Category Archives: foreign policy

PRC Cyberwar

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Here’s an example of the People’s Republic of China’s war on us, here in cyberspace, described in BusinessWeek.

In 2011, [Dell SecureWorks Director of Malware Research, Joe] Stewart turned his sights on China. “I thought I’d have this figured out in two months,” he says.  Two years later, trying to identify Chinese malware and develop countermeasures is pretty much all he does.
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Malware from China has inundated the Internet, targeting Fortune 500 companies, tech startups, government agencies, news organizations, embassies, universities, law firms, and anything else with intellectual property to protect.  A recently prepared secret intelligence assessment described this month in the Washington Post found that the US is the target of a massive and prolonged computer espionage campaign from China that threatens the US economy.  With the possible exceptions of the US Department of Defense and a handful of three-letter agencies, the victims are outmatched by an enemy with vast resources and a long head start.
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Stewart tracks about 24,000 Internet domains, which he says Chinese spies have rented or hacked for the purpose of espionage. … He catalogs the malware he finds into categories, which usually correspond to particular hacking teams in China.  He says around 10 teams have deployed 300 malware groups, double the count of 10 months ago. “There is a tremendous amount of manpower being thrown at this from their side,” he says.

The intel assessment to which the BusinessWeek article referred was summarized here.

The National Intelligence Estimate identifies China as the country most aggressively seeking to penetrate the computer systems of American businesses and institutions to gain access to data that could be used for economic gain.

The report, which represents the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, describes a wide range of sectors that have been the focus of hacking over the past five years, including energy, finance, information technology, aerospace and automotives, according to the individuals familiar with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified document. The assessment does not quantify the financial impact of the espionage, but outside experts have estimated it in the tens of billions of dollars.

An example of the cascade effects of China’s war, from that intel summary:

In 2011, when Chinese hackers attacked network security company RSA Security, the technology stolen was used to penetrate military-industrial targets.  Shortly after, the networks of defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin, which used RSA security tokens, were penetrated by Chinese hackers.

There are a couple of questions remaining in this cynic’s mind.  One concerns the apparent ease with which Stewart and his Indian follow-on tracked down this Chinese hacker (an effort described in the BusinessWeek article).  I have to wonder whether the “hacker” was a honeypot and how well the two trackers covered their own tracks—or whether they left their employers exposed.

The other flows from that first question.  Assuming no honeypot, it seems apparent that the hacker was discovered because he was careless, and not because our guys were better at the cyber combat.  Is the US helplessly bringing a jackknife to a combined arms assault?  Is that why our government’s efforts to protect us—and to counter and retaliate—are so infantile?  And the latter so timid:

[T]he Obama administration is seeking ways to counter the online theft of trade secrets, according to officials.  Analysts have said that the administration’s options include formal protests, the expulsion of diplomatic personnel, the imposition of travel and visa restrictions, and complaints to the World Trade Organization.

Pleas and chit-chat, nothing serious.

How did we get so helplessly far behind?  Our government (not just the present administration) has had no understanding at all of the threat posed.  A former government official said,

The problem with foreign cyber-­espionage is not that it is an existential threat, but that it is invisible, and invisibility promotes inaction.

Understanding how our weapons work so they can be neutralized, knowing where and how to plant malware to shut down our financial, transportation, and energy infrastructure—and having the malware to plant—threatens our sovereignty.  That it’s “invisible” is simply an aspect of any war: camouflage and stealth.  The government has first to understand that we’re in a war with the Chinese for our independence; then the fact of invisibility for the Chinese combatants will be understood for what it is—just a technique for advancing their attacks.

Obama and our Constitution

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Michael Mukasy, President George Bush the Younger’s last Attorney General, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed described President Barack Obama’s leaked (should I say “surreptitiously released?”) white paper memo concerning presidential authority to conduct drone warfare, including against American citizens overseas.  Mukasey had this to say, in part, about the memo:

The memo mentions the president’s constitutional responsibility under Article II to defend the country, but it grounds the president’s authority to act not in the Constitution but in “the inherent right of the United States to national self-defense under international law…and the existence of an armed conflict with al-Qa’ida under international law.”

A moment’s reflection yields the insight that the US government’s powers are defined by the Constitution, not by international law, and that in any event international law is a highly elusive concept, there being no universally recognized source for it.  Yet here the Obama administration seems to prefer abandoning the Constitution altogether rather than relying on an inherent presidential power….

Because the Constitution is more than 100 years old, hard to understand, and not binding on anything, anyway.  And a law “professor” says we ought to just do away with it.  Plainly, our president buys that line, too.

In Defense of Drone Strikes

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I want to expand on a couple of points from a Stratfor article by George Friedman in which he talks about the use of drones on a modern terrorist war battlefield.  Friedman ultimately finds the utility of relying on drone strikes of dubious value.  Without addressing his utility conclusion, my own conclusion is that drone strikes are a legitimate application of our national defense imperative.

