Beijing’s Doctrine on the Conduct of “Irregular Forms of Warfare”
Testimony to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 29 Mar 07:
Asymmetric Military Aspirations and Capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China
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...Chinese aspirations to acquire capabilities which focus on US civil and military vulnerabilities are illustrated by the PLA’s investment in integrated network electronic warfare and space/counter-space capabilities.
The PLA has a large infrastructure that is focused on exploiting and attacking computer networks that will diminish the need to attack many targets by kinetic means or will magnify the effectiveness of kinetic attacks. China’s concept involves a fusion of computer network attack and exploitation with electronic warfare. Computer network attacks are a good illustration of asymmetric capabilities China has been developing to leverage its investment in traditional military capabilities....
China’s Military Modernization and its Impact on the United States and the Asia-Pacific
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...China does not want to confront the United States or be perceived as a threat, peer competitor, or rival of the United States. China needs the United States to continue its economic growth to meet the needs of its population. To counteract both real and imagined dangers of itself, China refutes threat claims and builds coalitions within the developing world to support it. I expect this behavior to continue and only to be effectively countered by local reactions to China’s policies. The answer lies not in a more aggressive US foreign policy, but in allowing China’s aggressiveness to alienate those countries it hopes to court....
Beijing, Unrestricted Warfare, and Threat Potentials
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...Based on the current state of sophistication, skill sets, and culture of the People’s Liberation Army, the “what if” scenarios posed by the Commission concerning actual methods of attack against the US are not likely to be conducted via Beijing’s own military. Beijing’s military never had a monopoly on Unrestricted Warfare and, in fact, may never get really good at it....
General: China taking on U.S. in cyber arms race
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/interne...eut/index.html
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- China is seeking to unseat the United States as the dominant power in cyberspace, a U.S. Air Force general leading a new push in this area said Wednesday.
"They're the only nation that has been quite that blatant about saying, 'We're looking to do that,"' 8th Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Robert Elder told reporters.
Elder is to head a new three-star cyber command being set up at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, already home to about 25,000 military personnel involved in everything from electronic warfare to network defense.
The command's focus is to control the cyber domain, critical to everything from communications to surveillance to infrastructure security.
"We have peer competitors right now in terms of doing computer network attack ... and I believe we're going to be able to ratchet up our capability," Elder said. "We're going to go way ahead."
The Defense Department said in its annual report on China's military power last month that China regarded computer network operations -- attacks, defense and exploitation -- as critical to achieving "electromagnetic dominance" early in a conflict.
China's People's Liberation Army has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, the Pentagon said.
China also was investing in electronic countermeasures and defenses against electronic attack, including infrared decoys, angle reflectors and false-target generators, it said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected the U.S. report as "brutal interference" in China's internal affairs and insisted Beijing's military preparations were purely defensive.
Elder described the bulk of current alleged Chinese cyber-operations as industrial espionage aimed at stealing trade secrets to save years of high-tech development.
He attributed the espionage to a mix of criminals, hackers and "nation-state" forces. Virtually all potential U.S. foes also were scanning U.S. networks for trade and defense secrets, he added.
"Everyone but North Korea," he said. "We've concluded that there must be only one laptop in all of North Korea -- and that guy's not allowed to scan overseas networks," Elder said.
In October, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff defined cyberspace as "characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify, and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures."
The definition is broad enough to cover far more than merely defending or attacking computer networks. Other concerns include remotely detonated roadside bombs in Iraq, interference with Global Positioning Satellites and satellite communications, Internet financial transactions by adversaries, and radar and navigational jamming.
Unfortunately most people equate war to dropping bombs or other delivered by aerial threats. If it doesn't go boom and splatter collateral damage around the countryside it can't be considered combat or war.
I guess SEALS, and other black OP's types sneaking and peeking at the enemy aren't engaged in war efforts either. In an effort to geekify computers and marginalize the threats of cyber warfare most people are missing that real cyber warfare is about espionage, intelligence gathering, and probing enemy weaknesses.
Cyber warfare is NOT about defacing political opponents websites or stealing credit card numbers. In joking about North Korea the General misses the point that they DON'T HAVE TO BE IN NORTH KOREA to engage you. The enemy can be anywhere or appear to be everywhere. Argh.
China spying 'biggest US threat'
More on the China information warfare campaign. Not kinetic but definitely asymmetric.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7097296.stm
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Chinese espionage poses "the single greatest risk" to the security of US technology, a panel has told Congress.
China is pursuing new technology "aggressively", it says, legitimately through research and business deals and illegally through industrial espionage.
