ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
China
(A few select snippets)
China has similar aims in global shipping and resource access, including in the Arctic, where melting sea ice is creating opportunities for expanded maritime transport and energy exploitation, especially along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) off Russia’s coast. China seeks access to the Arctic’s potentially vast natural resources, including oil, gas, and minerals, even though China is not among the eight Arctic countries that control territory in the region. Beijing seeks to normalize more direct and efficient maritime shipping routes to Russia and other Northern Hemisphere areas, as a way to fuel its economic growth and energy security and reduce its dependence on Middle East energy. China has gradually increased engagement with Greenland mainly through mining projects, infrastructure development, and scientific research projects. Despite less active engagement right now, China’s long-term goal is to expand access to Greenland’s natural resources, as well as to use the same access as a key strategic foothold for advancing China’s broader and economic aims in the Arctic.
Some forecasts indicate China’s technology sectors will account for as much as 23 percent of its gross domestic product by 2026, more than doubling since 2018. In addition to private funding, the PRC government is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in priority technologies, such as AI, microelectronics, and biotechnologies, in pursuit of its self-reliance goals.
China almost certainly has a multifaceted, national-level strategy designed to displace the United States as the world’s most influential AI power by 2030. China is experiencing a boom in generative AI with the rapid emergence of a large number of PRC-developed models, and is broadly pursuing AI for smart cities, mass surveillance, healthcare, S&T innovation, and intelligent weapons. Chinese AI firms are already world leaders in voice and image recognition, video analytics, and mass surveillance technologies. The PLA probably plans to use large language models (LLMs) to generate information deception attacks, create fake news, imitate personas, and enable attack networks. China has also announced initiatives to bolster international support for its vision of AI governance.
China has stolen hundreds of gigabytes of intellectual property from companies in Asia, Europe, and North America in an effort to leapfrog over technological hurdles, with as much as 80 percent of U.S. economic espionage cases as of 2021 involving PRC entities
The PLA has the capability to conduct long-range precision-strikes with conventional weapons against the Homeland’s periphery in the Western Pacific, including Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska. China has developed a range of ballistic and cruise missiles with conventional payloads that can be delivered from its mainland as well as by air and sea, including by nuclear-powered submarines. China may be exploring development of conventionally-armed intercontinental range missile systems, which, if developed and fielded, would allow China to threaten conventional strikes against targets in the continental United States. The PLA will continue to pursue the establishment of overseas military installations and access agreements to project power and protect China’s interests abroad. Beijing may also pursue a mixture of military logistics models, including preferred access to commercial infrastructure abroad, exclusive PLA logistics facilities with pre-positioned supplies co-located with commercial infrastructure, and bases with stationed forces, to meet its overseas military logistics needs.
If Beijing believed that a major conflict with Washington was imminent, it could consider aggressive cyber operations against U.S. critical infrastructure and military assets. Such strikes would be designed to deter U.S. military action by impeding U.S. decision-making, inducing societal panic, and interfering with the deployment of U.S. forces
China’s approach to and role in global biological, medical, and other health-related global priorities present unique challenges to the United States and the world The COVID-19 pandemic that ultimately led to the death of more than one million Americans—and multiples more worldwide—began in China, which Beijing still refuses to acknowledge. China’s strict censorship and repression of free speech prevented doctors treating the earliest of patients in Wuhan from warning the world of a far more serious contagion than Beijing wanted told, slowing the world’s preparedness and response. To this day, Beijing refuses to fully cooperate with the rest of the international community trying to definitively pinpoint the precise cause of the disease so it can head off and prepare for any new disease.
China has eclipsed Russia as a space leader and is poised to compete with the United States as the world’s leader in space by deploying increasingly capable interconnected multi-sensor systems and working toward ambitious scientific and strategic goals. China has achieved global coverage in some of its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) constellations and world-class status in all but a few space technologies.
