Table Of ContentAlso by Dennis F. Poindexter
The New Cyberwar: Technology and the Redefinition of Warfare
(McFarland, 2015)
The Chinese Information War
Espionage, Cyberwar, Communications Control and
Related Threats to United States Interests
SECOND EDITION
Dennis F. Poindexter
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
Copyright
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3176-9
© 2018 Dennis F. Poindexter. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Front cover images © 2018 iStockphoto
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Table of Contents
Preface
1. No Wars Here
2. Information War
3. What Has Become of War?
4. Political Wars
5. Fancy Bears, Chinese Businessmen and U.S. Politics
6. Economic War
7. Real War
8. It Is Just Business
9. Drifting into Darkness
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
List of Names and Terms
Preface
This book is about a war that many will doubt we are in: an information war
with China. To understand this is to believe that we do not have war
anymore, at least in the traditional sense of it. The new type of war is
China’s bending a country’s will to its own. It is clever, broadly applied,
successful, and aimed directly at the United States.
The 1990s were the years of information warfare, at least judging by the
two-inch-thick treatise Information Warfare: Legal, Regulatory and
Organizational Considerations for Assurance, published by the Joint Staff
of the Pentagon in 1996; but it was being talked about long before it became
fashionable. The Chinese were following the strategies before that, but they
may have been encouraged by our concentration on it. They have applied
themselves to it and have done well.
This war is neither conventional nor accidental. The U.S. military expanded
the doctrine and made it public, but they seldom used it themselves. Our
military is at a disadvantage in its application because it is part of a system
of government that is democratic and decentralized, and that separates the
government from commercial business. This is a system that has served us
well, but it is not one that China sees as a path to the top of the world’s food
chain.
This is not a “how to” book of strategies that might be developed to fight a
war. It is a way to organize what the Chinese are already doing, to make
sense of it. Until we see ourselves as being in a war, we cannot begin to
fight it effectively. It doesn’t fit our idea of war because the Chinese have
changed the nature of war to carry it out. The First Principle of War is never
to be at war with anyone. This is the Escher drawing of war—a stairway that
never goes where it should. They will never admit that what they are doing
could be interpreted as war. Denial is a large part of this form of war.
We tend to think of war as something fought by the military, when we know
the militaries of the world are often augmented by other types of covert
actions, usually carried out by the intelligence communities of different
countries. We know that a military attack force can have ground troops who
are not in uniform and not working for a military commander. There are
helicopters overhead that are “different” from some of the others and are not
manned by pilots working for a military. There are support functions that
give maps and warnings to attacking military forces. Some of the forces
operate from front companies that look like legitimate businesses but are
really covered operations. The Chinese use their companies as covers for
their government and military, but they are not the only country that
operates them. If we don’t see them for what they are, they are doing their
operational security the way it is supposed to be done. Information war
should be below the enemy’s radar.
The gap that this book covers is an area of information warfare that is called
“black” and involves classified national security information, which is not
supposed to be written about in the public media. The irony, of course, is
that people do actually write about things that are black, and the government
even approves some of the things that are said. We talk about things we do
in war, yet we hold these things to be among our most valued secrets.
In this book I’ve done the best I can to describe some of the aspects of this
type of warfare without discussing things that could be related to United
States military or intelligence community capabilities. Sometimes that
means being vague about what the U.S. might be able to do, or how an
enemy might be able to develop other capabilities. Where possible, I have
used open sources and what hackers are doing, even though those groups
may not be sponsored by a government agency.
Hackers have caught up to what the governments were doing ten years ago,
and the concern today is that terrorists will do the same. It is probably
inevitable that this will happen, and when it does, there will be almost no
deterrent that can stop a stateless group from causing us damage that will be
painful. I have tried not to encourage them or point them in any particular
direction. Too many people speculate on how to hurt us, without thinking
about how that might benefit someone who hasn’t thought about the subject
very much.
I wrote this book for a general audience and not just for military people. The
military does not pay much attention to doctrine unless it helps them win
wars. This is not a war that the military would fight alone. My purpose is to
educate by attempting to teach concepts, not techniques, of warfare. If my
audience believes we might already be at war with China, the book is a
success.
There are several congressional reports that are very authoritative and well
written, and, for the most part, I have used these as sources. They are the
only unclassified sources for some of this material. The U.S.–China
Economic and Security Review Commission has provided the best sources
of any committee of Congress and has done so more frequently than most
others. They are both authoritative and thorough.
