By Adam Segal
Yesterday, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commissionreleased the second report prepared for it by Northrop Grumman on Chinese cyber capabilities. As numerous press reports noted, Occupying the Information High Ground argues that China’s improving cyber capabilities pose a threat to the United States military, that China could target U.S. logistic and transport networks in the case of a regional conflict, and that Chinese IT companies ZTE, Datang, and Huawei all have close collaborative ties with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The report does a good job of bringing a great deal of Chinese-language and open-source information together, and is especially useful in laying out how information security research is funded in and conducted by military and civilian universities. Much of the discussion, however, about how China thinks about computer network operations, the growing links between defense and civilian industries, and the threats to the supply chain has been done before (James Mulvenon is particularly good on Chinese thinking about seizing the information advantage and the “digital triangle”; Tai Ming Cheung’s Fortifying China is an exhaustive study of China’s efforts to build a dual-use industrial base; and CFR held a workshop on some of the vulnerabilities that stem from sourcing hardware and software from all over the world in January 2011).
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