Friedman suggests in a posited anti-drone argument that

What makes unmanned aerial vehicle strikes controversial is that they are used to deliberately target specific individuals…. The modern battlefield—and the ancient as well—has been marked by anonymity.  The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability.  In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment.

…the objection is that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is not so much an act of war as an act of judgment and, as such, violates international law that requires due process for a soldier being judged and executed.

When is the judgment carried out, though?  In a conventional war, an overall judgment is carried out at the war’s outset, with the decision to enter into it, and any enemy or collection of enemies after that entry is shot on sight.  In the terror war, the same total judgment is made as that of the conventional war, differing only in its mechanics—now it’s most often a two-step process.  A secondary judgment is carried out in real time in the terror war that was subsumed into the conventional war’s original judgment: an individual is identified (including being discriminated from an innocent civilian) in real time, within that larger judgment’s framework, and the strike carried out.  But this two-step process is not materially different from the totality of judgment for the conventional war, and it differs not at all from a two-step process often explicitly carried out in a conventional war: consider the capture of a city by ground troops during which the classic house-to-house combat occurs.  The framework judgment—kill the enemy wherever you find him—was carried out at the war’s start.  Now, in the house-to-house environment, the second step is carried out: is this an enemy soldier, or is it an innocent civilian?

Friedman later says

the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war.  Al Qaeda and the allied groups and sympathetic individuals that comprise the international jihadist movement are global, dispersed and sparse.  They are not a hierarchical military organization.  Where conventional forces have divisions and battalions, the global jihadist movement consists primarily of individuals who at times group together into distinct regional franchises, small groups and cells, and frequently even these groups are scattered.
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The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals—particularly the commanders—isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible.  Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.

I’ll elide the violation of laws of war at which Friedman hints here and focus on the dispersal aspect.  I suggest that this is not so much a unique sort of war as much as it’s an extension of conventional war tactics carried to an extreme, albeit with a unique set of targets and goals.  The terrorists’ dispersal is simply an extension of conventional infantry tactics writ to a global scale.  Prior to the opening of an infantry assault, the attacking force often attempts to infiltrate as much as possible—through stealth—the defenders’ positions before firing the first shot.  The terror war’s terrorist simply carries this to the next logical step: instead of several infantry units, each consisting of a number of individuals doing the infiltrating, the terrorists’ small units now consists of individual terrorists doing the infiltrating—or the plotting of the attack.

In either of these cases, the drone strike is well within the limits of war: it’s a valid means of killing an enemy—here a terrorist, rather than a soldier—when and where he’s been found, and it’s a valid response to catching a terrorist in his infiltration process (at any stage, from planning it to mid-execution) and interrupting his intended assault.

China’s Economic Course

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In a nation that’s facing a demographic implosion (a birth rate of around 1.5 against a rate of roughly 2.1 required to maintain current population levels, and an aging population (expected by 2050 (the current generation plus their children) to have four workers in the age band 50-64 for every three aged 15-29, and for every 100 people aged 20-64, 45 over 65), that chronically lives on the edge of famine, and that has a population increasingly aware of what could be compared to what is, the PRC government is not treating its poor or its farmers (22% of whom will be over 65 as early as 2030—the current generation) very well.  And so it’s not treating its society or its economy with any foresight.

For instance:

In December 2010, when [Fu Liang]  says a campaign of harassment drove him off the small plot where he ran a fish farm, the local government paid Mr Fu just nine yuan ($1.45) a square meter for it.

The plot was quickly resold for 640 yuan [$103.11] per square meter to a developer, a national database of land transactions shows.  The developer has built villas that sell for 6,900 yuan [$1,111.67] a square meter.

A markup of a factor of nearly 10 at each stage.  Fu’s 9 yuan meter of fish farm was worth far more than he was paid.  In another sense, it was priceless, since he didn’t want to sell.

Mr Fu now is unemployed, one among tens of thousands of former farmers who inhabit the impoverished fringes of Chengdu, a city in southwestern China.  He has no heart to start another business.  “What’s the point if the government can just destroy it?” he says.

With no sense of irony, the PRC’s new president, Xi Jinping, claims to want strengthen that demographically unstable society and its unstable economy—through property (land) ownership.  After all, as Fu pointed out,

precarious land rights mean little incentive to invest in improving agricultural output, and no asset that can be sold to fund a move to the city.  Low compensation for the millions ousted from their land—coupled with ineligibility for social benefits because they aren’t registered as urban residents—means for many a life of poverty on the edges of the cities.

And no incentive to bring additional children—boys only, mind, in a mandated one child environment, with the bias’ own long-run population sustainability implications—into the world.  And the one-child policy was put in place explicitly to achieve the population reduction about to occur sharply.

Fat chance for any serious change:

“Push forward scientific development and advance social harmony,” proclaims a banner draped across one construction site, parroting a catch phrase of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao.  Mr Fu, surveying a noodle bowl of highway overpasses, said, “A few years ago, this was all farmland.”

Because farmland—the means of feeding the population—stands in the way of progress.  Xi will have a great deal of trouble reversing that, especially with the money to be made converting farmland to urban land.

