Fang Fenghui (left), chief of General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, welcomes Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Beijing on Monday. Kuang Linhua / China Daily
I’ve been reading an awesome book about Winston Churchill called The Last Lion by William Manchester and Paul Reid. One of the many things in the book that jumped out at me was a quote from a speech Churchill gave in Nov. 1942 after British forces defeated Rommel and his German troops at El Alamein. It was the first major victory for British ground forces after a series of defeats. Churchill stated:
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
This brings me to what I’d like to blog about. The terrorist attack in Boston and thwarted terrorist attack on a train have overshadowed what may prove to be an important event the beginning of a dialogue on cyber attacks between the United States and China. This week Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been visiting China this week at the invitation of Gen. Fang Fenghui, chief of the general staff for the Chinese army. During a joint press conference both men addressed cyber, as reported in a 22 April American Forces press article:
“Fang … answered a question about cyberattacks in the wake of recent reports that many are launched from within China’s army and said cyberattacks are a concern for all “big cyber countries.”
If the Internet is not managed well, he said, “it may bring damaging consequences.” He added, “If the security of the Internet cannot be guaranteed, then … results may be as serious as a nuclear bomb.”
China is a major victim of cyberattacks, he said, and the nation’s leaders have no tolerance for it. Fang pointed out, however, that pinpointing the source of attacks can be very difficult, as the Internet is open to everyone and attacks can be launched from anywhere.
“General Dempsey and I have already talked about the importance of maintaining cybersecurity,” he said. “I believe it is important that we check out the idea that we should jointly work on this issue.”
This follows in the wake of an earlier visit to China this week by Secretary of State John Kerry. In a 13 April press conference discussing his visit, he remarked:
“In addition to the elevation of the climate issue to a significantly heightened level of effort and urgency, we also discussed cyber security, and we agreed there also that we will create an immediate working group because cyber security affects everybody. It affects airplanes in the sky, trains on their tracks. It affects the flow of water through dams. It affects transportation networks, power plants. It affects the financial sector, banks, financial transactions. Every aspect of nations in modern times are affected by use of cyber networking, and obviously all of us, every nation, has an interest in protecting its people, protecting its rights, protecting its infrastructure. And so we are going to work immediately on an accelerated basis on cyber.”
I’ve long believed that the United States is in an undeclared cyber war. In this year’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment put out by the intelligence community, cyber is listed as the number one threat. The report says:
State and nonstate actors increasingly exploit the Internet to achieve strategic objectives, while many governments—shaken by the role the Internet has played in political instability and regime change—seek to increase their control over content in cyberspace. The growing use of cyber capabilities to achieve strategic goals is also outpacing the development of a shared understanding of norms of behavior, increasing the chances for miscalculations and misunderstandings that could lead to unintended escalation.
Compounding these developments are uncertainty and doubt as we face new and unpredictable cyber threats. In response to the trends and events that happen in cyberspace, the choices we and other actors make in coming years will shape cyberspace for decades to come, with potentially profound implications for US economic and national security.
China is not the only source of cyber attacks and espionage against U.S. targets but as has been widely reported cyber has become a major source of tension between the two nations. It’s too early to tell if this is a turning point for the better and the start of a real effort to develop a bilateral cyber policy. To me, it feels like what Churchill said, “the end of the beginning.” As always, my views are my own.
