AI in Defense: Analyzing China’s Parade Weapons
On 3 September 2025, China held its Victory Day Parade and unveiled a range of advanced weapon systems. As someone who grew up on sci-fi comics and movies, I was naturally drawn to the “pointy scary weapons” on display — borrowing a line from Admiral-General Aladeen in The Dictator. When I couldn’t find a clear, organized list of the systems revealed, I decided to build my own analysis pipeline. Using open-source tools like yt-dlp and OpenCV, I turned parade footage into more than 36,000 images, grouped them into categories, and then used OpenAI’s gpt-4o model to generate structured profiles of selected systems. This workflow is simple but useful: Gather OSINT → Process Data → Generate Information → Create Outputs for Review. It shows how AI can take on low-value tasks like classification and first-pass analysis, freeing human analysts to focus on high-value work like strategy and scenario planning.
