Defense News
05/18/2012
China Continues its Focus on Cyber: Report
By MARCUS
WEISGERBER and WENDELL MINNICK
WASHINGTON and TAIPEI —
China continues to invest in the development of offensive cyberwarfare
capabilities that could disrupt global computer networks, according to a new
U.S. Defense Department report.
“China is investing in not
only capabilities to better defend their networks, but also, they’re looking at
ways to use cyber for offensive operations,” said David Helvey, acting deputy
assistant defense secretary for East Asia, during a May 18 briefing at the
Pentagon.
While Helvey could not say
whether China is accelerating development of these offensive cyberwarfare
capabilities, Beijing’s actions in this area over the past year have been
sustained.
“Their continued efforts in
this area reflect the importance that they’re placing on developing
capabilities for cyberwarfare,” he said.
The report notes that in
2011, global computer networks “continued to be targets of intrusions and data
theft, many of which originated within China. Although some of the targeted
systems were U.S. government-owned, others were commercial networks owned by
private companies whose stolen data represents valuable intellectual property.”
The annual Pentagon report
— which is primarily conducted by the Pentagon’s policy office and the Defense
Intelligence Agency — has been mandated by Congress since 2000.
“We intend the report to be
factual,” Helvey said. “We try to maintain a very analytic, objective tone and
let the facts speak for themselves.”
Beijing continued
“sustained investment” in nuclear forces, short and medium-range conventional
ballistic missiles, advanced aircraft, integrated air defenses, cruise missiles,
submarines, ships and cyberwarfare capabilities, Helvey said.
“China’s military
modernization is also, to an increasing extent, focusing on investments that
would enable China’s armed forces to conduct a wide range of missions,
including those that are far from China,” he said.
That said, “preparing for
contingencies in the Taiwan Strait appears to be the principal focus and driver
for much of China’s military investment,” he said.
The Pentagon does not
expect the Chinese J-20 — an advanced fighter jet with capabilities that
analysts say are similar to advanced U.S. aircraft — to achieve an “effective
operational capability no sooner than 2018,” Helvey said.
China began sea trials of
its first aircraft carrier last year. While the ship could be operationally
ready by the end of the year, it will likely take “several additional years”
before it is able to deploy with aircraft.
Despite Beijing’s military
investments, military-to-military relations has improved in recent years, and
top defense officials from the U.S. and China have made official visits to each
country. Earlier this month, Gen. Liang Guanglie, the Chinese defense minister,
met with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at the Pentagon and visited a
number of military bases in the United States.
Adm. Samuel Locklear, the
head of U.S. Pacific Command, is scheduled to visit China this summer and
Panetta has been invited to China in the second half of this year.
This year’s 52-page report
was “strangely short” compared to the 94-page report in 2011, said Gary Li, a
defense analyst with London-based Exclusive Analysis. This year’s report was
“very short and condensed,” he said.
Li noted that all analysis
of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was shortened to general trends rather
than specifics. There was a “focus on China’s overall national strategy rather
than the PLA as an entity.”
DoD appears to have
abandoned the “bean counting approach” to PLA unit information, most likely
because “they were rubbish at it,” Li said.
The lack of facts and figures
in this year’s report makes it impossible to say how accurate the report is
this time, Li said. This could be “due to a more ‘softly softly’ approach to
China” following the U.S. announcement of a new strategic realignment toward
Asia, or “due to the rapidly changing character of the PLA over the past year,”
which could be the Pentagon’s way of taking a “wait and see approach,” he said.
Despite the format changes,
Helvey said the report still addresses “the same range of questions and issues
that’s requested by the Congress in the legislation.”
“We’ve streamlined and
consolidated the report in keeping with DoD-wide guidance for how we’re
handling reports to Congress,” he said.
On the positive side, the
Pentagon released this report roughly on schedule for the first time in years,
said Henry Boyd, Research Associate for Defence and Military Analysis at
London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. But on the down
side, “there seems to be little in the way of new substantive analysis, and the
same old contradictions continue to crop up.”
Boyd also noted the shorter
version of the report compared to 2011, which might explain why they were able
to release it earlier than normal.
“The chapter on ‘Force
Modernization Goals and Trends’ has gone from 15 to 5 pages and the one on
‘Resources for Force Modernization’ is effectively gone,” and Boyd asked, is
this “because the size of China’s Defense Budget isn’t an issue any more?”
To make matters worse,
there appears to be a disconnect between the text and the data.
The PLA is believed to be
reorganizing both its land and air structures to a certain extent, but no
mention is made of air force restructuring in the report, “whilst there is a
token nod in the direction of ground force changes,” Boyd said.
The report acknowledges
that in “mid-2011 the PLA began to transform its ground forces into a modular
combined arms brigade-focused structure,” but the army data in the report is
effectively the same set DoD put out last year.
The same could be said for
missile estimates where despite “acquiring and fielding greater numbers of
conventional medium-range ballistic missiles” and “continuing to produce large
numbers of ground-launched cruise missiles” as well as adding “additional
missile brigades,” DoD estimates for ballistic-missile numbers “are exactly the
same as last year, and therefore really, really similar to the ones published
the year before that,” Boyd said.
Boyd said the report has
deleted any mention or the names of senior Communist Party/PLA personnel. And
although President Hu Jintao gets one mention with regard to his January 2011
meeting with Obama, there is no discussion of leadership transition and no
organization chart of the PRC military structure.
“In general, I would
describe myself as disappointed but not surprised by the content of this
report,” Boyd said. “This year is obviously going to be a highly politicized
one on both sides of the Pacific, and U.S.-China relations have not run smooth
as of late.”
“It
is possible that the reduced transparency and analysis reflects perceptions in
the Pentagon of a more serious challenge posed by China than hitherto, and thus
a desire not to tip the hand any further than they absolutely have to,” Boyd
said. “However, you could make an equally plausible case to suggest that this
report has just been given less time and attention than it previously received
and has suffered accordingly.”
