Question: Which of the following activities represent applications of cyberwarfare?

1. Stealing intellectual property from private businesses to strengthen one's own economy and military while weakening the economy and military of a rival
2. Destroying or disabling critical infrastructure such as an enemy's air-traffic-control network, electricity grid, banking and financial systems, or subways
3. Stealing military defense secrets during peacetime to maintain weapons parity with a rival
4. Destroying, disabling, or redirecting an enemy's aircraft, missiles, ships, or tanks during wartime
5. Gaining strategic or tactical advantage on the battlefield through deception and misdirection
6. Monitoring, or interfering with, military communications
7. All of the above

I think you get the “all of the above” picture here, and looking back on the emergence of the Internet in the 1990s, it may well turn out to be the biggest Mephistophelian bargain of all time. For counterbalancing all of the wonderful gifts the Internet brings us—from GPS and iTunes to online education and video conferencing—is the emergence of a new and silent but supremely powerful weapon of both selective and mass destruction.

Unfortunately for the cause of peace, no country has been more aggressive in seeking to develop its cyberwarfare capabilities than China. Nor has any country so actively deployed at least some of those capabilities during what is supposed to be a time of peace and robust global trade.

China's aggressiveness on the cyberbattlefield is further compounded by the rapid increase in cyberespionage by the United States since the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, in 2001. While the United States has sought to justify its actions on the basis of national security, the court of world opinion does not appear to be buying into this “American exceptionalism” argument. One unfortunate byproduct of America's fall from the moral high ground has been far less global condemnation of China's cyberwarfare activities than the level of those activities likely warrant.1

To understand this particular threat vector, it may be useful to start with the disturbing fact that computer hacking in China is anything but illegal. Instead, it has become a very attractive career path for a whole new generation of Chinese youth raised on an electric blend of ultranationalism and Internet connectivity.

To pursue this career path, some Chinese youth will attend one of the many private schools set up across China to teach various techniques. These relatively low-level Chinese hacker “trade schools” are big business; they operate out in the sunshine with full government sanction and generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue a year.²

Still other Chinese hackers-in-training will take the higher-education path to master the engineering and mathematical intricacies of cyberespionage, attending prestigious universities like China's Harbin Institute of Technology.³ However, the preferred route for many would-be elite hackers is to attend a foreign university, preferably in the United States. Not only is the education often better; such study abroad also allows the hacker to carefully study the host country and its infrastructure for possible later targeting.

As for the hacking done directly by the government, China's cybercommand is under the full control of the People's Liberation Army. It consists of over one hundred thousand cyberwarriors and is stretched across “12 bureaus and three research institutes.”⁴

Perhaps the most notorious of China's cybercommand operations is an advanced persistent-threat military unit housed in a twelve-story building in the Pudong district of Shanghai, where an “advanced persistent threat” is a computer-network attack of long duration. As documented in a watershed report by the Mandiant consulting firm, the Chinese military's elite band of Shanghai hackers alone is reportedly responsible for compromising over 140 foreign companies “spanning 20 major industries.”⁵

Fig. 17.1. A platoon of China's more than one hundred thousand cyberwarriors. From digital sweatshops like these, China infiltrates the computers of the Pentagon and American industry with computer viruses, Trojans, and worms. (Photograph from the Drum.)

On this industrial front, China's hackers seek not just to steal the obligatory blueprints, research and development, and proprietary manufacturing processes of foreign businesses large and small. They will also vacuum up everything from emails, contact lists, and test results to pricing information and partnership agreements.

Such economic hacking by groups like PT1 also highlights the unique collaborative arrangement that China's state-owned enterprises have with the People's Liberation Army. In many cases, a key hacking goal is to improve the position of a Chinese company relative to a foreign competitor.