I have said what I think China has been doing, and in this edition included a
few things about Russia, North Korea, and Iran without mentioning some of
the U.S. capabilities to counterattack. Some of my critics think China is
weak and does much of their information war out of fear of the rest of the
world. I doubt that. They could not take on countries like the United States if
they believed they were too weak to do so. Their strategy is to wait for a
time when the advantage is theirs. At the same time, they know their own
strength.
I believe the Russians and Chinese work together more than we currently
know, in information warfare. Their techniques and strategies are too much
alike for it to be coincidental.
We are behind the Chinese in areas that are going to cause us great harm if
we don’t start catching up. But it is not something you will hear discussed in
the halls of Congress or the Pentagon. Exactly how we are behind is one of
our best kept secrets and will stay that way. We have to learn to fight in
similar ways, and we have to do it quietly.
This book could not have been written without the support and inspiration of
my wife, Virginia. She is very smart and keeps good counsel.
1 No Wars Here
The First Principle of War
To throw by strategic movements the mass of an army,
successfully, upon the decisive points of a theater of war, and also
upon the communications of the enemy, as much as possible,
without compromising one’s own.
—Major General A. H. Jomini,
The Art of War, Paris, 1838
In 1862, during the United States Civil War, the area around Antietam
Creek in Sharpsburg, Maryland, saw a battle where soldiers walked
relentlessly across an open field of fire while their comrades fell beside
them. Soldiers threw themselves across a narrow bridge directly under
fire from hills above as waves of them died, one after another. Quite a
bit has changed since that war, but we sometimes need to walk in those
fields to experience what soldiers must have felt while they fought.
Thousands of tourists visit our region every year to do just that.
I walked with a few of them down a long, sloping hill at the battlefield,
where four thousand troops were killed. It was a hot day; the sun was
blazing. Every step was agonizing. I wondered what it must have been
like to look at the fence row ahead and see those little puffs of smoke
popping up almost everywhere, watching people drop on either side.
The grass would have been wet with the blood of soldiers. It made the
hair stand up on the back of my neck. It seemed like certain death.
You have to ask yourself how it is possible that soldiers believe this is
part of their job—to die with near certainty—because someone thinks it
is a sound military strategy. A soldier who looks down at that fence line
has to know the truth. Yet years after Antietam, we got even better at
killing soldiers without getting better at war.
In the fields of Verdun, France, soldiers were blasted by new weapons
from the air and ground. Airplanes and machine guns made killing
much easier and more efficient. The Germans had almost complete air
superiority, which they used to their advantage. The French had the
fierceness of soldiers fighting for their home, and little else. From
February to December of 1916, fighting surged and stopped with
seemingly endless deaths among the combatants. When the battle was
over, the Germans had lost 140,000 men and the French 162,000.
All the while, those soldiers, and the ones who have come after them,
must have wished there was a better way to settle a dispute.
Now, there is.
Today, we can win territory, capture populations, influence our
enemies, and engage our allies without having a war by any current
definition. Soldiers enforce checkpoints inside another country, arrest
political opponents, seize radio and television stations, take over public
utilities, and declare the territory theirs. Is that war? Apparently not,
since no government, press outlet or public view says it is. The
occasional government official has called it annexation. Annexation is
“the act of attaching, adding, joining, or uniting one thing to another. It
is usually applied to land or fixtures as: the acquisition of land or
territory by a nation, state, or municipality.”1 It is not war.
Adolf Hitler used the term frequently to describe his taking of various
parts of countries around Germany just prior to World War II. Trying
to stop the war Hitler threatened, the major powers of Europe conceded
land owned by other countries. It seemed like a good way to stop a war
from happening, but we all know how that strategy turned out.
Russia in Crimea and Ukraine, China in the South and East China Sea,
and ISIS in the Middle East are not at war with their neighbors by
almost any definition we find today, yet they have each seized territory
others claimed and used some force to do it. Russia and China have
strengthened their positions by convincing allies and enemies alike that
these are peaceful takeovers of territory each owns. Governments and
their political allies, even parts of the academic community, define war
in such a way that the methods used in these circumstances fall outside
the bounds. But if it cannot be war, what is it? Annexation describes
what has occurred, yet that is not an acceptable term here any more
than it was in the time of Adolf Hitler.
In 2012, Leon Panetta, who was Secretary of Defense at the time, was
asked if we were at war with China, and he said, “I guess it depends on
your definition of war.” Some researchers want a formal definition that
is recognized by scholars. There are many, but this one is recognized in
law:
A contest by force between two or more nations, carried on for any
purpose, or armed conflict of sovereign powers or declared and
open hostilities, or the state of nations among whom there is an
