Hello and welcome. I’m Mike, and this is Orders and Observations, a new Substack focused on the Chinese military and the present state, future trajectory, and fascinating history of military command, control, communications, intelligence, and reconnaissance (C4ISR).
For the past decade, I’ve worked in the U.S. national security world, first as a intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency and then as a contractor with the Pentagon’s acquisition and R&E communities. My work has focused on Chinese military strategy, space systems, AI, and the backbone of how militaries talk, sense, decide, and strike. C4ISR is where all of that comes together; it’s the connective tissue of modern warfare.
My goal with this newsletter is to explore how the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and other militaries are trying to solve enduring C2 and ISR challenges and incorporate new technologies like AI.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about topics like:
The PLA’s evolving command structure
China’s military communication networks and modalities
Beijing’s growing space-based ISR and communication capabilities
The PLA’s integration of AI and other advanced technologies
PLA long-range kill chains and their enabling technologies
If any of that sounds interesting, subscribe. Share it. Or just follow along quietly (no pressure.)
Thanks for reading. The first real post will drop soon. Stay tuned.
— Mike
Lucky to find this and look forward to reading.
Pt. 2 China article popped up in the home feed. Will go back to the beginning like a good von Trapp
Very deep topic ... I can't say much about the milTech side but I note that modern (consumer) markets treat FMCG as information (bits) flowing from consumer to supply chains, and logistics of atoms flowing the other direction. In peacetime, this lead to a major paradigm shift by Japanese ... Just-in-Time which optimised inventory (and thus capital costs) to support their automated robots (Detroit missed the JIT angle). COVID showed the fragility of such a system.
I postulate a new formation ... Just-in-Case where in addition to information flows, you create some autonomy by caching supplies which can be auto-delivered via new field robot-carriers.