China's Military Insists AI Can't Replace Commanders. Xi May Be Betting Otherwise

The People's Liberation Army Daily has spent much of the past year repeating a single line: however fast artificial intelligence sorts sensor data or drafts strike options, final command authority and responsibility belong to a human officer, not a machine. Jaehwan Lim, writing in War on the Rocks, takes that insistence seriously and then reads past it. Only a human commander, the paper argues, can bear the moral and political weight of ordering troops to kill and die — a formula Lim traces to a 2025 doctrinal essay that explicitly denies AI any role in allocating command responsibility. But the emphasis on human primacy, Lim argues, obscures a deeper wager Xi Jinping is making: that superior technology can compensate for the institutional damage his own purges have inflicted on the PLA's officer corps. A hollowed-out, politically vetted command structure is precisely the kind of force that most needs AI to compress the gap between observation and action. The doctrine of human control, in other words, may be less a constraint on the technology than a cover story for why China needs it so badly. For a military that has not fought a war in over four decades, the test of that wager will come only in crisis — over Taiwan, most plausibly — when doctrine meets reality.