America Must Fight China's All-Out Cyber Warfare

Cyber espionage is one of the unconventional methods recommended for achieving global dominance in the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare by People’s Liberation Army (PLA) colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. They state that America, though far more powerful than China, is vulnerable to asymmetric warfare, which has “greater destructive force” than military action.

Like other asymmetric strategies, cyber warfare blurs the boundaries between war and peace as well as between military and civilian domains. Consequently, covert attacks continue without formal declarations of war: research and technology are stolen from universities, corporations, and leading institutions; sensitive networks and grids, both military and civilian, are hacked; critical infrastructure is compromised with bugged Chinese-made components.

These efforts have been ongoing for decades as China seeks to cheat its way into dominating key industries in the 21st century, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning. No other country has targeted our government, military, and corporations to seize intellectual property as aggressively as China has.

Take the Made in China 2025 initiative, for example, which aims to comprehensively upgrade both traditional and advanced sectors of Chinese industry. The goal is to position China as a leading player in global supply chains; additionally, it emphasizes increasing the use of domestic components from 40% to 70%. To achieve this, Chinese agents have engaged in outright theft: estimates suggest that one in five American companies has had its patents and trade secrets stolen.

Data centers are another target for Chinese hackers. Generative AI, which can produce original images, text, and code, and conceptualize designs, depends on access to large data sets for learning. By attacking data centers and corrupting data sets, Chinese hackers slow down the progress of this advanced technology toward reliability. Additionally, companies that unknowingly use contaminated data for analysis and projections end up with unusable results.

Then there’s Volt Typhoon, which is believed to be operated by the PLA Cyberspace Force and has been active since 2021. It targets critical infrastructure—both government and private—by exploiting vulnerabilities in internet service providers. In 2023, the White House, the Defense Department, and other agencies stated that its goal is to slow down any potential military mobilization that the U.S. might initiate if China invades Taiwan.

The internet is important but it is useless without a power grid.

The US has not built large power transformers in 20 years or more. We import all of them from China.

All new transformers are Hi Tech, digitally controlled through the Internet.

Although these transformers are supposed to be checked for imbedded malware, it is highly probable in my opinion that China can shut down our grid whenever they want.

Having our transformer source off shore is a big strategic blunder. Having that source be a hostile foe is unforgivable.

The lead time for a new large transformer is also 3+ years. A lot can happen in three years.

We very much need to On Shore our Electric Transformer manufacturing as a strategic imperative. We can't trust the Chinese with this critical infrastructure supply.

Also agree 100%.

I have read two specific books on this that finally made me understand just exactly what Communist China is up to: Stealth War: How China Took Over While America's Elite Slept by Gen. Robert Spalding (Ret.) and Unrestricted Warfare co-written by two Colonels in the People's Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui.

General Spalding's book was eminently readable, though a bit gut wrenching. But knew of what he wrote. (General Spalding was relieved of his post in the NSC because of his strident, unrepentant, and finally, public warnings about allowing Communist China to design and build 5G networks in the USA. His open statement to the press was what got him fired.)

And General Spalding also mentioned that when he went to Communist China openly as an Air Force Major who had been flying B-2 Bombers) to get his Masters in Business at the behest of the USAF, he thought it was the purest and most aggressive form of capitalism he had ever seen. He studied there and got his degree, and learned about the Chinese culture, up close and personal. He even thought of going over there after he retired. But after he got his degree, he said he would never go back there. So he understood.

I had far more difficulty reading Unrestricted Warfare, but what impressed me about that was how they weren't even trying to hide their goals in it. I didn't enjoy reading it, as it was not very approachable, but the message was unmistakeable.

They clearly believe they can bring our country down via non-kinetic warfare. Further, I got the unmistakeable impression that they discouraged the approach of building up their military as the Soviet Union did to challenge us, but instead were advocating that they build just enough to make the world believe they were following the path of the Soviet Union in order to make us build ourselves up and bankrupt ourselves, as the Soviet Union did.

That said, in General Spalding's book, he described a hack into an American company. It wasn't IBM or anything like that. It was a small company that had not gone public yet...they were unknown and obscure. They made a new, environmentally safe industrial solvent.

But they were preparing to go public. But they began having problems. Orders were going out incorrectly, where a customer would order 100 units and only get 10 (so it looked like someone fat-fingered the order) or the order would get lost. The guys who owned the company fired their sales manager and overhauled the team and the order systems, but the customer service errors persisted and they began to hemorrhage customers.

When they were preparing to do an IPO, they got an offer from a Chinese company to buy them out. When they looked at the offer, there were proprietary elements that the Chinese company offered that were not known outside the leadership of the company. They got suspicious, and hired a team to do an analysis of their systems, and found that they had been hacked, and the origin of the hacks had been Communist China.

They had wormed their way into the order software, and were changing orders deliberately to make the company seem inept. They had hacked into the email, and were deleting email-based orders so they never got filled.

All in an effort to drive the value of the company down before they offered to buy them out.

And this was just one small, unknown company. But the CCP apparently knew of them. How many companies have had damage like this done to them? Subtle, behind the scenes.

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