China’s Digital Threat – USA Gov Policy

China’s digital prowess is an immediate and high-level threat to the United States. It cannot be stated more plainly. How our loss of cyber security occurred over the last two decades is, perhaps, more disconcerting as the US and other democracies had plenty of warning. The Western world chose to relegate the issue to a “future potential challenge” status that it believed could be overcome by creating a friendly relationship with the communist giant. Since China’s opening to the democratic West, Beijing has failed repeatedly to abide by the rules-based international order. The West, in turn, has failed to hold China accountable for its actions. The free world is paying a high price and it may be too late to stop China.

Kinetic warfare is only one type of combat. In our digital world today, vast armies work from home behind computer screens. The digital threat mounted by China’s military since Xi Jinping assumed power is real, growing, and in some areas surpasses the United States’ capability to defend against it. Although China’s hacking teams have been hard at work since the early 2000’s, Xi first prioritized cybersecurity (AKA cyberwarfare) as a policy in 2014. He ordered increased funding for cybersecurity research and recruited talented young Chinese in universities, the bureaucracy, and security services who could wreak havoc throughout the digital world.

“The Chinese state has systematized cybersecurity education, improved students’ access to hands-on practice, promoted hacking competitions, and collected vulnerabilities to be used in network operations against China’s adversaries, according to CyberScoop’s Dakota Cary. These better resourced and trained teams, he says, put companies at risk of further compromise and create an additional imperative for the US and allied nations to improve defenses of government networks. In 2014 Xi formed the Cybersecurity and Informatization Leading Small Group inside the CCP.

Less recognized at the time was that China secretly was fashioning their cybersecurity on the American intelligence community’s Centers for Excellence model. After analyzing the United States’ National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, Beijing established a board of academics from universities across the country. The government developed a list of core competencies needed by Chinese students graduating with a cybersecurity degree and rolled out a full curriculum to be followed by the country’s top universities. By 2014, only two years after prioritizing and funding the initiative, the government under Xi’s direction established a new agency call the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). This allowed the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Cybersecurity and Informatization Committee of the CCP Central Committee (CIC) to present the effort as a government operation to global businesses and foreign agencies.

“One of the CAC’s first acts was to publish a National Cybersecurity Strategy for China,” according to Cary. Two of the regions developing programs, he notes, were modeled on North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. China’s National Cybersecurity Talent and Innovation Base is in Wuhan. There is a 15-square-mile campus with a fourth of it dedicated to the National Cybersecurity School, the Offense-Defense Laboratory, the Combined Cybersecurity Research Institute, and supporting computational, data storage and cyber range facilities, says Cary. “The remainder of the campus,” he adds, “offered tax incentives to people and businesses wishing to set up shop next to the base.” Central government policymakers made the project a national asset in late 2016 but didn’t stop there. A year later another provincial project was nationalized in support of the cyberwarfare effort. The Guiyang National Big Data Cyber Range now hosts cybersecurity competitions, industrial hardware for OT hackers, and apparently enough server space to count as “big data,” says Cary. Unlike the democratic West, the CCP and the central government can quickly co-opt so-called private infrastructure to serve the country.

To keep the effort moving China adopted a program in 2017 that mirrors the Center for Academic Excellence-Cyber Operations certification awarded by seven US agencies, including the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security. Today it runs hundreds of cyber hacking competitions to identify new “national resources” to be China’s digital warriors and software vulnerability researchers. The competitions are modeled again on the US Defense Department’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) which hosts a Grand Cyber Challenge. A recently released report, authored by several of the world-class cybersecurity schools in partnership with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Education, and the cybersecurity firm Beijing Integrity Technology, describes the current landscape, according to Cary. The authors of the report, he says, “expect China’s deficit of cybersecurity experts to fall to 370,000 by 2027 — likely seen as a big success since 2017 estimates put the then-deficit at around 1.4 million.” Within the next decade the West can look forward to seeing the results of a mass of well-trained Chinese civil servants working behind computer screens. Their only goal: take down the West’s digital infrastructure. No kinetic warfare is necessary.

Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

Ukraine’s Frozen Conflict

As we approach winter in the northern hemisphere, the war in Ukraine is beginning to resemble a “frozen conflict” from many perspectives. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently told the media he hopes the war will end faster once President-elect Trump takes over in January. Opinions in Moscow, however, differ from that of the Ukrainian leader. Russian President Vladimir Putin argues that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) needs to exclude Ukraine from joining in “exchange” for peace. If it does not, he says, then no end to the war is in sight. So far there is no Christmas solution. Several NATO countries, according to Vladimir Socor of the Jamestown Foundation, are tentatively considering “coalitions-of-the-willing” to provide security for Ukraine outside of the formal NATO framework. There is, however, no collective mechanism today under which such an arrangement is viable. According to the NATO Charter, while Ukraine is a NATO partner country, it may not join as a full member since it has not fulfilled the requirements for membership. That has not stopped NATO and allies from continuing “to provide Ukraine with unprecedented levels of support, helping to uphold its fundamental right to self-defence,” according to the organization. Socor says that keeping Ukraine out of NATO will not advance peace with Russia. Waiting for a peace settlement, he suggests, would only serve to encourage Moscow to continue the war indefinitely. Although the Biden Administration officially withdrew its support for Ukrainian membership in 2021, NATO maintains an “open door” policy toward membership-seeking countries. The current White House position led the way for European states to oppose Ukraine’s membership saying that a decision should be delayed until “conditions are met.” Biden pushed for changing “open door” to a “bridge” metaphor. It is not intended as an across-the-board NATO policy and has been implemented in the past on a case-by-case basis, says Socor. “The alliance’s open-door policy was not fully insulated from Russia’s non-statutory blocking power, and NATO-aspirant countries’ path toward membership was not always irreversible.” Russia has successfully blocked states like Georgia from joining, first in 2008 and again after the war in Ukraine began in 2014. Russia recognizes the value add of Ukraine to NATO is enormous and that Kyiv has a better case than some other nations. Putin’s invasion was, in part, intended to foreclose that option. By 2021, Moscow was pushing hard to maximize its war objectives, which included further annexations of Ukrainian territory. A main goal for Putin was, and is, to ensure there is no Ukraine left to join NATO. As President-elect Trump prepares to assume office in January, he is faced with the historical challenges presented by the war. Post-conflict security guarantees were the center of several proposals made during the 2023 military stalemate. The incoming Trump Administration has yet to outline how it intends to handle the Russia-Ukraine war. Analysts in Washington believe that the new Administration will expect its European allies to guarantee the majority of Ukraine’s security needs. As we approach 2025, several European nations have acknowledged that they do not view Ukraine as eligible for NATO membership as it would draw the organization into the middle of the conflict. Others want to wait until the war is over or pending a “peace” settlement before considering Ukrainian membership. Socor reports that some “influential voices” are suggesting that “Kyiv should join NATO after “freezing” the war along a stable armistice line, de facto accepting Ukraine’s partition, with NATO security guarantees applying de jure to the government-controlled territory only.” This would mean starting accession talks soon with the actual talks to commence only after a ceasefire is in place. Trump arrives in Washington at a time when Putin’s hybrid strategies of war in Ukraine have eviscerated commonly-held differences between war and peace. “Absent a political consensus in NATO over Ukrainian membership, certain European allies, including France’s President Emmanuel Macron, are holding informal consultations about post-conflict security guarantees to Kyiv by NATO members outside of NATO’s framework,” according to the Jamestown Foundation. The Biden Administration downplayed the discussions on possible forms of military assistance and defense industry cooperation by sending only an Assistant Secretary of State. For a European peace to hold the Trump Administration would need to formally extend the United States’ nuclear deterrence to Ukraine. Options under discussion in Europe include a “coalition of the resolute” to deploy forces to Ukraine as part of a possible armistice package, deterring further Russian attacks, says Secor. European officials are also debating, without any agreement, whether its military forces could perform non-combat logistical roles to free Ukrainian forces to fight. None of the possible courses of action has moved forward as all eyes are waiting on the incoming Trump Administration for clues about its intended level of support for a NATO framework and other non-NATO proposals. Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.