by Bill Gertz
As Jake Bebber, a U.S. Cyber Command military officer, put it, the threat from China and its strategy of seeking the destruction of the United States have been misunderstood by the U.S. government and military. “China seeks to win without fighting, so the real danger is not that America will find itself in a war with China, but that America will find itself the loser without a shot being fired,” he wrote in a report for the Center for International Maritime Security.
These types of information warfare activities, along with cyberattacks, influence operations, and the buying of former American officials and military officers who can spout China’s key information warfare themes, have reached unprecedented levels. And the programs have accelerated under the hard-line Marxist-Leninist policies of current supreme leader and party general secretary Xi Jinping.
While China today remains ruled by a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship, many Americans have been beguiled by successive reformist regimes in China that emerged after the madness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s and ouster of radical Maoists. Communism in China remains unfamiliar and to some even nonexistent. After I took part in a debate in New York City in 2007 on the threat posed by China, I was astounded by businessman James McGregor, an adviser to both the U.S. and Chinese governments, who told me after doing business in China for twenty years he had never met a communist. The ruling party boasts 88.6 million members and controls or influences most domestic businesses.
The roots of Chinese information warfare can be found in the writings of ancient strategists. Sun Tzu is well known and his precepts mainly focus on the use of covert intelligence operations to win wars. “Warfare is the way of deception,” he wrote. “Thus although you are capable, display incapability to them.” But another less well-known Chinese philosopher, Tai Kung, provides a larger strategic perspective on China’s information warfare activities today. In a series of revolutionary military strategies called the Six Secret Teachings, which were passed down through the centuries verbally and eventually in writings, Tai Kung introduced the concept of “total warfare”—the use of all available means to achieve victory, including feigning and dissembling to deceive the enemy and allay suspicions, along with bribing and sending gifts to enemies as a way to foster disloyalties among foreign officials and create chaos in their ranks. Tai Kung also advocated covert action as a way of inducing extravagance and wastefulness in the enemy by providing the tools for the enemy’s self-destruction. China operates under the concept that utmost secrecy is required in preparation for warfare and that once the battle begins, warfare must be unrestricted by any constraints.I These concepts directly apply to the element of Chinese information warfare currently used by the rulers in the People’s Republic of China.
Based on these ancient principles, China has been developing its information warfare programs in earnest since the early 2000s, and despite its penchant for utmost secrecy, military writings obtained by the CIA and Pentagon have revealed the underpinnings of this new strategy. Shen Weiguang, one of China’s leading military theorists on information warfare, stated in his 2000 book, World War, the Third World War—Total Information Warfare, that warfare in the twenty-first century will shift from traditional mechanized warfare to information-based conflict, the new “leading form of war.” In a society dominated by information, Shen, a former People’s Liberation Army officer, writes, control is the prime objective and controlling the information domain will be the key to victory. “Whoever controls information society will have the opportunity to dominate the world and even the universe,” he warns.
Shen makes the dubious assertion that information warfare will be a bloodless, nonviolent war carried out in the domain of information systems and that it will ultimately replace traditional armed conflict. Echoing Sun Tzu, he states: “Because one can win an information war without fighting, it is thousands of times more efficient than armed aggression.” He called on China to rapidly learn this new form of warfare because China’s communist system is “locked in a fierce conflict with the capitalist system.”
For the Chinese, information warfare encompasses six aspects: obtaining information by various means, analyzing and verifying information, protecting information from attack or theft, utilizing information fully for military objectives, denying the enemy the ability to gather information, and managing information through electronic means to ensure its use. Its essence is to defeat enemy forces without fighting or with as little fighting as possible. China’s plan for information warfare includes both wartime and peacetime variants. For periods of peace, China will wage economic information war, to weaken a country’s economy by cutting off the source of information. Cultural information war, psychological war, and Internet war also will be employed in both peacetime and times of conflict. According to Shen, here’s what the United States will face from China’s military during a future conflict: “Strategically the objective of information war is to destroy the enemy’s political, economic, and military information infrastructures, perhaps even the information infrastructure of the whole society. This includes destroying and paralyzing the enemy’s military, financial, telecommunications, electronic, and power systems as well as computer networks. Moreover, psychological war and strategic deception would be employed to undermine morale among enemy forces and in the civilian population and weaken confidence in the government in hopes of stripping the enemy of its ability to go to war.”
Shen concludes:
Not for a single day have the imperialists given up their desire to destroy socialism. Instead they have adopted all sorts of strategies and taken all kinds of actions to achieve that goal. Peaceful evolution is precisely the product of the failure of the imperialists’ armed suffocation strategy and global containment strategy, a shift from “hard confrontation” to “soft confrontation,” from “armed conquest” to “victory through peace,” an effort to use peaceful methods to achieve objectives unattainable by military means, an attempt to change the face of socialist nations and turn them into the appendages of the capitalist world.
