Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [103]
Today, Chinese students regularly place at the top of international science and math challenges, far above their peers in the United States. In a 2003 math, science, and reading assessment involving 250,000 students from 41 countries, China (Hong Kong) ranked #1 in science and #3 in math. Many of those students will go on to receive advanced degrees from US universities such as Stanford and MIT, and some may serve as officers in the People’s Liberation Army. In 2006, two Chinese universities contributed more Ph.D.s to American university graduate programs than any other nation, including the United States (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08301/).
The Chinese government sees information warfare as a true People’s War, meaning that they can recruit technical expertise from their civilian population. Timothy Thomas wrote about this in his essay “Adding Wings to Tigers”:
Wang Xiaodong, while analyzing a RAND IW document, observed that this study unknowingly outlined a People’s War in the information age.
Even as to government mobilized troops, the numbers and roles of traditional warriors will be sharply less than those of technical experts in all lines...since thousands of personal computers can be linked up to perform a common operation, to perform many tasks in place of a large-scale military computer, an IW victory will very likely be determined by which side can mobilize the most computer experts and part-time fans. That will be a real People’s War.
In line with this concept of organizing a civilian cyber militia, there are reports of actual IW drills being conducted within Chinese provinces, such as Hubei in 2000. According to Xu Jiwu and Xiao Xinmin, in their article “Civil Networks Used in War” (Beijing Jiefangjun Bao), an IW exercise was held in the city of Ezhou that demonstrated the rapid mobilization of civilian networks, such as cable television stations, banking networks, telecommunications, and other linked systems, to serve as offensive IW units in times of war.
This is a further example that China’s political leaders are well aware of their shortcomings in traditional warfare and are trying to maximize their assets, civilian and military, to gain additional strategic leverage. From their perspective, the key filters for decision making are US military superiority, China’s aging military technology, and how best to prepare for the next military conflict.
China views future conflicts in the same way that the United States does—as limited engagements rather than total war. To that end, according to Peng and Yao, “what is emphasized most is the combined use of many types of military, political, economic, and diplomatic measures” (Peng Guangqian and Yao Youzhi, eds., The Science of Strategy, Beijing: Military Science Press, 2001).
The goal is not to crush an opponent but to make the cost of warfare unacceptable. RAND expert James Mulvenon quotes from Lu Daohai’s “Information Operations”(Lu Daohai, Information Operations: Exploring the Seizure of Information Control, Beijing: Junshi Yiwen Press, 1999) to make this point:
Computer warfare targets computers—the core of weapons systems and command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) systems—in order to paralyze the enemy...[and to]...shake war resoluteness, destroy war potential and win the upper hand in war.
The specific tools of offensive and defensive IW include:
Physical destruction
Dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum
Computer network warfare
Psychological manipulation
Interestingly, these capabilities almost mirror US doctrine on IW, such as the US Air Force’s “Six Pillars of IW” and “Joint Vision 2010.” The People’s Liberation Army has also obtained and translated copies of JP3-13.1, “Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare,” according to RAND’s James Mulvenon.
Consequently, PLA strategists use the same terminology as that of the US Armed Forces: CNO (computer network