Some Thoughts on the Politics of Missile Defense

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I’ll leave aside the technical difficulties of a missile defense; these are just engineering problems, most of which have already been solved, with the remainder having solutions understood and under development.  I’ll only write about some of the political factors involved in our country defending itself.

I operate in this post from this First Principle: we formed the social compact that created the US explicitly to do two things: one is to protect individual liberty and facilitate an environment within which each of us also could satisfy our individual responsibilities.  The other is to protect our nation as a whole from outside disaster.  A corollary to this is the defense of our friends and allies, since their health, independence, and freedom contribute to our own and so facilitate our defense.

A missile defense system is intended to support that second imperative—national defense—and missile defense in Europe (and in eastern Asia when the alliances can be arranged) is a component of that.

There are a number of objections to our having an active, and forward, missile defense capability.

  • Russia is also critical of the plan, which it believes is really intended to counter its missiles.
  • While it might seem logical for the US to want to have a defense against Russian missiles, it’s not so simple.  A new missile defense system aimed at Russia could undermine the balance between the nuclear powers, prompting Moscow to add to its arsenal and build up its own defenses.
  • [P]lans have gained momentum in Europe with the signing of basing agreements in Poland, Romania and Turkey, as well as backing by NATO.  But Russia, while initially welcoming the plan, now strongly opposes it, especially the interceptors in the final stage.  Russia fears those interceptors could catch its intercontinental missiles launched at the US.

Aside from my (minor) meme that if the Russians don’t like it, it must be a good idea, whatever “it” might be, there are a number of reasons why these objections are silly.  Say, arguendo, that our anti-Iranian missile defense system does have the capability of countering Russian missiles.  This isn’t at all farfetched, since the end-stage of our missile defense system includes a capability against all ICBMs (Russia’s included).  The Russians don’t have any intention of attacking us or our allies.  Do they?  Since they…do not…their plaint that a defense system might interfere with their non-existent attack is a non sequitur.  Besides, if they do attack, our government has a duty to shoot down those missiles—as well as to respond with the total defeat of Russia and their war.

Deploying a functional missile defense system could push the Russians into adding “to its arsenal and build[ing] up its own defenses?”  They’re already doing that.  However, even in our current economic strait, this is an arms race Russia cannot sustain.  Russia’s economy is too dependent on oil and gas exports, and that economy already is failing (and not only due to falling oil and gas prices on the world market).  They don’t have the money.  Besides, this is a rerun of a play we’ve already seen under identical circumstances: the failure of the Soviet Union and its subsequent dissolution was contributed to heavily by their effort to sustain a missile and missile defense effort in the face of our earlier, Reaganite missile defense system development.

  • [R]elocating missile interceptors planned for Poland and possibly Romania to ships on the North Sea, could be diplomatically explosive.

If setting ourselves to defend ourselves and our friends and allies is diplomatically explosive, that’s a problem for those with plans to attack us, not for us.

  • It [Europe-based missile defense] would undermine prospects for further cuts in nuclear weapons—a priority for President Barack Obama—and could also hurt US-Russian cooperation on other issues of international importance.

We’ve reduced our nuclear capacity below military viability, already.  We should be rebuilding/modernizing, not engaging in further cuts.  Beyond that, this is another red herring.  Stipulating a need for further cuts anyway, a viable defense against nuclear (missile) attack can only facilitate a willingness to reduce or eliminate expensive, no longer viable weapons systems.  When facing an effective defensive system,  there are two major options: overwhelming it with massive numbers—an enormously expensive option—or improving penetration aids and developing offensive systems that bypass the defenses.  The latter option doesn’t require much of an investment in nuclear weapons.

Moreover, Russia isn’t cooperating with us on anything, so there’s nothing here to hurt.  See their active obstruction of our, and of international, efforts to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons development program.  See, also, their active support for, and consequent blocking of efforts to curb or replace, a Syrian régime that has butchered 60,000 of its people in the last 18 months.  After Afghanistan, their “cooperation” won’t be even be necessary there, and as it is, it’s an iffy cooperation: they’ve already tried to get Kirghizstan to stop letting us use their bases, and we had to greatly increase the rent to be able to continue.

OK, one technical item:

  • Romania [is] a poor location for an interceptor to protect the US.  …the Polish site would work only if the US developed capabilities to launch interceptors while an Iranian missile was in its short initial phase of powered flight.

However, Romania is well situated to defend Europe from Iran—or Russia, or China.

Additionally, intercepting missiles during boost already is under development, and this isn’t as difficult (relative to interception in any other phase of flight) as it might seem (only detection and reaction times are somewhat compressed).  Missiles still boosting are not yet at maximum velocity (they are still boosting), and they’ve not yet released their warhead(s), which greatly increases the interception problem, nor have they yet released their decoys and other countermeasures, which also greatly magnify the interception problem.

There are no coherent political reasons for not deploying an effective, and extensive, missile defense system around the world.