In early last September, 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.
China strongly denied reports on November 21 that its military was behind a hacking attack on the Pentagon computer network this year.
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.
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.
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.
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. (Source: Redstate.com, Nov 22, 2007).