It doesn't take bullets, bombs and rockets to kill people and cripple nations. Our almost insane dependence on computers today creates all the vulnerability a determined, sophisticated enemy needs to take us down. Enter China.
China’s military is preparing for war in cyberspace involving space attacks on satellites and the use of both military and civilian personnel for a digital “people’s war,” according to an internal Chinese defense report.
“As cyber technology continues to develop, cyber warfare has quietly begun,” the report concludes, noting that the ability to wage cyber war in space is vital for China’s military modernization.
According to the report, strategic warfare in the past was built on nuclear weapons. “But strategic warfare in the information age is cyber warfare,” the report said.
“With the reliance of information warfare on space, cyberspace will surely become a hot spot in the struggle for cyberspace control,” the report said.
The new details of Chinese plans for cyber and space warfare were revealed in a report “Study on Space Cyber Warfare” by four engineers working at a Chinese defense research center in Shanghai.
The report presents a rare inside look of one of Beijing’s most secret military programs: Cyber warfare plans against the United States in a future conflict.
“Cyber warfare is not limited to military personnel. All personnel with special knowledge and skills on information system may participate in the execution of cyber warfare. Cyber warfare may truly be called a people’s warfare,” the report says.
“Cyber warfare is an act of war that utilizes space technology; it combines space technology and cyber technology and maintains and seizes the control of cyberspace,” the study says.
Because cyberspace relies on satellites, “space will surely be the main battlefield of cyber warfare,” the report said.
Satellites and space vehicles are considered the “outer nodes” of cyber space and “are clear targets for attack and may be approached directly,” the report said, adding that ground-based cyberspace nodes are more concealed and thus more difficult to attack.
Additionally, satellites have limited defenses and anti-jamming capabilities, leaving them very vulnerable to attack.
The report reveals that China’s military, which controls the country’s rapidly growing space program, is preparing to conduct space-based cyber warfare—“cyber reconnaissance, jamming, and attack”—from space vehicles.
Space-based cyber warfare will include three categories: space cyber attack, space cyber defense, and space cyber support. The space cyber support involves reconnaissance, targeting, and intelligence gathering.
“A space cyber-attack is carried out using space technology and methods of hard kill and soft kill,” the report said. “It ensures its own control at will while at the same time uses cyberspace to disable, weaken, disrupt, and destroy the enemy’s cyber actions or cyber installations.”
Soft-kill methods are designed to disrupt or damage cyberspace links using jamming, network cyber attacks, and “deceit” in the electromagnetic domain.
The cyber attacks include launching computer viruses, theft and tampering of data, denial of service attacks, and “detonation of [a] network bomb that can instantaneously paralyze or destroy enemy’s information network.”
“Soft kill measures are well concealed, fast in action, and the attack can be accomplished before the enemy even has time to discover it,” the report said. “Soft kill measures are deceptive and well hidden; they are difficult to detect and monitor.”
Hard-kill cyber attack weapons include missiles and other“kinetic” weapons along with directed energy, including lasers, radio frequency weapons, and particle beam weapons.
Once again, Canadians find themselves staring straight down the barrel of a loaded gun and nobody wants to talk about it. What the Chinese (and the Americans as well as others) are focusing on is taking down our satellite networks - the very communications systems around which your daily life is organized. You may not realize how dependent you are on them. You probably have little idea how close your life is to chaos without them. The Chinese know that cyberwar is strategic warfare, readily capable of bringing the most powerful nations to their knees. You don't need batteries of ICBMs with MIRVed warheads any longer to kill a nation.
The reality of China's cyberwarfare threat has the United States military scrambling. The Americans have heavily integrated computer and satellite communications into their warfighting systems, leaving them extremely vulnerable to this form of disruption.
The U.S. Army is now seeing a non-satellite dependent radio for troops in the field that can bounce signals off the troposphere to allow communications even in mountainous terrain. Meanwhile, the July 8th edition of Aviation Week reported that the U.S. Air Force is looking at ground-based positioning systems for navigation and guidance systems in the event that global positioning satellite (GPS) systems are taken down.
5 comments:
I posted the following contribution to a discussion on Montreal Simon's blog pertaining to Harper's economic policies. The only modification I might make is that Harper is apparently not pursuing the same game plan as the Americans, nor has he clued in his followers, as he apparently, in the event the US rejects his pipeline schemes, is pursuing a policy of economic partnership with a regime you describe as future military rivals...
