Category Archives: defense policy

Trust and the PRC

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Having finally, and successfully, crushed a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China has declared null and void its treaty with Great Britain, the Joint Declaration that turned Hong Kong over to PRC control.

China’s deputy ambassador to Britain, Ni Jian, told the committee’s chairman, Richard Ottaway, that the Joint Declaration “is now void and only covered the period from the signing in 1984 until the handover in 1997.”

Never mind that the treaty the PRC signed was agreed by the PRC to run for 50 years from 1997, the year of the turnover.

This follows the PRC’s naked aggression in the South and East China Seas, as it looks to occupy those seas under falsified legal pretenses.

This government cannot be trusted. We—and the Brits—must govern our interaction with it accordingly; we can never know when the PRC will decide that another of its agreements with one of us has become inconvenient to it and so will welch on it.

US Defense, Foreign Policies

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Russia, China, Iran, and Islamists are waging unconventional warfare around the world, and the United States currently lacks a clear strategy to counter the threat, according to a recent report by the Army Special Operations Command.

“This challenge is hybrid warfare combining conventional, irregular, and asymmetric means, to include the persistent manipulation of political and ideological conflict,” states the Army white paper, Counter-Unconventional Warfare.

Foreshadowed by Iranian actions throughout the Middle East, and by Chinese “unrestricted warfare” strategists in the 1990s, hybrid warfare has now reached its most brazen form in Russia’s support for separatist insurgents in Ukraine.

[“Non-kinetic”] tools…include covert and clandestine special operations commando activities combined with political, intelligence, diplomatic, and financial warfare methods to counter the activities of states like Russia, China and Iran, and insurgent activities by terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

And

US government “lacks a cohesive [information warfare] strategy to counter adversary [unconventional warfare] campaigns conducted by state and non-state actors….”

Russian examples include

using special operations forces, intelligence agents, political provocateurs, and news media reporters, as well as transnational criminal elements in eastern and southern Ukraine.

“Funded by the Kremlin and operating with differing degrees of deniability or even acknowledgement, the Russian government uses ‘little green men’ for classic [unconventional warfare] objectives,” [according to the white paper].

Examples of the People’s Republic of China’s…techniques…include

unconventional warfare [based on the book,] Unrestricted Warfare…calls for using all means to defeat enemies, including cyber attacks, ecological warfare, financial warfare, and terrorism.

“China will use a host of methods, many of which lie out of the realm of conventional warfare,” [according to the white paper]. “These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare.”

Examples include China’s threat several years ago to sell off large US debt holdings to protest US arms sales to Taiwan, and cutting off sales of rare earth minerals to Japan in a dispute over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

Chinese news outlets also are used in media warfare….

Iran’s techniques are more limited in scope, but no less deadly:

“…Iran provides ‘material support to terrorist or militant groups such as HAMAS, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Taliban, and Iraqi Shia groups,’ [according to the white paper]. “Hezbollah is the primary terrorists’ proxy for Iran working together with a campaign of terror against Israel, the United States, and other western nations.”

It’s entirely possible that an administration more interested in American global interests would have missed this, also. It’s virtually certain, though, that this administration, bent as it is on American withdrawal from the world, wouldn’t have cared even had it recognized any of this.

The Free Beacon‘s article is well worth reading in its entirety, and so is the USA SpecOps’ white paper on the matter.

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons

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The US has agreed to extend “negotiations” over Iran’s nuclear weapons program into June.

Iran is expected to continue receiving some $700 million in oil export revenues that has been stuck overseas because of US sanctions.

Yet Iran gave nothing in return for the extension. Regarding those $700 million, the US gets nothing; Iran gets that for free, and they are free to use the money to expand its centrifuge program, continue its plutonium reactor program, develop its missile delivery program, and so on.

Another Cyber Threat

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…and an empty solution.

[NSA Director and Commander, US Cyber Command Admiral Michael] Rogers said he believed China along with “one or two” other countries had the capability to successfully launch a cyber-attack that could shut down the electric grid in parts of the United States.

And

US adversaries are performing electronic “reconnaissance” on a regular basis so that they can be in a position to attack the industrial control systems that run everything from chemical facilities to water treatment plants.

We’ve known the PRC, Russia, and have been hacking into a broad variety of our computer systems for some years. Rogers is correct that “if the US remains on the defensive, it would be a ‘losing strategy.'”

However, his insistence that

agreeing to an international code, a sort of “laws of law” in the cyber realm, is urgent[]

is wrong. These three nations are not going to honor any restrictions on their war fighting behaviors. Nor will any other nation that develops such a capability and then uses it.

What’s urgent is that we improve our defensive capability so that we can block—and preempt—further cyber recce runs and any attack. What’s urgent is that we develop our offensive cyber and physical capabilities so that we can fight a total cyber war, in conjunction with a physical response, to the total destruction of our attacker(s)’ ability to attack us again, much less continue its present attack.

Anything less is just selling us down the river.

Intelligence Fusion

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Intel fusion is the process of putting together disparate—often widely disparate—bits of information, from a wide variety of sources, to achieve a larger, coherent picture of various goings-on (and to rule out as truly unrelated some of those bits).

We’ve had in our recent past (as far as is being discovered by the public) a number of not too disparate, but seemingly relatively trivial on an individual basis, hacks by the People’s Republic of China of lower level US government agencies. They’ve hacked, for instance, our weather systems and satellite network, corporate email networks, the Federal government’s OPM computers, the White House’s computer networks, state and Federal level DMV databases, and on and on.

Often, the hacks really are directly useful: they get intellectual property, proprietary financial information, defense secrets, and so on.

But these hacks, rather their entry points, also represent windows into the government house—the Chinese sneak into our house through a variety of windows, since the front (and maybe back) doors are more or less locked.

What does fusion say about these disparate hacks? Are they just random probes? Pokings around to see what’s what or to see what they can get away with? Or, what’s getting planted in the way of malware that, once through the window, moves along, penetrating more deeply, perhaps proliferating? Once past the outer firewalls (the software version of a house’s locked entryways), what thefts are being set up for future use, what Stux-like sabotage is being prepared for future mid-crisis execution?

Maybe nothing. Maybe….

I’d rather be foolishly paranoid, though, than innocent and vulnerable.