Many of the concepts and theories put forth in 2000 by Shen have been implemented by the Chinese leadership, including the shift within its armed forces from a traditional, ground-force-oriented military to what Beijing calls an “informationized” one.
In 2012 China’s National Defense University produced a revealing internal study that includes the first details on information warfare programs and operations being developed by PLA forces for use in both peacetime and wartime.
The offensive information missions will seek to destroy American high-technology networks and systems, including satellites and their ground stations “so as to strip away and weaken the enemy’s information collection, dissemination, and processing capabilities,” according to a chapter of the report that I obtained. In the next war the Chinese will be using electronic, cyber, and military influence operations for attacks against military computer systems and networks, and specifically against air defenses and for jamming American precision-guided munitions and the GPS satellites that guide them. American antimissile systems also have been made a priority target of Chinese electronic warfare attacks as a way to assist “the penetration of our conventional missiles.” By electronically disrupting U.S. missile defenses, Chinese warfighters plan to increase the ability of their large and diverse missile forces to reach and destroy regional targets.
For network attacks, special computer programs and viruses will be used in the attacks to “weaken, sabotage, or destroy enemy computer network systems or to degrade their operating effectiveness.” Chinese cyberwarriors plan to exploit what the report called “loopholes and weak links in the enemy network operating system, network protocols, applications software, and management operation.” The operations will require Chinese hackers to conduct forced or secret entry into American networks by penetrating security protection measures such as firewalls, gateways, and encryption authentication measures. Once network security is broken, follow-on attacks usi
ng “deception and disruption” will take place.
The report provides the first official Chinese evidence that its military forces are developing extremely powerful weapons for what were described as special information warfare attacks. “These weapons can effectively destroy electronic targets, and have become a new means with the highest lethality in information attacks,” the report said. “They mainly include directed energy weapons, kinetic energy weapons, incapacitating weapons, and plasma weapons. . . . They mainly include laser weapons, high-power microwave weapons, EM-pulse [electromagnetic pulse] bombs, and particle-beam weapons.”
Psychological information warfare attacks by the Chinese military will combine “soft strike” with “hard destruction” means to inflict “enormous shock to the enemy in psychological respects, keep the enemy in a state of fear for a long period, and thus achieve the goal of victory without fighting.”
According to the report:
The important means for executing psychological attack against the enemy include the following: first is to organize and conduct public opinion propaganda. No matter whether before a war or during war, it is always necessary to fully exploit carriers such as leaflets, photos, radio and TV, computer networks, multimedia newspapers & magazines, and the Internet, and adopt modes such as sea floats, air projection, and battlefield front-line propaganda directed to the enemy, to carry out psychological deterrence and psychological inducement of the enemy, so as to shake the enemy troops’ morale, disintegrate the enemy morale, break up the hostile forces, and win over the enemy people’s support. Second is to apply psychological warfare (PSYWAR) weapons to execute psychological attacks against the enemy. This can apply specialized PSYWAR weapons such as noise simulators, electronic whistlers, thought-control weapons, and virtual reality [VR] means to attack and deter the enemy, generate psychological fear or various hallucinations in the enemy military and civilians, and thus shake their will to wage war and degrade the enemy’s operational capability.
Among the exotic Chinese information weapons are holographic projectors and laser-glaring arms that can present large unusual images in the skies above enemy forces that would simulate hallucinations among troops on the ground. Traditional propaganda also will be used, including “public opinion propaganda and PSYWAR weapons to execute psychological attacks against the enemy, so as to disrupt the enemy command decision making, disintegrate the enemy troop morale, and shake the enemy’s will to wage war.”
All the operations would require military forces to use speed, surprise, and utmost secrecy. Also, Chinese troops are being ideologically hardened against enemy psychological warfare operations and U.S. EMP weapons.II
The response of American leaders to the unprecedented published threat to inflict nuclear annihilation on the United States was equally chilling. Under the liberal left policies of President Barack Obama, every element of the U.S. government was ordered to silence all public criticism of China. Government spokesmen were prohibited from saying anything about the Chinese threat. The American response to a state-run Communist Party newspaper’s outlining of plans to kill up to 12 million Americans was silence. It would be another seventeen days before I posed a question about the Global Times report to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert during a conference at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Greenert, among the more dovish navy chiefs in recent years, had been politicized under the Obama administration into not highlighting any threat posed by China. In response to my question, he astoundingly dismissed China’s submarine-launched nuclear attack threat as “a deterrent” that lacked credibility. The four-star admiral instead suggested that U.S. attack submarine forces were capable enough to prevent such attacks. “For a submarine-launched ballistic missile to be effective it has to be accurate, and you have to be stealthy, and survivable and I’ll leave it at that,” Greenert said, adding that American nuclear-armed missile submarines remain a powerful deterrent despite an aging U.S. nuclear arsenal and the urgent need to upgrade those forces, including new missile submarines, in the face of eight years of sharp defense spending cuts under Obama.
