Army’s China-Deterrence Strategy

The US Army is hedging its bet that China won’t invade Taiwan, by laying out a detailed, multi-pronged strategy for deterring a future war in the Pacific. It may, however, be too little and too late. DOD’s budget cuts under the Biden Administration do not bode well for advances in American preparedness for war in the numerous flashpoints existing in today’s world. During a talk on China this week at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), US Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth told the gathering “… obviously [we] have to prepare, to be prepared to fight and win that war.” She then added a mixed message signaling that she personally was “not of the view that an amphibious invasion of Taiwan is imminent.” Officials in Beijing analyzing her words might take this message to imply the US is not concerned about the threat, or that such an act would be below the threshold requiring a response from Washington. Translated into Chinese the word imminent can mean “working towards something.” It doesn’t have the same sense of urgency or intensity as the English word.

Secretary Wormuth’s use of “imminent” is significant. By Western definition the concept of an imminent threat is traditionally understood in a temporal sense to mean that a state is faced with a physical danger that is both real and could occur within an immediate time frame. Under those conditions a state, or a partner of a threatened state, understands the threat to be at the center of the timeline extending into both the past and near future.

One issue related to the Chinese threat toward Taiwan is that the United States and China have very different concepts of linear time. The US measures time in very short periods or “events,” while Chinese leaders talk in terms of decades and generations. If the CCP leadership believes Secretary Wormuth’s use of the word suggests the US is not seriously concerned about Beijing “working towards” a war with Taiwan, it may alter the timing of the CCP’s military and political policy toward Taipei.

The nexus of two opposing great powers, both commanding advanced weaponry, means that every single word spoken by leaders gets digested and analyzed in both capitals so that analysts can brief their leadership on the threat environment. What serves as a calming domestic political statement spoken in Washington, can act as a military permission slip in Beijing. If the United States puts weapons systems in place in Asia but the leadership in Washington talks about the lack of an imminent threat, Beijing will consider three possible conclusions about American political willpower. First, it could conclude the United States is serious about defending Taiwan because it is moving to reinforce the US Pacific command. Second, the words spoken by American military and political leaders are simply political theater and can be ignored. The third consideration is the most dangerous. Beijing could misinterpret the words to mean that Washington doesn’t see a serious near-term threat in the Pacific. This interpretation provides China more leeway in how it carries out its Taiwan policy and may embolden Xi Jinping to act.

If Xi concludes Washington doesn’t see the danger and will not choose to become involved despite military sales and training exchanges with Taiwan, the Chinese leader may choose to force Taiwan’s hand at the most convenient time for Beijing. It may not be in the form of kinetic warfare as China’s influence operations in Taiwan are extensive, but it could tilt toward a calculated action to force Taiwan under Beijing’s control.

Many military and political analysts in Washington who understand the nuances of the Chinese language and the country’s political culture suggest that their briefings are falling on deaf ears inside the Biden Administration. They argue that the US leadership must improve its understanding of how China perceives the world and responds to comments, like those of Secretary Wormuth.

It is not the first time a few words made a mark in US-China relations. When President Carter recognized mainland China as the legitimate government of the country and formally opened relations, the US renamed its Embassy on Taiwan the American Institute in Taiwan. Essentially it performs the same tasks as any US embassy. The word change allowed Beijing to save face.

In April 2001, a US Navy EP-3A ARIES reconnaissance aircraft collided with a Chinese jet midair. The Chinese pilot was attempting to intimidate the American plane flying in international airspace 70 miles off China’s coastline. The Chinese pilot died when his plane fell into the ocean after hitting the US aircraft. The US plane was damaged and forced to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. The plane and its 24 crew members were detained. For 11 days the two countries worked to develop the “Letter of the Two Sorries.” The United States in English stated that the country was “very sorry” for the death of the Chinese pilot. In English the wording does not insinuate culpability. For its domestic audience, Beijing translated the sentiment to mean the US took responsibility and made a formal apology. Words matter.

