At some point next month, China’s army will conduct its first ever “digital” technology military exercise, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency. It will be part of an annual People’s Liberation Army (PLA) training exercise that will, starting this year, also focus on “digital” and “non-contact” war games that may extend to cyberattack exercises.
The Chinese digital war games will be held in Beijing and will include the Air Force as well as other elite military-linked groups such as the Air Force Command College and one unspecified electronic engineering institute. There will be some real military hardware maneuvers – involving ground drills, fighter jets, and helicopters – as well as deployed “digital units” that will, Xinhua says, “focus on non-contact enemy attack”. That indeed could also mean drones.
Reuters just spotted this but, as per usual, fails to link to the online Xinhua source. But we tracked it down to this article.
Counter-claims of cyberattack hacks and digital espionage between China and numerous states have abounded in the past year. The most serious claim pertaining to alleged state-approved cyberattacks came in February this year when security researchers said they had tracked down Chinese hackers to a PLA building in Shanghai. Chinese authorities say that they’re frequently under hack attack as well from numerous foreign hackers that could include, say, US military-backed forces.
As the Pentagon said back in 2011, a major cyberattack could count as an act of war if, factoring in “equivalence”, it resulted in death, damage, and destruction comparable to a physical attack.
(Source: Xinhua)
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