WASHINGTON — China's belief in asymmetric warfare may be one of the major forces driving its efforts at the national level to develop missiles, submarines and, more recently, cyber-warfare capability. Chinese cyber-warfare concepts subscribe to the notion of "the inferior defeating the superior," which draws inspiration from both Sun Tzu and Mao Zedong.
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Though China has achieved remarkable successes in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs, other military research and development successes are rare. Chinese achievements in nuclear weapons and missiles resulted from concentrated resources, effective coordination of distinct specialties, and determined leadership directed at the achievement of a single, well-defined goal.
Unlike most weapon programs, which were developed in total government secrecy, dual-use information technologies (IT) are out in the open. Indeed, IT in the West is developed mostly in the civilian sector and then migrated into military applications. In recent years, U.S. weapon systems have been heavily embedded with commercial- off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software components.
As a result, powerful military technologies have been developed more efficiently. Likewise, cutting-edge cyber-warfare technologies and capabilities are largely developed in an open commercial market and are outside direct government control.
Consequently, the rapid development of electronics and computer applications in the 1980s and 1990s seem to have eluded China, despite its many national programs for technological modernization. In the IT area, China's private sector, with extensive foreign contacts and more up-to-date technologies, may have even surpassed the technological level of the research and development establishment associated directly or indirectly with the People's Liberation Army (PLA).
We have seen evidence that more pressure for contacts between the military and civilian sectors has been mounting and that the PLA is increasingly relying on "borrowed" expertise from the private sector.
The PLA's highly selective procurement and deployment of modern technologies for military operational capabilities will pose great difficulties because technology is advancing faster than it can be acquired, tested and applied in a military environment. As other nations' militaries continue to advance, the PLA's modernization efforts face moving technological goalposts.
Most notably, China's military- industrial complex seems to suffer from technological disadvantages in areas such as electronics, computers and software — areas where the civilian sector advances almost daily. The Chinese military-industrial complex, with its military top-down control, may not have the wherewithal to compete with other democracies' IT industries.
On the operational level, China's cyber warriors deploy concealment, deception and camouflage measures to hide its trails, but their effectiveness does not seem promising, given that the United States is credited with most IT development.
With the help of the U.S. National Security Agency, for example, Google and other high-tech companies were able to trace the source of cyber attacks back to China, despite the Chinese attackers' deliberate efforts to mask their footprints. In that regard, even if the PLA is able to develop certain "asymmetric" capabilities, it is still a long shot to expect it to defeat the U.S. in information battlefields where the latter seems to set the rules and leads the race.
Unless China can exploit certain weaknesses on the network and succeeds in developing some asymmetric advantages, the U.S. will retain systems that possess the skills and tools to retaliate.
The PLA's cyber capabilities can probably delay American intervention in a military contingency, but the chance of China leapfrogging the U.S. technologically to bring about the downfall of the U.S. in an all-out cyber war seems rather remote. Therefore, apprehension of "asymmetric warfare" capabilities may disappoint the PLA.
German deployment of submarines during both world wars was initially an asymmetric nightmare for its opposing forces. Japan's kamikaze tactics was a desperate asymmetric response to the U.S. naval supremacy near the end of World War II. Similarly, Egyptian fast boats carrying anti-ship cruise missiles ware also an asymmetric threat to Israeli destroyers in the 1960s.
But as technologies matured and corresponding countermeasures and doctrines were perfected, Germany's enemies developed anti-submarine warfare, Americans congregated their anti-air artillery firepower on the kamikaze planes, and Israelis used chaff to confuse anti-ship cruise missiles.
The chaos created by Chinese hackers on U.S. technology companies is due to the fact that IT is still in its infant stage. Logic in software is inherently complex, making it difficult to verify mathematically and very expensive to validate exhaustively.
Despite much hype, most IT products in the commercial world rarely go through the same vigorous development processes as in defense and aerospace sectors. Unlike the aerospace industry, where reliability and safety is of utmost importance, one rarely finds sound engineering disciplines and certified solutions in the information industry. Consequently, hackers around the world exploit ubiquitous weaknesses in many U.S. information applications laden with COTS components.
It is often argued that an autocracy rounds up resources better than a democracy. So, it is concluded that a dictatorship is more efficient in achieving national objectives, especially military ones. This may be true in public policymaking, but an oppressed and authoritarian society is ill-suited for the free flow of information; in fact, it is antithetical to the very notion of an IT revolution.
IT has been shown to exert profound impacts on society, which inevitably undergoes extensive transformation. An information revolution is much more than technological or military; it influences the social and national fabric of a country. The Chinese autocratic model exposes the inability to cope with the "third wave" of the technological revolution.
In the late 19th century, China's attempts to modernize its armed forces failed miserably because no other up-to-date social elements existed to support the technological innovation.
China's greatest impediment to achieving an information-based revolution in military affairs is the authoritarian nature of its political control over society.
The Chinese should learn from the failures of their 19th-century military revolution and reshape their society (and government) to be competitive in the new millennium. The capabilities to cope with the challenges posed by information warfare will not naturally come until the social transformation is complete.
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