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

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

Long Term Effects of Putin’s Ukraine War

“The war in Ukraine is leading both Moscow and Kyiv to engage in increased cyberattacks that are destructive to both infrastructure and civilian lives from meddling with energy networks to manipulating people into committing violent acts,” according to Luke Rodeheffer of the Jamestown Foundation. Both sides are engaging in activities that will leave their mark on the world for years to come as the war has increasingly blurred the lines of official state actions and those of non-state cyber actors. Criminal hacking groups and official intelligence organizations are developing working relationships that offer attractive opportunities to collaborate with good pay. As the kinetic war drifts into the cyberspace domain, some members of government agencies are moonlighting as hackers and coordinating their activities over the Internet. Early on in the war Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, announced that the country needed a volunteer Information Technology (IT) Army capable of coordinating activities against Russian targets using Telegram. Today that IT Army distributes free hacking tools to its volunteers for conducting cyberattacks on the Russian infrastructure and companies. Using tens of thousands of network devices, Ukraine’s volunteers have had success in performing distributed-denial-of-service attacks. “Ukraine has conducted a large-scale call center fraud operation targeting Russia, particularly older and more gullible Russian citizens, which is forcing the Russian state to increase surveillance on communication networks,” says Rodeheffer. In late June the IT Army overwhelmed Russian target Internet infrastructure with “connection requests” that ultimately led to interruptions in Mir, Russia’s national payment card system, according to Lizzie Simpson writing for Habr. She quotes a Forbes interlocutor in the Russian information security industry as saying: “The attack is 100%, and this is the work of the IT army of Ukraine.” Confirmed attacks such as the Mir incident are changing the character of warfare and are challenging for international security networks to control. The intensity and breadth of the attacks continues to increase on both sides of the conflict, however, it started long before the invasion. As early as 2010, there are indications Russia engaged in destructive cyberattacks against Ukraine. One of the most egregious strikes occurred in the winter of 2015 against the country’s power grid. Years before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia used hacks to shut down the computer infrastructure of TV channels in the country, according to an expert involved in the investigation of one of the episodes. Russia carried it out in a “multi-stage secret infection of information networks,” says Vsevolod Nekrasov of Epravda. Russia often employs these weapons against Ukraine in its current war effort against the civilian infrastructure. Using malware capable of permanently erasing data, Russia is seen as the likely sponsor of last December’s attack on Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest telecommunications company. It resulted in extensive interruptions in telephone and Internet services that disabled the country for weeks. Kyivstar called it “catastrophic” at the time. In April, a response by a Ukrainian security services linked group called “Ukrainian Blackjack,” responded in kind by targeting a Russian data center utilized by several Large Russian companies and defense-related conglomerates. NV.ua reports that the group destroyed 300 terabytes (TB) of data. A DVD-R holds 4.7 GB. One would need 63,830 DVD’s to hold 300 TB of data! Ukraine has also targeted public figures in Russia linked to the war including high-ranking Duma members and policymakers focusing on the Middle East and Central Asia. Two of those, Alexander Babakov and Semyon Bagdasarov were close confidants of Putin. Their emails exposed sensitive detailed plans on how Russia planned to work with Iran to avoid sanctions. Simultaneously with the increase in cyberattacks, is a corresponding rise in cybercrime aimed at the Russian citizenry. Many of these incidents were in the form of fraud calls tricking Russians into transferring money out of the country or revealing personal information, according to RIA Novosti. “The scale of Ukrainian cybercrime has provided Moscow with additional justification to bolster its internal communications surveillance systems, under the auspices of detecting fraudulent phone calls,” says Rodeheffer. Radio Svoboda is reporting that it is also being used as an excuse to rush the integration of the occupied regions of Ukraine into Russia’s telecommunications systems and SORM, the communications surveillance system. What is most problematic is that the criminal elements involved may make it difficult to dismantle this “underground” after the war ends, says Rodeheffer. What is tolerated during a war, including the need for questionable characters with technical expertise, may lead to a new type of 21-century warfare that extends beyond the current geography of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It could end up as a battle for the survival of both Western military and civilian infrastructures.