China has also "embraced destructive warfare techniques", the report says, enabling it to carry out cyber attacks on other countries' infrastructure.
A foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing denied any spying activities by China.
"China and the US have a fundamental common interest in promoting sound and rapid development," said Liu Jianchao, quoted by the Associated Press news agency.
More at link
This has been a long time coming.
PRC intelligence, espionage, IO, and the like in many Western countries, the U.S. in particular, reached a critical level at least a decade-and-a-half ago, perhaps even as far back as nearly 20 years ago. This intelligence campaign has, over the 15-20 years since it more or less hit its stride (after a testing of the waters and subsequentl build-up of about the same length of time), reaped rewards that would have made the old KGB and GRU green with envy over much the same time period.
Critical, not just significant, information, technology, intelligence, etc., has come into PRC possession. Similarly, PRC use of, and infiltration into, the political lobby system has been strikingly effective in influencing some U.S. Government policy-making or execution. The Chinese Government has the U.S. Government reasonably-well "framed" if you will in many respects; the U.S. Government, by contrast, is not unaware of this, but its own internal divisions (successfully and subtly exploited to a certain extent by the PRC) impede its ability to fully grasp the scale of the problem and especially to deal effectively with it.
The PRC Government does not want to become an enemy of the U.S. Government any more than the U.S. wishes to become an enemy of China. Chinese strategic manoeuvering, of both its own position and that of the U.S., is of course in order for the former to gain a position of relative advantage over the latter; fortunately the PRC does not conceive of its strategic competition with the U.S. as necessarily a relationship of hostility.
But Chinese strategic miscalculation and American strategic erraticism can lead to serious misunderstandings. PRC intelligence penetration of the U.S. on the scope and scale as it presently exists (so far as we know) does not meet with the same equanimity on the U.S. side (which tends to see such as an attack) as it does on the PRC side (which tends to see the same as just a part of diplomacy - a non-violent jockeying for advantage).
The Chinese Underground Hacker Economy and its ties to the PLA
10,000 Methods Combined as One: Chinese Hackers and Unrestricted Warfare:
I reference the Chinese military text "Unrestricted Warfare", a newly released academic study "Studying Malicious Websites and the Underground
Economy on the Chinese Web" and a DOD investigative report "Red Storm Rising" to show the relationship between the "Red Hacker" unions and the PLA, and how thousands of these youths are hacking networks pretty much anywhere that they want, all in the name of the People's Republic of China and the all-mighty Yuan.
Chinese spies in the West
An analysis of numerous cases leads to the conclusion that China has shifted its tactics in recruiting citizens of Western countries.
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By ANDREI CHANG
HONG KONG, April 18 (UPI) -- China's intelligence agency has reinforced its infiltration activities in Europe, North America, Japan and Russia in recent years.
Beijing has abandoned the traditional approach of ideological persuasion, turning instead to the use of blackmail, women and money -- quite similar to the practices employed by the former Soviet Union's KGB and the former East German Intelligence Agency. A series of "massage salon" incidents involving Japanese diplomats in Beijing and Shanghai are typical examples.
At the same time, the targets of recruitment by Chinese intelligence agents are switching from ethnic Chinese to local personnel of mainstream society who work in core government departments.
There is credible evidence that the large number of community organizations that have emerged in Chinese communities in the United States and Canada are actually receiving financial support from the Chinese embassies and consulates.
Then who do these people really work for? The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Canadian Intelligence Service might find the answer of interest.
Readers of this article can test this for themselves by obtaining the name card of a Chinese journalist or diplomat responsible for education, and calling the office of his or her media or institution in Beijing. After numerous such tests, experiences and observations, this author's conclusion is that the number of Chinese spies who work in the United States and Canada is much larger than the number who worked for the former Soviet KGB.
Much more at the link...
The correct interpretation of Unrestricted Warfare
Coming from an approach of studying Chinese philosophy, there are a couple of points that I consistently see military folks getting wrong about Unrestricted Warfare, the 1999 piece by two PLA colonels that predicted 9/11. One of the authors was a specialist in Chinese literature, and there are references to philosophy sprinkled throughout the text (one of the chapter names is a reference to Dao De Jing, Daoism's seminal work) so I think this angle is an important one.
