PLA Daily declared this week that AI-driven warfare has reached a turning point, citing the US-Israeli campaign against Iran as the first conflict where artificial intelligence was integrated across the entire kill chain, and urging the People's Liberation Army to accelerate its own adoption before the gap widens further.
The commentary, published Thursday in China's official military newspaper, was unusually direct. It described the US-Israeli strikes on Iran as a practical validation of AI's strategic military value, noting that the technology was embedded across the full operational cycle: intelligence analysis, target identification, mission planning, and battle damage assessment. "This has practically demonstrated and validated the vast application potential and significant strategic value of AI in the military domain," the article stated, calling AI a "core engine" reshaping warfare, armed forces, and the global strategic landscape. The message to the PLA was explicit: rapid transformation of AI for combat is not optional. It is inevitable, and necessary to gain the advantage in future warfare.
The conflict the PLA Daily was studying began on February 28, 2026, when the US and Israel launched a coordinated offensive against Iran. In the first twelve hours, nearly 900 targets were struck. Before a single missile was fired, AI systems had already mapped the battlefield: networks were infiltrated, communications disrupted, sensors blinded. As Eurasia Review's subsequent analysis described it, "the war had already been decided by machines" before jets appeared in the sky. The system powering much of the US targeting was Project Maven, built on Palantir technology and incorporating Anthropic's Claude model. It compressed the kill chain, the sequence from target identification through legal authorization to strike execution, from a process that historically took days into one that took minutes. The Guardian reported that the speed raised immediate fears about whether human decision-making had been effectively sidelined.
What the PLA Learned, and What It Is Building
PLA Daily identified intelligent situational awareness as the primary domain where the People's Liberation Army needs to focus investment. This encompasses active early warning systems capable of real-time target identification and tracking, predictive modeling of enemy intent, and autonomous decision support that reduces the cognitive load on commanders in high-tempo operations. The article reflects a broader strategic framework the PLA calls "intelligentization," the third phase of China's military modernization following mechanization and informatization, and one that its strategists have been developing conceptually for several years. What Iran provided was empirical confirmation that the concept works at operational scale.
Defense News reported earlier this month, citing Georgetown University analyst Sam Bresnick, that PLA leaders place particular value on AI decision support precisely because most of their personnel lack battlefield experience. American commanders who have rotated through Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria carry institutional knowledge that cannot be easily replicated. AI systems that model battlefield decisions can, in theory, partially compensate for that deficit. China may have already surpassed the United States in one specific domain: a Taiwan-based analyst cited by Defense News assessed that the PLA has a meaningful lead in AI for drone swarm coordination, a capability that matters enormously in any scenario involving the Taiwan Strait.
The Technology That Made Iran Possible
The Iran conflict did not come together overnight. Project Maven, the Pentagon's AI targeting program, was launched in 2017 and spent years absorbing data from Gaza and Lebanon before being deployed at scale against Iran. Israel's own AI targeting systems, which were stress-tested in Gaza beginning in late 2023, provided a parallel development track. The result in February 2026 was a military that had effectively industrialized target generation: tens of thousands of targets in a single conflict, processed and prioritized at machine speed, with human authorization compressed to the point where critics questioned whether meaningful oversight remained in the loop at all. The strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed over 165 people on the first day of the conflict triggered a Pentagon investigation into whether Project Maven played a role, raising the accountability questions that AI warfare generates and that no existing legal framework has yet resolved.
For Beijing, the Iran conflict is less a moral referendum than a technical briefing. The PLA Daily commentary is not the first signal of this kind: a March report in the same publication highlighted AI's use in battlefield perception, intelligent decision support, and autonomous control systems, and the Pentagon's own annual report to Congress on Chinese military developments noted that the PLA is using civil-military fusion mechanisms to route private sector AI breakthroughs directly into military systems. DeepSeek's capabilities, developed for commercial applications, are now being studied for military relevance. The same efficiency breakthroughs that make DeepSeek V4 competitive with GPT-5 at a fraction of the cost are applicable to the inference workloads that power battlefield AI systems. China's software-centric approach to AI development, which has frustrated US chip export controls by achieving frontier performance on constrained hardware, turns out to be exactly the right architecture for a military that cannot rely on access to the most advanced American semiconductors. The Iran war accelerated a race that was already running. The PLA Daily commentary signals that Beijing has no intention of letting the gap widen further.