Counterspace operations will be integral to PLA military campaigns, and China has counterspace-weapons capabilities intended to target U.S. and allied satellites. China already has fielded ground-based counterspace capabilities, including EW systems, directed energy weapons (DEWs), and antisatellite (ASAT) missiles intended to disrupt, damage, and destroy target satellites. • China also has conducted orbital technology demonstrations, which, while not counterspace weapons tests, prove its ability to operate future space-based counterspace weapons. China has also conducted on-orbit satellite inspections of other satellites, which probably would be representative of the tactics required for some counterspace attacks.
Russia
(A few select snippets)
Regardless of how and when the war in Ukraine ends, Russia’s current geopolitical, economic, military, and domestic political trends underscore its resilience and enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence, and global interests. Despite having paid enormous military and economic costs in its war with Ukraine, Russia has proven adaptable and resilient, in part because of the expanded backing of China, Iran, and North Korea. President Vladimir Putin appears resolved and prepared to pay a very high price to prevail in what he sees as a defining time in Russia’s strategic competition with the United States, world history, and his personal legacy. Most Russian people continue to passively accept the war, and the emergence of an alternative to Putin probably is less likely now than at any point in his quarter-century rule.
Russia has shown it can navigate substantial economic challenges resulting from the ongoing drains of the war, Western cost imposition, and high inflation and interest rates, for at least the near term by using financial and import substitution workarounds, maintaining low debt, and continuing investments in the defense-industrial base. Russia’s economy remains the fourth largest in the world (based on GDP at purchasing power parity).
- The war in Ukraine has afforded Moscow a wealth of lessons regarding combat against Western weapons and intelligence in a large-scale war. This experience probably will challenge future U.S. defense planning, including against other adversaries with whom Moscow is sharing those lessons learned.
Moscow will contend with long-term challenges such as troop quality and corruption, and a fertility rate below what is needed for replacements, but its investments in personnel recruitment and procurement should allow it to steadily reconstitute reserves and expand ground forces in particular during the next decade. Nevertheless, the war in Ukraine will be a drag on those efforts as long as it persists. Moscow will have to continually balance resource allocation between large-scale production of equipment to sustain the war with modernization and recapitalization efforts.
Russia’s advanced cyber capabilities, its repeated success compromising sensitive targets for intelligence collection, and its past attempts to pre-position access on U.S. critical infrastructure make it a persistent counterintelligence and cyber attack threat. Moscow’s unique strength is the practical experience it has gained integrating cyber attacks and operations with wartime military action, almost certainly amplifying its potential to focus combined impact on U.S. targets in time of conflict.
Russia continues to train its military space elements and field new antisatellite weapons to disrupt and degrade U.S. and allied space capabilities. It is expanding its arsenal of jamming systems, DEWs, on-orbit counterspace capabilities, and ASAT missiles designed to target U.S. and allied satellites.
Russia is developing a new satellite meant to carry a nuclear weapon as an antisatellite capability. A nuclear
detonation in outer space could cause devastating consequences for the United States, the global
economy, and the world in general. It would harm all countries’ national security and commercial
satellites and infrastructure, as well as impair U.S. use of space as a driver for economic development.
• In February 2022, Russia launched a satellite, which its Ministry of Defense claimed at the time
was for testing on-board instruments and systems under the influence of radiation and heavy
charged particles.
While Russia’s S&T ecosystem has been constrained in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow continues to deploy
nascent AI applications on and off the battlefield and has deepened technical cooperation with partners such as China
in support of long-term R&D goals. Moscow’s use of AI to augment military operations probably will further
hone Russian tactics and capabilities in the event of future conflicts with the United States or NATO allies.
• Russia is using AI to create highly-capable deepfakes to spread misinformation, conduct malign
influence operations, and stoke further fear. Russia has also demonstrated the use of AI-enabled
antidrone equipment during its ongoing conflict with Ukraine.
• Russia’s few domestic microelectronics manufacturers have only mastered production of chips down to
the 65nm level and has goals of mass producing 28nm chips by 2030, significantly behind global leaders.