The perfect proving ground for the Military Singularity

The long-disputed China-India border as a sandbox for future drone-defined warfare

Old school “Ender’s Game”

To me, the perfect proving ground for the looming Military Singularity in which drones, robots, and AI combine to make the battlefield too dangerous for actual troops, thus constricting warfare to unmanned elements only, is a conflict scenario/venue that:

1. Involves two superpowers (for speed of experimentation and adoption) who are

   1. Risers/recently risen, so national pride is on the line

   2. Who have a long history of rivalry

2. Comprises something of value to both sides, but over which national ownership is disputed (a border zone)

3. A relatively lightly populated theater of operations

4. Off the beaten path (like up in the mountains)

5. Can be compartmentalized from the rest of the relationship.

   

   https://images.app.goo.gl/uzotdcVnEbrbCKg98

India and China’s disputed mountainous border in the Himalayas that separate the two Asian behemoths strikes me as the perfect proving ground. From America’s New Map:

India’s relationship with China is complicated by their long-disputed mountainous Himalayan border, where the two fought an intense but truncated war in 1962. India and China have never formally agreed on the matter, which is why they have engaged in countless skirmishes over the decades concerning the Line of Actual Control—a diplomatic oxymoron for a border suffering frequent incursions from both sides.

Elevating the matter in importance: China’s side of the border comprises the Tibet Autonomous Region annexed by Beijing in 1959. Mao Zedong famously intimated that China would eventually reclaim the “five fingers of Tibet”— namely, the independent border states Nepal and Bhutan, along with one Indian territory (Ladakh) and two Indian states (Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh).

If that was not enough, Tibet’s mountains are the starting point for seven rivers that flow into India—all subject to dam-construction and flow-diversion schemes pursued by an increasingly water-insecure China.

Beijing, keen to present itself as law-abiding, nonetheless sits atop several thousand years of historic expansionism along its borders. In this never-ending endeavor, China has mastered what the West has dubbed “salami slicing” tactics (in Chinese, nibbling like a silkworm), wherein soft- and hard-power schemes combine to incrementally advance their lines of control in an unstoppable sov- ereign “velocity” not unlike climate change’s creeping advance.

Well, India just built a big tunnel in the border region of Arunachal Pradesh:

A tunnel constructed high in the mountains of northeastern India has become the latest flashpoint in a simmering border dispute between New Delhi and Beijing.

The Sela Tunnel, inaugurated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this month, has been hailed in India as a feat of engineering … enabling faster, “all-weather” access to a tense de facto border with China.

That’s caught the attention of Beijing, whose long-running dispute with New Delhi over their contested 2,100-mile (3,379-kilometer) border has seen the two nuclear-armed powers clash in recent years.

That includes in 2020 when hand-to-hand fighting between the two sides resulted in the deaths of at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers in Aksai Chin-Ladakh in the western stretches of the border …

China also claims the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, where the tunnel was constructed, as its own, even as the area has long functioned as Indian territory.

Chinese officials in recent days have slammed the tunnel project and Modi’s visit to the state.

Now, it’s not like China is going to blow up the tunnel or anything, but it has to signal displeasure in various “nibbling” ways, and using drones and robots provocatively is really good for that.