China has announced plans to conduct Internet warfare, and the nation's top military intelligence officer says that poses a future threat to American military superiority.
"We are clearly interested and concerned about this whole idea of information attack," Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, the new director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), said in an interview with the Washington Times, which broke the story Wednesday that the official Chinese military newspaper was saying the People's Liberation Army was gearing up for wartime computer attacks.
The Chinese article reportedly says it is "essential to have an all-conquering offensive technology and to develop software and technology for Net offensives so as to be able to launch attacks and countermeasures on the Net, including information- software, information-blocking software, and information-deception software The operations would involve Internet attacks that would include "breaking codes, stealing data and taking anti-follow-up measures."
"We recognize that information dominance is going to be important to the future and that has to do with acquiring better information about your adversary, and protecting your own," Wilson says. "So when the Chinese discuss [information warfare] in the PLA daily . . . we ought to take note and we have." The fact that the Chinese openly are discussing plans to attack computer-run infrastructures in future war is unsettling, he tells the Times.
Wilson also tells the paper the Pentagon's Defense Information Systems Agency has set up a special joint task force known as the Computer Defense Network.
The Chinese report was published in the Liberation Army Daily, official newspaper of the army's political department, and is said to have coincided with other Chinese military statements in recent weeks about growing offensive capabilities. The Times says it also appeared days before China agreed to join the World Trade Organization attacks.
But Wilson also says the Chinese possibility should be taken seriously even if the Chinese might be overstating their actual capabilities.