1. One shouldn't take it only at a literal level. If you compare this to works like Mao Zedong's On Guerrilla Warfare, and Sun Zi's Art of War, there a couple different levels to it. Whereas you might be able to learn from On Guerrilla Warfare if you're a Communist, or Islamist, and anyone else, and ignore the overall ideological message, it would be hard to look at that work and totally ignore its connection to Communism. Likewise, The Art of War can be applied to a multitude of situations, but you won't understand it totally without also understanding its grounding in Daoism and Confucianism. There's been a lot of discussion about the connection between 9/11, along with cyber warfare and a few other relatively restricted topics, with Unrestricted Warfare. That's not wrong, but I think it misses the overall message of the work: the power that comes from being seen as having been oppressed. This was why Bin Laden was such a potent example. I suspect though, because of this larger point, this piece would have become an important work with or without 9/11 - all the more because of its subtlety.
2. Along those lines, being a political doctrine, this work has interesting things to say about Chinese intentions and strategy, not just tactics. The essence of Mao's piece was that China was in a weak position. You could say, in effect, it was an interpretation of Sun Zi for a specific situation. Now China is not as weak. It's clear from works like Unrestricted Warfare, as well as On Guerrilla Warfare that China sees its advantage in asymmetrical warfare. In that sense, nothing's changed - except that China's situation in the world has. This is where it gets a little speculative, but I think you can trace the roots of Unrestricted Warfare back to Sun Zi, as well as Mao Zedong, who would have said that you need to create the advantageous situation, even if it doesn't naturally exist. So the point is not just to use asymmetric warfare when necessary, but to keep yourself as the underdog, so that it asymmetric warfare will become necessary. This, in my opinion, is how China complains about American economic mismanagement, when it was also Chinese economic mismanagement that helped cause the financial crisis. That may have been part of the plan all along. China can justify taking actions that might make it financially worse off (along with the US), because of the political doctrine of 'underdogism.'
In general, I find that it's much more useful to study Chinese classics to understand contemporary China than it is to study the Soviet or Japanese systems. Political ideology, in the sense that we use the word (involving a reason why a particular set of rulers might be better for the citizens than any other set, and a specific set of policies, besides just 'everything that's good') was just a 'weapon' used by Mao. There's nothing fundamental about it in China.
projections of pandamonium
Here are some folks who take it seriously.
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Are CHINA and the UNITED STATES headed for WAR?
Yes, say bestselling authors Jed Babbin (former deputy undersecretary of defense) and Edward Timperlake (veteran defense analyst) in this riveting new book that takes you from the latest developments in China’s quest to become a superpower to the possible battlefields of what might become World War III.
Babbin and Timperlake unveil China’s aggressive military buildup (more rapid than that of Nazi Germany before World War II) and expose how China is engaging in a new Cold War aimed at expanding its commercial and military reach at the expense of the United States. Babbin (a former Air Force JAG) and Timperlake (a former Marine fighter pilot) do more than offer expert analysis. In dramatic Clancy-esque style, they take you into the field with Navy SEALs and Air Force bomber pilots, invite you inside the war councils at the White House and the Pentagon, and peer within China’s own Politburo in an exciting—and all too likely—series of war scenarios.
In Showdown, Babbin and Timperlake reveal:
* The unholy alliance between Communist China and radical Islam—and a possible war over Middle Eastern oil
* How China is infiltrating Latin America—including oil-rich Venezuela—to create an anti-American axis
* How a Chinese attack on Taiwan could spark the biggest war in the Pacific since World War II
* The vulnerability of Japan and the United States to Chinese cyber-warfare
* The likelihood of a second Korean War . . . only this time, the madmen in North Korea have nuclear weapons
As Babbin and Timperlake make clear, China is the greatest—and most dangerously ignored—threat to America’s national security. If America does not deter China’s aggressive ambitions, the result could be global war. Provocative, thrilling, and must-reading, Showdown is a wake-up call for America.
From the editorial blurb for:Showdown: Why China Wants War With The United States - Amazon
Also:
U.S. Intelligence Council Reading List
let a thousand contracts bloom
2006 interview with Jed Babbin, co-author of Showdown: Why China Wants War With The United States.
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Does China really want a war with us?
Yes, but not a nuclear war or an all-out conventional one. China wants war because without it they can’t achieve superpower status. China, like France, believes power is a zero-sum game. Without defeating us in at least a short war—say over Taiwan or somewhere else in the Pacific—China won’t have the ability to proclaim its hegemony over their region.
$$$
So how soon is this war going to happen? And what will it look like?
No one but the Chinese know. They’ll start it when it suits them, and not a moment sooner. It could take any number of forms, ranging from an attack on Taiwan to a cyber attack on the United States. (italics added)
Given this scenario, shouldn't Taiwan, Japan, Australia and possibly Indonesia seriously consider developing their own nuclear deterrents?
Exclusive: China Craves War With U.S. - Human Events
Showdown: Why China Wants War With The United States - Amazon