China’s habit of attempting to steal promising U.S. technological innovations and even appearing to copy U.S. design configurations and weapons platforms is well known, yet there now appears to be indications that the People’s Liberation Army is copying U.S. military multi-domain tactical warfare concepts.
Chinese Warfare Theft
For many years now, the U.S. military has been conducting specific multi-domain combat training operations and war preparation exercises to include landing Army helicopters on Navy ships, forming Multi-Domain task forces in the Pacific and firing land weapons at ocean targets.
Based upon land-sea-air networking, the concept of operation is to find and hand-off targets, conduct joint attack operations and draw upon advantages and attributes specific to certain domain platforms such as fighter jets, surface ships and land artillery. In certain scenarios, the Army has explored the prospect of using land-based weapons for maritime attack, as many ground munitions have the guidance technology, range and explosive components to track and destroy moving ships at sea.
One senior Army weapons developer explained it to me this way … “it does not matter if the target of a land weapons is on land or at sea at the ocean,” meaning land-launched missiles, rockets and even artillery can fire from coastal areas out onto the ocean. This is particularly significant in areas such as the Pacific given the large amount of island chains and coastal areas in the Pacific.
Now China is practicing multi-domain maneuvers in the Pacific with live-fire exercises shooting long-range rocket artillery against “different types of maritime targets,” the Chinese Global Times newspaper reports.