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It is indeed curious to note that Alberta Reformers are seeking economic salvation for Canada, in the event of rejection of environmentally unfriendly resource extraction plans by the representatives of US corporate interests, who have their own dilemnas, projects and interests to consider, by aligning Canadian trade, development and resource extraction perspectives with those of the Peoples Republic of China. Leaving aside the "sociological" disputes over so-called socialist nomenclature by numerous left wing splinters and sects on the fringes of the NDP, there is very little progressive content to such joint Harper-Stalinist schemes.
Thus you have curious contributions by fringe group "socialists" who claim the major obligation of socialists in Canada is "overwhelming solidarity" with the Peoples Republic of China, presumably including their Harper endorsed foreign investment and resource extraction schemes, going so far as to argue that " in China, unlike in the United States or Canada, almost every anti-state force that claims to fight for social and political rights– from “pro-democracy” groups, to Falun Gong, to pro-Dalai Lama forces – are either openly anti-communist or otherwise subordinated to Western imperialism. ... If Western leftists, on the wrong basis that China is 'capitalist', support those forces who under the guise of 'democracy' want to weaken the PRC proletarian state, they are only going to encourage counterrevolutionary factions within the CPC." And thus we have crazed left wing sectarians arguing against minority rights for cultural minorities or democratic freedoms in China because such movements are part of some counterrevolutionary imperialist conspiracy. Our theoretically unsophisticated Alberta Reformers don't labour under any such sociological delusions as to the "inherently progressive" class nature of the Chinese state, they know fellow capitalists, exploiters and kindred spirits when they meet them. Alberta Reformers don't call for "imperialist intervention" in China because they don't see the need to crush their partners in imperialist exploitation of world resources, but they do actively and constantly call for violent state intervention in media discussion blogs against their perennial favourites, the "welfare state leeches" in Quebec, natives or muslim immigrants...
We can leave such abstract and curious exchanges as to what extent, nomenclature withstanding, "socialism" endures in the Peoples Republic of China and to what extent capitalist counterrevolution has triumphed to the sectarian political economy types and "sociologically inclined" splinter group theorists. Our Albert Reformers, not known for any theoretical sophistication or for any appetite for studies in sociology, political economy or any of the social sciences - those who routinely boast of their ignorance and equate state subsidized daycare with communism - do know who their friends are and who their enemies are. They have even gone so far as to publish a list of their enemies and it is doubtful that the leaders of the Peoples Republic are included in such list. The so-called Communist leaders of the Peoples Republic of China are thus considered trusted allies of the most socially and politically backward sectors of the Canadian electorate, those who engage in cult worship of police and military, who advocate imperialist intervention worldwide, that is with the exception of their favoured investor and trade partner - China - on whose behalf they are willing to ignore all sorts of environmental, labour and human rights abuses.
It's certainly true that the Americans, Chinese and others have moved to extend their concept of warfare to information and "cyberspace", as we've seen in practice in the behaviour of the NSA and in US cyber-attacks on Iran, for example.
But frankly, if it ever comes down to direct, shooting war between the US and China, I think losing satellites will be the least of our worries. I know it's an old technology, but they have these things called "nuclear weapons" that, y'know, just kill everybody.
Still, on a political level maybe there's some chance someone could exploit this threat to get politicians to actually sponsor some infrastructure spending? I wouldn't mind seeing publicly financed and owned fibre across the country.
Rene, you've touched on a point that is commonly overlooked. Harper doesn't follow the same game plan as the Americans when that conflicts with Canada's fossil fuel trade with China. That said, Harper has outsourced much of Canada's military and military-related foreign policy to Washington. Short of a shooting war it's a conflict Harper can live with.
Harper is aligning Canadian military and foreign policy with the Americans. The F-35 is proof positive of this. This aircraft is a light attack bomber. It lacks the range, payload, speed and agility of contemporary fighters. It is an offensive weapon with a stealth technology designed to defeat air defence radars in heavily defended airspace. It is designed to operate in conjunction with sophisticated support aircraft of which Canada owns precisely none.
The F-35 is designed with a couple of potential adversaries in mind, China one of them. The Chinese know it which is why they've been actively developing their own stealth fighters and stealth countermeasures.
@ PLG - I think the MAD scenario will prevent nuclear war as it has in the past. The object is to incapacitate the adversary, not to wreak destruction on the entire planet.
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