Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [102]
Moscow prefers a nonproliferation treaty similar to what’s in place for weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, nuclear), but it vigorously resists any attempt to allow international law enforcement to pursue cyber criminals within its borders.
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[38] Source: Moscow Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye (in Russian), a weekly independent military newspaper published by Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
China Military Doctrine
As the Chinese have said, losers in IW will not just be those with backward technology. They will also be those who lack command thinking and the ability to apply strategies. It is worth the time of the US analytical community to analyze IW strategies and tactics from all points of view, not just the empirical US approach.
--Lt. Col. Timothy Thomas, “Like Adding Wings to the Tiger”
Information technology is an area where, unlike industrial capacity or military hardware, no one nation can claim dominance. As a result, information technology and its military counterpart, information warfare, holds great appeal for the PRC, which has tremendous resources in its population size and the number of their high-quality math and science graduates.
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers began writing about information warfare at about the same time that the Internet browser became wildly popular: 1993. The instigating factor was the US display of technology in the first Gulf War, noticed and written about by General Liu Huaqing, the former vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. The U.S victory held special significance for the Chinese because Iraq was using weapons acquired from China and Russia. The resounding defeat of the Iraqi military was also a comment on the lack of effectiveness of Chinese hardware against an obviously superior force.
A second wake-up call for the Chinese arrived with the NATO action in Kosovo in 1999, which resulted in the bombing of the Chinese embassy. Although apologies were forthcoming, the action resulted in Chinese hackers attacking official US government networks, including the US Department of Energy and Interior websites.
In April 2001, when a US EP-3 Signals surveillance aircraft collided with a Chinese military aircraft, resulting in the death of the Chinese pilot, angry civilian hackers launched cyber attacks against US networks. These events did not go unnoticed by PLA officers, who observed how computer warriors could leverage technological dependencies by a superior force in an effort to gain an asymmetric advantage.
A recent study uses US joint doctrine as a construct to highlight the differences between Chinese and American IW. Kate Farris argues that “the US tends to focus on the CNA aspect of IW, while the Chinese take a more broad perspective, emphasizing pillars such as PSYOP, Denial, and Deception.” While my selection of Chinese literature persuasively supports this assessment, the current state of Chinese IW is simply too immature and not understood well enough to reach any definitive conclusion.
The inherent problem with a technologically advanced military force is its dependence on technology. The more complex a network, the more vulnerable it is. Major General Wang Pufeng wrote in 1995: “There is a question of how to use weakness to defeat strength and how to conduct war against weak enemies in order to use information superiority to achieve greater victories at a smaller cost.”
In 1995, Pufeng, often referred to as the “father of information warfare,” wrote his influential book The Challenge of Information Warfare, wherein he saw information warfare as a critical factor for China’s future modernization plans:
In the final analysis, information warfare is conducted by people. One aspect is to cultivate talent in information science and technology. The development and resolution of information warfare can be predicted to a great