US tries candour to assure China on cyberattacks

In the months before US defense secretary Chuck Hagel’s arrival in Beijing on Monday, the Obama administration quietly held an extraordinary briefing for the Chinese military leadership on a subject officials have rarely discussed in public: the Pentagon’s emerging doctrine for defending against cyberattacks against the United States — and for using its cybertechnology against adversaries, including the Chinese. 

The idea was to allay Chinese concerns about plans to more than triple the number of American cyberwarriors to 6,000 by the end of 2016, a force that will include new teams the Pentagon plans to deploy to each military combatant command around the world. But the hope was to prompt the Chinese to give Washington a similar briefing about the many People’s Liberation Army units that are believed to be behind the escalating attacks on American corporations and government networks. 

So far, the Chinese have not reciprocated — a point Hagel plans to make in a speech at the PLA’s National Defense University on Tuesday.

The effort, senior Pentagon officials say, is to head off what Hagel and his advisers fear is the growing possibility of a fast-escalating series of cyberattacks and counterattacks between the United States and China. This is a concern especially at a time of mounting tensions over China’s expanding claims of control over what it argues are exclusive territories in the East and South China Seas, and over a new air defense zone. In interviews, American officials say their latest initiatives were inspired by Cold-War-era exchanges held with the Soviets so that each side understood the ‘red lines’ for employing nuclear weapons against each other. 

‘Think of this in terms of the Cuban missile crisis,’ one senior Pentagon official said. While the United States ‘suffers attacks every day,’ he said, ‘the last thing we would want to do is misinterpret an attack and escalate to a real conflict.’ 

Hagel’s concern is spurred by the fact that in the year since US President Obama explicitly brought up the barrage of Chinese-origin attacks on the United States with his newly installed counterpart, Chinese President Xi Jinping, the pace of those attacks has increased. Most continue to be aimed at stealing technology and other intellectual property from Silicon Valley, military contractors and energy firms. Many are believed to be linked to cyberwarfare units of the People’s Liberation Army acting on behalf of state-owned, or state-affiliated, Chinese companies.