China Plans Cyberwarfare Says Congressional Report

No longer content to just meddle with our election system via illegal campaign contributions the Chinese are undertaking a program to disrupt our Communications Networks, in September they actually attempted to disrupt Defense Department Computers. Which triggered and immediate investigation, Congress has just received a report that explores China's attempts to disrupt networks across the U.S.

Check out the article from Redstate:China's Plans to Disrupt American Communications Networks:

You may or may not have been paying attention early last September when several unusual disruptions rolled through Defense Department computer networks with links to the Internet. News reports at the time blamed the disruptions on a deliberate "cyberwarfare" attack by China's People's Liberation Army.

According to this story, Congress has just received a report that explores China's drive to acquire the capability to disrupt computer networks in the United States, most likely as part of fighting a war against us.

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Needless to say, back in September when the accusations surfaced in the world press, China scurried to deny the story and to accuse the US of thinking like there was still a Cold War on. From the Financial Times story linked above:

China yesterday strongly denied reports that its military was behind a hacking attack on the Pentagon computer network this year.

Jiang Yu, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, said at a regular news briefing that the accusations against China were "absurd".

"The criticism is un-founded, which represents cold war thinking," she said.

I'll let you evaluate the credibility of these statements for yourself.

Now the Defense Department runs a lot of networks, and in fact networked communications are a core element of our approach to war-fighting. But while DoD's public networks (the ones with .mil top-level domains) are linked to the open Internet and thus are vulnerable to hacking activities, the Pentagon also has extensive networks that are totally private. Those are not the subject of this discussion.

The report just submitted to Congress is from the US-China Economic Review Commission, and quotes the commander of the US Strategic command. From the eWeek article:

If the United States and China were to find themselves in an armed conflict, China is likely to launch cyber attacks on American regional bases in Japan and South Korea, and might even include cyber attacks on the U.S. homeland that target financial, economic, energy and communications infrastructures.

According to Gen. James Cartwright, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, China is already actively engaging in cyber-reconnaissance through the probing of computer networks of U.S. government agencies and private companies.

Cartwright said the data collected from these reconnaissance probes can be used for many purposes, including identifying network weak points, understanding how U.S. leaders think, discovering the communication patterns of government agencies and private companies, and gaining valuable information stored throughout the networks.

The latter point is a key one. You can get a lot of insights about an enemy simply by performing "traffic analysis" and generally observing his information flow. And these insights can provide a valuable edge in war.

So what if things heat up with China, let's say in a tiff over (likely) protectionist legislation or (less likely) Taiwan? Let's assume that the Chinese have discovered ways to degrade or even disable our communications infrastructure. This of course will have an impact on our whole national life, not just our military capabilities.

What impact? Just as with strategic bombing, that's not a question with a clear answer. According to General Cartwright:

"I think that we should start to consider that regret factors associated with a cyber-attack could, in fact, be in the magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction," Cartwright told the Commission, referring to the psychological effects that would be generated by the sense of disruption and chaos caused by a cyber-attack.

And the counterpoint, by James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

"The effect is usually to solidify resistance, to encourage people to continue the fight, and if you haven't actually badly damaged their abilities to continue to fight, all you've done is annoy them, and what many of us call cyber-attacks [are] not weapons of mass destruction but weapons of mass annoyance," Lewis said.

I don't happen to believe that the Chinese include war against the US as a necessary part of their grand strategy. (Plenty of people in and out of the defense establishment vehemently disagree with me.)

But I think there's not the slightest question that the Chinese are preparing for war against us. There's no other credible enemy that they could possibly face, and if I were them I'd never assume that the US will not strike first.

Additionally, it might be useful even in everyday economic competition for them to degrade our normal network communications, through such capabilities as massive email-spam attacks.

Leaving aside a discussion of the circumstances under which we might go to war against the Chinese, let's recognize that they have little hope of ever matching our logistic and conventional capabilities. Therefore they won't try to do that.

But they will seek "asymmetric" advantages, with which they can blunt our effectiveness both politically and technologically in the event that we attack them. Hence the emphasis on cyberwarfare, and on capabilities such as the satellite killer they messily and noisily tested last January.

I'm not willing to judge China's ability to disrupt our national economy through cyberattacks. Modern communications networks probably have ways of staying resilient and functional that are not designed-in, but arise from their decentralized structure. But they have never been tested under full-scale war conditions, so we don't know.

Wall Street firms were deeply frightened by how fragile and vulnerable their telephone and data networks proved to be on September 11, 2001. By both voluntary and government-mandated action, they moved swiftly to geographically diversify both networks and people operations away from lower Manhattan. The lessons learned then will prove invaluable in recovering from cyberattacks in a war against China.

These are all important questions. But regardless of how we answer them, doesn't it stick in your craw to know that the Chinese are snooping around in your business, and spying on you?

Let's never forget that the Chinese fight dirty, both as economic competitors and as a geopolitical adversary. Perhaps we should be less hesitant to fight dirty against them.

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