Article Posted on : - Jul 23, 2014

An armoured vehicle of the PLA. An MoD photo

BEIJING (BNS): China is making efforts to convert its existing armoured fighting vehicles into unmanned ones for future warfare operations, a senior military official has said.

"Unmanned ground vehicles will play a very important role in future ground combat. Realising that, we have begun to explore how to refit our armoured vehicles into unmanned ones," Maj. Gen. Xu Hang, president of the PLA Academy of Armoured Forces Engineering in Beijing, told the media.

"Though we have yet to develop unmanned tanks, I think it is an irreversible trend that computers will gradually replace humans to control those fighting machines," the official was quoted as saying by the China Daily newspaper.

Last month, the China North Industries Group Corp, one of the nation's major defence technology and equipment contractors, founded China's first research centre dedicated to the development of unmanned ground vehicles in Beijing, the report said.

Meng Hong, deputy director of the centre, said that the US has invented a series of unmanned ground vehicles and put them to use in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such vehicles enable military personnel to investigate suspicious objects or perform other tasks in dangerous scenarios from a safe distance.

While the Chinese engineers have developed some unmanned military vehicles, they have not been widely used by the PLA so far, the official said.

The Chinese PLA uses a large number and wide range of battle tanks and infantry vehicles.