China's PLA opens colleges to train officers and technicians for drones and AI

Three of the PLA's four new colleges are for people who have to make equipment work on an ordinary day ^[1]. China's defense policy has used the words "informationised" and "intelligentised" for years, according to Interesting Engineering ^[8]. The colleges that opened on September 30 are meant to produce, on a schedule, the officers and technicians who keep drones and the rest of that equipment working ^[1].

The announcement leads with the College of Unmanned and Intelligent Engineering, and AI-assisted decision-making is on its syllabus ^[2]. The actual staffing happens a level down, in the two schools for non-commissioned officers. NCOs are the career soldiers who sit between the enlisted ranks and commissioned officers ^[12]. In Western armies, the outlet notes, they matter most in technical fields where complex equipment has to be operated and maintained ^[12]. Interesting Engineering wrote that the schools are a way to build into the PLA the skills Beijing believes will matter in future warfare, and that they do not amount to a new AI army ^[10].

The unmanned college's location says more than its course list. It is a formal college inside the Army Engineering University ^[3]. Interesting Engineering takes that as a sign that drones and AI now need "a permanent stream of trained engineers and officers" ^[13]. Some of the curriculum is still a forecast: the outlet says integration engineering will "likely" be taught ^[11]. The report does not give enrollment figures or say how the PLA has bought and fielded drones until now. So it cannot show whether the colleges replace a run of procurement trials. The outlet's view is that they make an existing direction formal, one in which President Xi has pushed for the armed forces to make more use of networked information systems and of unmanned, intelligent technology ^[8][9].

The timetable follows anniversaries. Reports link the colleges to Beijing's "centennial goals" for the PLA's 100th birthday in 2027 and to a target of full modernization by 2035 ^[7]. That target is nine years after the inauguration ^[2]. The fourth college has nothing to do with drones, but it follows the same pattern. It gives career investigators of misconduct a school of their own, at the National Defence University's Xian campus ^[6].

Whether drones become part of how the PLA staffs turns on two questions: does someone own keeping them running, and is there a route by which new people learn them? A training route with no maintainer would give the army people who can demo a drone and nobody who can fix it. A maintainer with no training route would leave it depending on one person it cannot lose. On September 30 the PLA answered yes to both, with the Army Engineering University as the training route and the College of Equipment Support as the maintainer ^[3][5].