Gadget factories ready to play military role

High technology undergoes a dramatic transformation when it hits China — everything from smartphones to laptops to telecommunications networks go from being expensive and proprietary to being cheap and easy to produce in a few short years.

Thousands of factories in southern China churn out components for iPhone or iPad imitations, sometimes in the same factories that produce the Apple gadgets themselves.

Could the commodification of technology happen to defence industries as well? This is an important question for the Pentagon.

The prospect of robot wars in the future raises the question of whether quantity will finally trump quality when it comes to military hardware. This trend clearly favours China as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse.

Another trend favouring China is that next-generation defence technologies are more and more indistinguishable from the civilian technologies mass- produced in cities like Shenzhen.

While recent breakthroughs in stealth and precision guidance were purely military applications, the next round might be in areas such as facial recognition or autonomous driving, and are as likely to come from the private sector as from the military, both in the US and China.

This blurring of lines has been recognised by President Xi Jinping, who this year created a Military-Civil Integration Development Commission with himself as head.

Military industry in China now feeds off the private industry and vice versa: China has become the market leader in commercial drones, as well as a robust exporter of military drones based on US models such as the Reaper and the Predator to countries such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

A third trend favouring China is that software has become more important than hardware.

As part of an effort to reduce their reliance on US technology companies such as IBM and Oracle, Chinese banks have begun using systems based on simpler servers kitted out with advanced software.

Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications manufacturer, has embraced “software-defined networks” that are designed to be much cheaper than the previous proprietary networks, run by cloud-based software that knits together standardised routers and switches.

Autonomous drone-swarm technology represents the culmination of this trend — cheap, commoditised hardware functioning on high-powered software. FINANCIAL TIMES