies to create a fast track for top-tier global AI researchers.¹⁶
• Operationalize CJADC2 as a Diplomatic Priority: Elevate the “Combined” aspect of CJADC2 from a technical goal to a core diplomatic effort. This involves deepening collaborative AI R&D, establishing common data and ethical frameworks, and conducting regular, large-scale joint exercises with key allies (e.g., the Five Eyes, Japan, South Korea, and key NATO partners) to build a deeply integrated, networked coalition that China cannot replicate.³¹

Recommendation 3: Counter the Cognitive Threat

The U.S. must develop a comprehensive national strategy to defend against and deter China’s cognitive warfare operations, an area where current defenses are dangerously inadequate.

Actions:

• Establish a National Cognitive Security Center: Create a new, inter-agency center co-led by the DoD, the Intelligence Community, and the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission would be to coordinate the detection, analysis, and countering of foreign, AI-driven disinformation and influence operations targeting the U.S. military and public.⁸
• Spur Counter-Influence Technology: Launch a DARPA-led grand challenge to develop advanced, real-time technologies for detecting and attributing AI-generated deepfakes, synthetic media, and coordinated inauthentic behavior online.
• Build Societal Resilience: Invest in public education and media literacy programs to inoculate the American populace against the divisive narratives that are the primary weapons of cognitive warfare, thereby strengthening the nation’s cognitive defenses from the ground up.

Recommendation 4: Beyond Decision Advantage – Crafting a Broader American Vision

To effectively compete with China’s holistic strategy, the U.S. must evolve its own military doctrine to formally recognize and address the broader dimensions of modern conflict.

Actions:

• Develop a Doctrine for Integrated Cognitive-Domain Operations: The Joint Staff, in coordination with the National Security Council, should initiate a formal process to develop a U.S. doctrine for operations in the cognitive domain. This would recognize the human mind as a contested battlefield and articulate how the instruments of national power—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic (DIME)—can be integrated to defend against and conduct cognitive operations in a manner consistent with democratic principles.
• This new doctrine must explicitly address the role of AI in both defending against and, where necessary and lawful, conducting influence and psychological operations to deter aggression and shape the strategic environment.

Recommendation 5: Weaponize Responsibility – Leveraging the Ethical High Ground

The U.S. commitment to Responsible AI should be transformed from a perceived constraint into a potent strategic advantage that distinguishes the U.S. and its allies from their authoritarian rivals.

Actions:

• Lead on International Norms: Launch a major diplomatic initiative to build upon the U.S. Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of AI, with the goal of making its principles the foundation for a binding international treaty or a widely adopted set of norms among the world’s democracies.⁶²
• Condition AI Sales and Transfers: In all foreign military sales and technology-sharing agreements involving AI-enabled systems, require partner nations to adopt and adhere to RAI principles as a condition of the transfer. This will help build a global military AI ecosystem based on U.S. standards of safety, ethics, and reliability.
• Highlight the Authoritarian Contradiction: Use public diplomacy and strategic communications to consistently expose the fundamental weakness in China’s approach: the impossibility of guaranteeing safe, reliable, or ethical AI when a system’s ultimate arbiter is not objective law or principle, but the shifting political imperatives of the CCP.⁵⁵

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V. Conclusion

The contest for military AI supremacy between the United States and China is a competition between two profoundly different systems. The United States currently holds a critical advantage in foundational technology, talent, and innovation, but this lead is fragile. China’s broader, more cohesive, and more revolutionary strategic vision—which integrates technological development with a “whole-of-society” mobilization and a doctrine aimed at cognitive dominance—poses a long-term threat that cannot be countered by superior microchips alone.

China is preparing for a future war fought not just on land, at sea, and in the air, but in the virtual space of networks and the cognitive space of the human mind. The U.S., while building a formidable technological arsenal, is still primarily focused on winning a faster and more efficient version of the last war. The nation with the best vision for the future will not be the one with the single best algorithm, but the one that can most successfully integrate its technological prowess, its organizational structure, and its guiding principles into a coherent and resilient whole. The five-year strategy outlined in this report is designed to ensure that nation is the United States, by first fixing its critical internal integration challenges while simultaneously broadening its strategic vision to compete and win in every domain—physical, virtual, and, most decisively, cognitive.

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