Free Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake Page A

Saddam Hussein’s army was the fourth-largest in the world. His weapons, largely of Soviet make and design, the same as China’s arsenal, were mostly destroyed from the air before they could ever be used. The U.S. ground war lasted one hundred hours, following thirty-eight days of air strikes. Among those watching on television were the leaders of the Chinese military. The former Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell, believes that “the Chinese received a big shock when watching the action of Desert Storm.” Later they probably read The First Information War and other accounts and realized how far behind they really were. They soon began referring to the Gulf War as zhongda biange , “the great transformation.”
    For a period of several years in the mid-1990s the Chinese talked very openly, for a Communist police state, about what they had learned from the Gulf War. They noted that their strategy had been to defeat the U.S. by overwhelming numbers if a war ever happened. Now they concluded that that strategy would not work. They began to downsize their military and invest in new technologies. One of those technologies was wangluohua , “networkization,” to deal with the “new battlefield of computers.” What they talked about publicly then sounds strikingly similar to what the U.S. Air Force generals were saying. Writing in his military’s daily paper, one Chinese expert explained that “the enemy country can receive a paralyzing blow through the Internet.” A senior colonel, perhaps thinking of the U.S. and China, wrote that “a superior force that loses information dominance will be beaten, while an inferior one that seizesinformation dominance will be able to win.” Major General Wang Pufeng, head of strategy at the military academy, wrote openly of the goal of zhixinxiquan , “information dominance.” Major General Dai Qingmin of the General Staff stated that such dominance could only be achieved by preemptive cyber attack. These strategists created “Integrated Network Electronic Warfare,” something similar to the Netcentric Warfare fad that was sweeping the Pentagon.
    By the end of the 1990s, China’s strategists had converged on the idea that cyber warfare could be used by China to make up for its qualitative military deficiencies when compared to the United States. Admiral McConnell believes that “the Chinese concluded from the Desert Storm experience that their counter approach had to be to challenge America’s control of the battlespace by building capabilities to knock out our satellites and invade our cyber networks. In the name of the defense of China in this new world, the Chinese feel they have to remove that advantage of the U.S. in the event of a war.”
    A recurring word in these Chinese statements was “asymmetry” likewise, the phrase “asymmetric warfare.” Much of what we know about China’s asymmetric warfare doctrine is contained in a slim volume translated as Unrestricted Warfare . The book, written by two high-ranking Chinese army colonels, was first published in 1999. It provides a blueprint for how weaker countries can outmaneuver status quo powers using weapons and tactics that fall outside the traditional military spectrum. The publishers of the most widely available English translation view the book as “China’s master plan to destroy America,” a subtitle the Americans added to the front cover of the U.S. edition. And in case the reader misses the point, the cover shows the World Trade Center engulfed in flames. A quote on the back, from a right-wing lunatic, claims that the book “is evidence linking China to 9-11.” Despite the right-wing rhetoric surrounding the U.S. edition, the book is one of the best windowsthrough which we can understand Chinese military thinking on cyber war.
    The book advocates tactics that have become known as shashoujian , the “assassin’s mace,” meant to take advantage of weaknesses created by an