Reforms equip China for high-tech wars
China’s Strategic Support Force allows Beijing to project power into the ‘strategic frontiers’ of space and cyberspace
China’s newly created Strategic Support Force unifies the Chinese military’s formerly separate space, cyberspace, electromagnetic and psychological warfare components. The force, officially launched in 2015 but still under development, will be crucial for China’s military to operate further overseas and will deepen its capability for ‘joint operations’ involving multiple service arms.
What next
In future wars, China would move early to strike and incapacitate an adversary’s information networks -- the nervous system of a military that includes its reconnaissance and early warning systems, command and control, air defence and radar. The aim is to render the adversary deaf, blind and unable or unwilling to resist. The offensive and defensive requirements of this ‘systems destruction’ warfare will profoundly shape how China’s military organises, equips and trains itself.
Subsidiary Impacts
- Historical differences in training, systems and culture will slow the development of the newly merged components into a combat-ready force.
- Economic espionage will probably shift from the military to the civilian intelligence agencies, particularly the Ministry of State Security.
- Lack of a strong cybersecurity industry will leave China’s own government, military and critical national infrastructure vulnerable.
Analysis
The Ministry of National Defence issues white papers that summarise the main threats facing China and how it plans to respond. The 2019 white paper states that China's armed forces -- collectively known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) -- must urgently improve their "informatisation". This is a critical concept in Chinese military literature.
'Informatisation' is the ability to fight using advanced information and communication technology
The PLA's belief in the importance of IT in modern warfare stems from its observations of foreign -- primarily US -- military campaigns over the past three decades, particularly the Gulf War (1991-92) and the Kosovo campaign (1998).
The PLA saw rapid US victory in both conflicts as coming not through the physical destruction of the enemy's forces, but the paralysis of their information networks. According to an authoritative PLA volume, the 2013 'Science of Military Strategy', these attacks rendered Iraqi and Serbian forces "limited, deprived and useless".
Those conflicts underlined the opportunities and vulnerabilities inherent in informatised warfare:
- IT enables capabilities such as precision strike, intelligence support systems, electronic and cyber operations, and real-time command and control. It also connects capabilities across the domains of ground, air and sea.
- However, a military whose effectiveness hinges on digital infrastructure is vulnerable if those systems are made inoperable during conflict.
As such, in 2005, the Central Military Commission, which oversees the PLA, defined a new theory of victory that centred on the destruction of enemy systems.
Authoritative writings suggest that the PLA sees pre-emptive strikes as crucial. China's military plans to concentrate firepower and cyberattacks early in a conflict and launch a precise and crippling assault on 'vital points' in an adversary's information infrastructure, including reconnaissance, early-warning and command-and-control systems.
An enemy that is 'deaf and blind' will be forced capitulate
The Strategic Support Force (SSF)
In recent years, the PLA has acknowledged that its ability to wage 'informatised warfare' has been hindered more by an outdated command bureaucracy than by technology. The answer, in 2015, was to create an entirely new service arm -- the SSF -- which has consolidated the PLA's information-related components under a single command.
These components are:
- cyberwarfare;
- electronic warfare (radar, radio, jamming and other electromagnetic capabilities);
- military space activities; and
- psychological warfare.
President Xi Jinping describes the SSF as a "brace" for other military services, whose information requirements are growing as the PLA moves towards joint operations and deploys further from China's shores.
Yet the new force has further implications for how China conducts operations in the information domain, including cyberspace.
China's information warfare units were previously grouped according to mission type. For example, the now-defunct Third Department of the General Staff managed signals intelligence and cyberespionage, separate from electronic and network attack in the Fourth Department.
The SSF has combined the PLA's espionage and attack units, opening the way for complex, multi-dimensional information operations that can adapt rapidly to fast-moving situations.
Psychological operations, for example, can be combined with electronic attacks to signal resolve before the outbreak of conflict. This could involve a high-volume media campaign to sap the enemy's will to fight and shape global narratives, while non-lethal electronic strikes on reconnaissance and intelligence systems would aim to deter an adversary by signalling the costs of further escalation.
Once conflict becomes unavoidable, the PLA would seek to strike first. Offensive cyber operations could paralyse critical parts of an adversary's information networks, along with kinetic strikes aimed at their physical destruction (see INTERNATIONAL: Anti-satellite weapons will proliferate - July 9, 2019).
The PLA's cyberespionage units are today in a better position to guide offensive network forces in cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum, because knowledge of an adversary's systems acquired during peacetime can be used to identify weak points to target during wartime.
Cyberespionage
Xi describes the goal of military reform, of which the SSF is part, as building a "modern force capable of winning information-based warfare".
With greater stress now placed on war fighting than on non-combat missions, the PLA's prodigious involvement in the theft of foreign intellectual property is likely to decline.
Cybersecurity companies instead report a recent uptick in intrusions from entities linked to the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China's main civilian intelligence agency, suggesting that intellectual property theft is no longer a core mission of the PLA's cyber forces.
The MSS is renowned for its cyber tradecraft and is reportedly more skilled at avoiding detection than its military counterparts.
In December 2018, the US Justice Department charged two MSS-linked hackers, Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong, with orchestrating a prolonged and sophisticated cyberespionage campaign against companies in at least a dozen countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, France and Germany.
Given how bad relations are between the Trump administration and China, Beijing has less incentive to rein in such activities in the face of US complaints.
Cyber defence
By consolidating all its information warfare units under a single command, China's military also seeks to ensure that its own growing reliance on information infrastructure never exceeds its ability to fight in the domains that support it.
However, the weakness of China's cyber defences is an open secret in Western capitals, rarely discussed publicly for fear of compromising their access.
Nevertheless, revelations by Edward Snowden of the scale of vulnerabilities in Chinese networks highlighted the degree to which the cybersecurity of government systems and critical national infrastructure have been an afterthought in the rush to embrace cutting-edge IT. In 2013, the exposure of PLA cyberespionage Unit 61398 by the US cybersecurity firm Mandiant was humiliating for China's armed forces and showed that their prowess in espionage is not matched by capabilities in defence.
The creation of the SSF will do little to remedy these shortcomings. China's weakness in cybersecurity is rooted in the country's lack of enterprises, researchers and investors necessary to design and develop advanced cybersecurity technology (see CHINA: Talent shortage poses obstacle for AI plans - June 21, 2019).
The party-state's traditional fixation on censorship rather than the security of networks will continue to divert political attention and resources away from the cybersecurity mission.
