Force of the Future

How information technology is changing Chinese shipbuilding industry

Information technology is changing how we do business, shop communicate, make friends, and make war. The information revolution is staggering in its scale. In 2015, global spending on information technology was expected to exceed $3.8 trillion, or double all military spending-procurement, research and development, personnel, construction-by every country on Earth. The scale of this investment, along with continued exponential growth in computing power, practically guarantees disruptive change. Indeed, in the past two years the U.S Navy has demonstrated three novel capabilities that would have been difficult if not impossible without advanced computers-landing an unmanned aircraft on a carrier, landing a tailless aircraft on a carrier, and performing automated aerial refueling with an unmanned aircraft. As the information revolution continues, in what ways might it change warfare?

The Unfolding Information Revolution

The information revolution is upending a range of industries, with applications as wide-ranging as social media, warehouse robots, and home-streaming videos. What is the nature of the information revolution? What are the underlying trends in what information technology enables, and how might these change warfare? Across the many diverse applications of information technology run three core trends: increasing transparency, connectivity, and machine intelligence.

Increasing Transparency

One of the core features of the information revolution is the “datafication” of our world-the generation of large amounts of digital data. Combined with the fact that computers make it almost costless to copy information, this has resulted in a freer flow of information that is making this world increasingly transparent. Satellite images, once the province only of superpowers, are now available free online. Even secret government data is not a secret as it once was. Edward Snowden, a U.S intelligence community contractor, has been reported by the U.S government to have stolen in excess of about 1.7 million documents, the largest leak in history. A leak of such scale would have been nearly impossible in a predigital era. Compare, for example, the Vietnam-era Pentagon papers, seven thousand pages that were photocopied by hand. The datafication of our world combined with the ease with which digital information can be copied and shared is leading to a world that is more transparent, with secrets harder to keep on all sides. Sifting through this massive amount of data, particularly when it is unstructured and heterogeneous, becomes a major challenge.

Increasing Connectivity

Information technology is increasing the degree of connectivity between people and things, both in terms of the number of people and things online as well as the volume and bandwidth of information exchanged. As the Internet continues to colonize the material would, more objects are increasingly networked (i.e, Internet of things), enabling remote access and information-sharing, as well as making them susceptible to hacking. Social media enables many-to-many communication, allowing any individual to share their story or report on abuses of authorities. The result is a fundamental shift in communication power dynamics, upending relationships between individuals and traditional authorities. In addition connectivity allows crowdsourcing of problems and ideas, accelerating the pace of innovation and the velocity and volume of human communication.

Increasingly Intelligent Machines

The rapid growth in computing power is resulting in increasingly intelligent machines. When embodied in physical machines, this trend is allowing the growth of increasingly capable and autonomous robotic systems. Advanced computing also allows for the processing of large amounts of data, including gene sequencing, enabling advances in “big data.” Artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology. While current computing methods have limitations and face tapering growth rates. Possible novel computing methods-such as quantum com