As a second putatively peacetime front in China's cyberwarfare, there is also the ongoing massive theft of US weapons systems. We have already discussed this problem within the context of compromised elite weapons such as the F-22 and F-35 fifth-generation fighters, but a more complete list includes “more than two dozen major weapons systems…critical to US missile defenses and combat aircraft and ships.”6

According to the Washington Post, this list features “the advanced Patriot missile system known as PAC-3; an Army system for shooting down ballistic missiles known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense or THAAD; and the Navy's Aegis ballistic-missile defense system. In addition, there are vital combat aircraft and ships, including the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the Navy's new Littoral Combat Ship, which is designed to patrol waters close to shore.”7 As defense analyst Richard Fisher has opined on this systematic extraction of America's most important defense secrets, “it's truly frightening.”⁸

Still a third major cyberwarfare front involves attacking critical infrastructure such as an enemy's electricity grid, water-purification plants, air-traffic control, subway systems, and telecommunications. The twin goals here are to sow chaos among the populace as well as to bring the enemy's economy to its knees.

Consider, for example, China's successful hack of Telvent—a software company that “keeps detailed blueprints on more than half of all the oil and gas pipelines in North and South America and has access to their systems.”⁹ Said one analyst of the stunning implications of China's hack:

[I]f someone hired me and told me they wanted to have the offensive capability to take out as many critical systems as possible, I would…do things like what happened to Telvent…. It's the holy grail.”¹⁰

It is precisely these kinds of cyberattacks that were featured in a seminal work entitled Unrestricted Warfare published in 1999 by two top colonels in the People's Liberation Army.¹¹ This volume provides yet another example of how a careful reading of the Chinese strategic literature is quite effective at unmasking China's true military intentions—no one can say the world was not warned.

Moving still further up the cyberwarfare gradient from peacetime hacks to all-out war scenarios, we next have to consider China's possible attempts to implant “Trojans” and other malware into the computer and electronic circuitry of America's weapons and logistics systems. The ultimate goal here is to mobilize this malware to destroy, disable, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize US capabilities during times of conflict or war.

To understand just one of the possible dangers, consider this “Manchurian Candidate” scenario:

A Chinese engineer at a factory in Chengdu designs a “kill switch” into a complex, custom computer chip. China then exports these secretly embedded “Manchurian” chips to the United States where they become embedded in America's defense systems. Meanwhile, just as in the classic film “The Manchurian Candidate,” these chips await some kind of signal from Chinese hackers that activates them—just imagine an aircraft carrier-based American F-35 jet fighter scrambling to assist Taiwan or Japan in the event of a Chinese attack and seeing its engines shut off or its electronic systems go dead in mid-flight.12

In fact, planting such Manchurian chips is remarkably easy to do since China has become the world's de facto factory floor. Modern software programs have millions of lines of code within which to bury a virus or Trojan while microchips for our computers and phones contain hundreds of millions of logic gates within which to hide a malicious digital payload. As to whether this prospect is some paranoid fantasy, such chips have already been discovered in the American defense system.

For example, one University of Cambridge researcher found a backdoor in a military-grade chip that was supposed to be one of the “most impenetrable”¹³ in the American arsenal. The chip in question, commonly known as the PA3, is used not just in weapons but also in civilian applications like nuclear power plants and public transport.¹⁴ As Aviation Week notes: “The potential for specialized microchips from China to find their way into US computers and networks, or even into conventional Western weapons systems, isn't just a frightening prospect—it is a chilling reality.”¹⁵

Of course, the Chinese government continues to vehemently insist it is not involved in any kind of organized cyberwarfare. However, if we are to “seek truth from facts” as Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once famously urged, the facts strongly prove otherwise.

As to how China's cyberwarfare capabilities ultimately relate to our “will there be war” core question, this may well be another case in which a new and very different kind of war between China and the United States is already well underway. Here, American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Auslin has the last word on this sore and sorry subject:

We don't take cybersecurity seriously, and we don't take defense secrets seriously. The Chinese stole reams and reams of data on our missiles back in the 1990s under the Clinton administration. All of a sudden they had intercontinental ballistic missiles that could effectively reach the United States. During the Bush years they stole information on the F-35 and other things. During the Obama years, they've stolen information on our drones. I mean we just think we're so big and we're so sophisticated and we're so technologically advanced that whatever we build is going to beat the other guy; and they've been robbing us blind and robbing the American taxpayer blind of billions of dollars of development and research money for decades.16