First published: 04th June 2011
Further indications of the accelerating trend towards incorporating ICT in warfare have been provided by an article written by Ye Zheng and Zhao Baoxian, researchers at the PLA's Academy of Military Sciences, in China Youth Daily.
In the article, the researchers say that China must make mastering cyber-warfare a military priority because, "Just as nuclear warfare was the strategic war of the industrial era, cyber-warfare has become the strategic war of the information era, and this has become a form of battle that is massively destructive and concerns the life and death of nations,"
They also accused the USA of being behind many recent cyber conflicts and said that China would call for the international community to establish "cyber territory" and defend "cyber sovereignty". They envisioned a "cyber non-proliferation treaty like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to lock up the Pandora's box".
Strangely, this call was echoed at a security summit organised by the EastWest Institute in London where Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT Group, suggested a cyber non-proliferation treaty should be signed to stop the escalation of Nations spending on cyber defence and cyber warfare.
Quite what these concepts of "cyber territory", "cyber sovereignty" and "cyber non-proliferation" mean is unclear. Deciding control over territory is often quite hard, even after lines have been drawn on a physical map; how much harder for online users of cloud services that are deliberately insulated from the location of the physical machines that provide those services?
Cyber non-proliferation seems totally unworkable. Nuclear non-proliferation worked because many of the technologies and raw materials were specialised and traceable. Even then, there have been a string of failures as states achieved nuclear status despite the treaty. Cyber non-proliferation is more like trying to ban tanks: it cannot work because the facilities required (a car factory and lots of steel) are freely available. In fact, cyber weapons are perhaps more like cakes than tanks - you don't even need an expensive factory to produce them, every home has an oven that can be used with a recipe. The approximately 700,000 new items of malware identified every day are testament that someone has the capability, and it probably is not Sovereign States that are still struggling to impose their power on this new domain.
