S8 Ep131: China's AI War Planning Focuses on Deception, Raises Global Thermonuclear Risk — General Blaine Holt — General Holt examines China's PLA war planning, which prioritizes using artificial intelligence for grand deception operations. He argues that fifth-gen

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🗓️ 27 November 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

China's AI War Planning Focuses on Deception, Raises Global Thermonuclear Risk — General Blaine Holt — General Holt examines China's PLA war planning, which prioritizes using artificial intelligence for grand deception operations. He argues that fifth-generation warfare, leveraging deepfakes and large language models, is potentially more destructive than nuclear weapons. Holt warns that autonomous AI systems adjudicating warfare decisions—analogous to WarGames—represents a probable future scenario. He assesses NATO as "slow and archaic," underscoring the urgent need for advanced indicators, warning systems, and diplomatic frameworks to manage emerging technological threats.

NOVEMBER 1973

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is CBSI on the world.
0:07.0	I'm John Batchel.
0:07.8	Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang, my colleague and a co-host, and we're very pleased to be
0:12.5	joined by General Blaine Holt, U.S. Air Force, retired to help us through a story in Defense
0:17.4	One most recently.
0:19.0	That is a level of war planning that I was not ready to learn about,
0:23.4	but here it is. To China's war planners, artificial intelligence is just another thing to deceive.
0:30.1	Subhead, the People's Liberation Army is prepping for battles in which AI's work to distort each other's
0:36.9	reality.
0:38.9	Well, in a very good evening to you, there is a very famous Star Trek episode where two cities have been at war for centuries.
0:46.7	And they discovered that war was very messy.
0:49.4	People died. Families were broken up.
0:51.7	There was a lot of tears.
0:53.4	So they decided that they could use their
0:55.9	ability to program. And they came up with a war that isn't actually fought, except imaginatively,
1:03.3	with electronic signals. And when one electronic signal representing a missile gets through the
1:09.8	defenses and hits a sector of this gigantic
1:12.8	city, the people who are in that sector at that moment have to report to certain nodes around
1:20.4	the city where you're evaporated because you've been killed. This turns war into something that
1:26.0	doesn't bleed. It's not messy and is favored until the Star Trek crew shows up and points out the moral disadvantage of playing a game that never will end.
1:37.3	This AI story is not the whole thing, but it reminds me of that.
1:42.0	They're anticipating a war that isn't real and challenging the other side to decide what to respond to and what to duck.
	...

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