China’s military is looking to adopt blockchain technology for personnel management with the aim of developing an ideal reward mechanism. The move will involve collection and management of personnel data such as training, career path, missions undertaken, and performance reports. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) perceives blockchain technology to be a key driver of its innovation strategy and a proper tool for improving its military management.
The interest in blockchain technology by PLA is based on its immutability making it quite suitable to record and store its personnel data permanently. As such, the distributed ledger database will act as a credible and trustworthy source of information that can be relied upon by officials in making key strategic decisions. The innovative technology is viewed as an effective tool that is able to give feedback more accurately and promptly thus aiding the decision making process.
The PLA is looking to leverage the blockchain technology attributes to create a non-financial incentives scheme through which soldiers can be rewarded subject to objective evaluations. It can be used to calculate and evaluate the soldiers’ performance. Good performance rewarded with tokens and bad performance resulting in potential token deductions. This is considered to be a far more superior and efficient mechanism for incentivizing its personnel as compared to the existing rewards mechanism. Its immediacy, security, and reliability are considered to be more favorable and confer greater benefits to the personnel.
Besides personnel management, the PLA is also understood to be exploring other blockchain technology use cases in the military. They are interested in using the technology’s high level encryption capacity as a potential tool for storing military secrets and generally improving information security within the army. These explorations are gaining further momentum especially since the public endorsement of blockchain technology by China’s President Xi Jinping. The endorsement has prompted multiple Chinese government agencies to pursue innovation around blockchain and the PLA does not want to be left behind.
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