China's Military AI Logistics: Peacetime Gains, Wartime Vulnerabilities

For decades, Chinese military planners have viewed logistics as the decisive factor in any campaign against Taiwan and across the broader Indo-Pacific. Sustaining large-scale operations across the strait would require moving and supplying forces under intense pressure, making logistics both a critical vulnerability and a priority for reform.

Established in 2016 as part of Chinese military reforms, the Joint Logistic Support Force serves as the Chinese army’s centralised logistics command, coordinating support across all services. It manages theatre‑level support centres and depots while drawing data from military units, bases and civilian contractors to develop cross‑theatre sustainment plans. China refers to this as ‘smart joint logistics’, with the force fusing data from military and civilian systems into unified support plans across theatres. Recent work has focused on combining information systems with AI applications to support more automated planning processes.

A key element of China’s approach is military‑civil fusion. Commercial firms supply a substantial portion of military technology, data platforms and transport capacity. Civilian transport networks, ports and communications infrastructure are being incorporated into military logistics planning. At the same time, sensor networks and AI platforms are being linked to existing logistics structures, allowing military planners to treat national freight networks and digital platforms as extensions of the military supply system. This enables China’s armed forces to draw on commercial capacity rather than building separate military systems.

Specific applications include the Military Fuel Internet‑of‑Things platform, which uses sensors to monitor fuel stocks and distribution in real time. In peacetime, these developments support several changes in how logistics functions are performed. Planning can incorporate larger volumes of data from both military and civilian sources, and stock levels can be managed with greater precision through improved forecasting. National commercial transport assets can be mobilised more systematically during training or surge requirements.

China’s military has worked with civilian logistics and e-commerce companies to strengthen multimodal transport, signing agreements with major providers to support the movement of forces and supplies over long distances during exercises and contingencies. These arrangements are intended to improve coordination between different theatres and allow logistics planners to shift resources more rapidly in response to changing priorities. Chinese military planners present these changes as a way to cut waste, speed up resupply and use scarce logistics resources more efficiently.

Beijing’s objective is to create a logistics system capable of sustaining higher‑tempo operations across multiple domains. The Chinese military hopes to link this goal to reducing delays that have historically affected campaign planning and execution, with the promise that more data, more automation and access to commercial capacity will let commanders move and resupply forces faster and over greater distances than the legacy system would have allowed. Integration with commercial scale and technology is presented as a way to achieve leapfrog development and narrow the gap with more advanced militaries, especially the United States.

In contrast, the US has prioritised concepts for contested logistics that stress dispersed stocks, hardened military communications and reduced dependence on commercial networks in forward areas. US planning often accepts higher peacetime costs to limit exposure once conflict begins and assumes that logistics networks will face significant disruption in dispersed operations. This has led to greater emphasis on self‑sufficiency and military‑controlled supply chains in forward areas rather than reliance on commercial systems.

Back in China, these developments are reshaping how the military plans, moves and sustains forces in peacetime and in preparation for higher‑tempo operations. Whether these developments ultimately strengthen or constrain China’s military logistics in wartime will depend on how resilient these new systems prove to be when contested, which I will address in another article.

Gerald Mako is a research affiliate at the Cambridge Central Asia Forum at Cambridge University.

AI contributed no ideas to this article – Gerald Mako.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).