Finally, a book review in The National Interest offers a balanced treatment of China's cyberwarfare capabilities, a rarity for American mainstream media these days:
Beijing is also developing cyber-warfare techniques, but exaggerated assessments of this capability fail to evaluate China’s own emerging vulnerability to such attacks. Cyber-warfare technologies and skills are readily accessible and U.S. advanced munitions are increasingly dependent on high-technology communication and surveillance technologies. The United States is thus vulnerable to cyber attacks, and a Chinese cyber offensive against the United States could influence U.S. operations in the western Pacific. Nonetheless, the reciprocal effect of Washington’s cyber-warfare capability on Beijing’s ability to wage high-technology warfare is equally significant.
The same advanced Chinese technologies and weaponry that pessimists argue present a major threat to U.S. security, including ASBMs, are highly dependent on advanced communication and surveillance technologies that are particularly vulnerable to U.S. cyber attacks. And once the United States degrades the PLA’s advanced communication technologies, China would lose its high-technology asymmetric capability that so alarms America’s pessimists, and it would be very susceptible to a wide range of superior U.S. sea-based forces, even if the United States suffered from an effective Chinese cyber attack.
Ouch, cyber-warfare could actually make the Chinese military more vulnerable; that memo must have got lost on its way to DC. This is not the cyber-warfare of botnets, but nevertheless, it's an important perspective that is not being heard in the current debates.
Of course, another overlooked benefit of cyberwarfare -- that is also rarely reported in the media -- is that it's, well, less bloody and thus more humane than conventional warfare. Why bomb train depots and thus risk civilian casualities if one could can temporarily disable their communication systems?
That's a great segue into Marcus Ranum's argument that "cyberwarfare is bulls**t" and that cyberwarfare option is only going to benefit those who are likely to win anyway.
Here is a video presentation of Ranum's contrarian thought that is worth watching.
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