The US and China are racing to militarize the virtual universe

A US soldier trains with augmented reality devices – Photo: DVID, Breaking Defense

Last December, in a small US Air Force office, military officials held a meeting with about 250 people with whiteboards, notes and yellow brochures as usual in every room. combat meeting.

But that meeting room does not exist in reality, and the attendees are hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart from the US to Japan. All wore Oculus augmented reality (VR) devices.

Familiar but strange to America

In fact, when it came to the concept of the “metaverse,” years ago, the Pentagon experimented with the broad concept of interconnected virtual worlds.

In 1978, Air Force Captain Jack Thorpe published an article outlining the idea of ​​building a website for linking combat plans. This idea was watched and developed, upgraded to a SIMNET system and then transferred to the Pentagon.

“If the metaverse is simply a series of interconnected virtual worlds, I can safely say that there have been odd types of metaverses in the military since the 90s of the 20th century,” the researcher said. Jennifer McArdle of the Center for a American Security recently raised the issue with the defense site Breaking Defense.

Mr. Palmer Luckey, founder of defense startup Anduril Industries – which created the VR device Oculus – agrees with Ms. McArdle’s view. The US military is very alert when it comes to the metaverse and is trying to dig deeper into this virtual world for military purposes.

“People in the military understand how VR can solve problems that they’ve been thinking about for the past 20, 30, or even 40 years,” Luckey explained. “As technology advances, they can use it for a whole host of things in the military.”

In the Florida city of Orlando, Brigadier General William Glaser’s team is trying to build a “Synthetic Training Environment” (STE) for the US military. This technology, in a way, can be seen as a military metaverse when it comes to actually connecting other people through the virtual world.

STE is used as an additional training environment for soldiers in the field. It allows multiple participants, with platoon levels and up, to plan combat in simulated situations and environments from urban to mountainous, desert or swampy.

3 types of confrontation

In an article published last month in the Association of Military Cyberspace Professionals, researcher Josh Baughman (US National Defense University) asserted that China sees the metaverse as a place where digital space combines scenarios. Real combat version.

Beijing also believes that an attack on an opponent’s metaverse can “influence the opponent’s thinking, perception, and decision-making.”

Indeed, in an article published in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) daily on March 3, PLA researchers talked about applying the metaverse to future cognitive warfare.

The writer is from the Institute of Military Political Work of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, which is the highest-level research institute of the PLA and is directly under the Central Military Commission. The Metaverse, as understood by the PLA, is a highly developed cognitive world and although virtual, it is an extension of reality.

The PLA predicts there will be three types of confrontation in the metaverse. The first is “platform confrontation” which involves hostile forces using the metaverse for attacks or defense to disrupt, block, destroy, and eliminate opponents in the metaverse.

The second is attacks on “supply chains and systems” that block nodes and key tactical operations in the enemy’s metaverse. Finally, attack, damage technological devices to change the way the metaverse works.

The US government’s concerns about China’s development of cognitive warfare were exposed last December, after the US Commerce Department imposed sanctions on a number of Chinese technology companies. Quoc for participating in “brain control” war research.

This may just be the tip of the iceberg when the US-China competition is getting fiercer. In that context, the competition between the two countries in the metaverse, a new field, will certainly have mobilization from many levels and be larger than what outsiders are envisioning.

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