Several weeks before the Global Times article boasting of the deaths of millions of Americans, Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader, spoke to a gathering of party propaganda officials tasked with waging what he termed “public opinion struggle,” the Marxist concept of using all means to wage information warfare. The secret speech was reproduced in China Digital Times, an uncensored aggregator of news and information on China. It was significant for revealing the true and secret objectives behind the current leadership of China’s efforts to master the power of the Information Age. Bemoaning how the Communist Party is besieged by hostile Western forces promoting values such as freedom and democracy, Xi issued an urgent appeal for cadres to step up the use of information warfare to defeat the United States and its democratic allies. The Chinese leader first made clear that the Chinese communist system—socialism with Chinese characteristics—is threatened by the West, along with the Communist Party itself. “The disintegration of a regime often starts from the ideological area, political unrest and regime change may perhaps occur in a night, but ideological evolution is a long-term process,” Xi proclaimed. “If the ideological defenses are breached, other defenses become very difficult to hold. . . . Communist Party members should fight and struggle for their beliefs, and contribute all their energies or even their lives.” The comments provide a clue to a future U.S. information warfare program against China.
The speech was an ideological call to arms, an appeal to step up information warfare against the West, an enemy Xi sees as posing an existential threat to party rule and what he has called the China Dream—the objective of diminishing all opposition to the Chinese communist system and leading to world domination by China, economically, politically, and militarily. This is the Chinese supremacist view of a world dominated by a Communist Party whose current leaders are the heirs of totalitarians behind the deaths of 65 million Chinese since coming to power in 1949, and who have never acknowledged that carnage or been held accountable for the atrocities committed under what has been called Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought, the official state ideology.
In December 2015, Xi completed a major reformation of the Communist Party–led People’s Liberation Army and its massive intelligence system with an eye to projecting power—both military and informational—around the world. The revamping of the military command structure has in-creased the danger posed by China’s cyberwarfare capabilities, which were folded into a new military entity called the Strategic Support Force and given greater prominence within China’s overall military forces. The Strategic Support Force, including intelligence, cyberwarfare, and information warfare units, was elevated to an equal footing with China’s other military services, the army, navy, air force, and strategic rocket forces that operate both nuclear and conventional missiles.
China’s main cyberwarfare capabilities were developed and are mainly carried out by one key unit within the all-powerful military, the Third Department of the General Staff, also known as 3PLA. American intelligence agencies estimate 3PLA has as many as 100,000 cyberwarfare troops—hackers and electronic intelligence-gathering specialists—under its control. They include highly trained people who specialize in conducting network attacks, information technology, code breaking, and foreign languages. The new force also includes the Fourth Department, China’s separate military electronic intelligence and electronic warfare service, and the more traditional military intelligence service devoted to human spying known as 2PLA.
Despite its secrecy, Xi made a revealing call for greater military information warfare efforts in the late summer of 2014. In a little-noticed report on China National Television, the Web version of state-run China Central Television, the Chinese leader announced at a meeting of the Communist Party Politburo on August 1, 2015, that China must adopt a new information warfare strategy as part of greater military innovation. “Xi
Jinping encouraged the army to change fixed mindsets on mechanized warfare and create a concept of information warfare, as the country faces escalating tensions on intelligence issues with other countries,” the English-language CCTV broadcast announced. According to Xi, the PLA needs to “counter nontraditional security threats, including economic threats.” The disclosure went unreported in Western news media but confirmed the growing danger posed by China.
For China, these events—the call to revamp information warfare against the West and reorganize the PLA into a high-tech power projection force—represent the ultimate repudiation of several decades of U.S. policies of conciliation toward China, which were the hallmark of successive U.S. administrations since the 1970s. That was when President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger introduced the Cold War policy of playing the China card against the Soviet Union. Since then, Kissinger and others of his ilk have dominated U.S. policy toward China, which has been characterized as unfettered engagement, regardless of Chinese threats, be they support for enemy states, theft of American nuclear secrets, or the spread of nuclear weapons around the world.
The height of the appeasement of China occurred during the administration of President George H. W. Bush, when National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft secretly traveled to China in July 1989 weeks after Chinese tanks crushed unarmed prodemocracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger were shown in photographs toasting Chinese leaders by candlelight during the visit. The message was unmistakable: despite curbing high-level contacts with China over the Tiananmen massacre, the U.S. government would continue business as usual with leaders who had been widely denounced as the Butchers of Beijing. The argument of the appeasers of China in the United States, who dominate not only the upper echelons of American government policy making and the halls of academia but the ranks of senior military and intelligence officials as well, is that by adopting conciliatory policies toward Beijing, the United States will foster the evolution of a free and democratic China. Instead the United States has become the target of Chinese hostility and venom and nonkinetic information warfare designed to destroy the nation.