The Chinese Information War

China's information war against the United States is clever technically, broadly applied and successful. The intelligence community in the U.S. has publicly stated this is a kind of war we do not know how to fight--yet it is the U.S. military that developed and expanded the doctrine of information war. In fact, the U.S. military is at a disadvantage because it is part of a democratic, decentralized system of government that separates the state from commercial business. China's political systems are more easily adapted to this form of warfare, as their recent land seizures in the South China Sea demonstrate. We call this annexation, when it is a new form of conquest.

The struggle to control information will be at the heart of a U.S-China military competition Much of the talk about intensifying confrontation between the United States and China has ignored the question of how modern technology will be wielded in a rising conflict. This ground-breaking book by an expert in technology and national security argues that the two contemporary superpowers will base their security competition primarily on the fight to dominate information and perception. One of the crucial questions facing each country is how it will attack the adversary's information architecture while protecting its own. How each country chooses to employ information countermeasures will, in large measure, determine the amount of friction and uncertainty in the conflict between them. Artificial intelligence will lie at the heart of this information-based war. But the adaptation of AI algorithms into operational systems will take time, and of course will be subject to countermeasures developed by a very sophisticated adversary using disruption and deception. To determine how China will approach the conflict, this book reviews recent Chinese research into sensing, communications, and artificial intelligence. Chinese officials and experts carefully studied U.S. dominance of the information field during and after the cold war with the Soviet Union and are now employing the lessons they learned into their own county's mounting challenge to United States. This book will interest military officials, defense industry managers, policy experts in academic think tanks, and students of national security. It provides a sober view of how artificial intelligence will be turned against itself in the new information war.

This book is about a cyberwar with China. This new type of war, says the author, is China's effort at bending another country's will to its own. It is clever, broadly applied, successful, and aimed directly at the United States. This war is neither conventional nor accidental. The U.S. military is at a disadvantage because it is part of a system of government that is democratic, decentralized and mostly separated from American businesses. This system has served the country well but is not a path that China sees as worth following. This book is not a "how to" book of strategies that might be developed to fight a cyberwar. It is a way to grasp and categorize what the Chinese are already doing, to make sense of it. Until the U.S. sees itself as in a war, it cannot begin to effectively prosecute it.

This book provides a framework for assessing China's extensive cyber espionage efforts and multi-decade modernization of its military, not only identifying the "what" but also addressing the "why" behind China's focus on establishing information dominance as a key component of its military efforts. China combines financial firepower—currently the world's second largest economy—with a clear intent of fielding a modern military capable of competing not only in the physical environments of land, sea, air, and outer space, but especially in the electromagnetic and cyber domains. This book makes extensive use of Chinese-language sources to provide policy-relevant insight into how the Chinese view the evolving relationship between information and future warfare as well as issues such as computer network warfare and electronic warfare. Written by an expert on Chinese military and security developments, this work taps materials the Chinese military uses to educate its own officers to explain the bigger-picture thinking that motivates Chinese cyber warfare. Readers will be able to place the key role of Chinese cyber operations in the overall context of how the Chinese military thinks future wars will be fought and grasp how Chinese computer network operations, including various hacking incidents, are part of a larger, different approach to warfare. The book's explanations of how the Chinese view information's growing role in warfare will benefit U.S. policymakers, while students in cyber security and Chinese studies will better understand how cyber and information threats work and the seriousness of the threat posed by China specifically.

The author explores what he perceives to be China s pursuit of information warfare (IW) as a method of fighting asymmetric warfare against the United States. He believes the Chinese are seeking ways to adapt IW to their own style of warfare. Paradoxically, he observes that the Chinese have not gleaned their intelligence through espionage, but through careful scrutiny of U.S. IW in practice. The author examines those aspects of IW--PSYOPS, Denial, and Deception--that China believes provides the greatest prospects for victory in a conflict. Not surprisingly, Sun Tzu is interwoven into this emerging theory. Targeting the enemy's nervous system at all levels, that is, his ability to gather and assess information and then transmit orders, provides significant advantages in the prosecution of a campaign. He concludes that the extent of Chinese advances or intent regarding IW is difficult to ascertain given its closed society. Chinese IW may still be nascent, but the menacing intent is there and only vigilance will protect the United States.

This work examines China's information-war (IW) theory and practice from 1995-2003. The effort rests upon the author's sustained and diligent research in Chinese open sources. Some specialists among the international audience may be surprised by the themes addressed in these sources and the presentation of key issues. The Chinese openly discuss not only computer network attacks and electronic preemption but also the development of IW units and an "integrated network-electronic warfare" theory (which closely approximates the US theory of "network-centric warfare").

Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia, who flood social media with disinformation, and circulate false and misleading information to fuel fake narratives and make the case for illegal warfare. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it? Central and Eastern European states, including Ukraine and Poland, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading. How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments' responses to Russian information warfare tactics - all of which have failed. She journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them. Above all, this book shows what is at stake: the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.