Responding to the $300 billion worth of ideas and research and development China allegedly steals from the U.S. annually via cyber attacks, Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer said, “The line is crossed, we are in cyber war.”
He added that right now, the war is one sided: China is attacking while the U.S. is sitting back.
Because of this, we are losing intellectual property, suffering damages to our economy, and damaging our national security, because high tech weapons are being compromised.
Krauthammer says this marks the second kind of new warfare we have seen recently. He expanded:
With terrorism, we started with a passive defense, [but] after 9/11 we realized that you have to go on active defense. Here in cyber war, which is ongoing [and] we are entirely in passive mode…I think we really have to unleash the beast here, and to counter attack.
He went on to say that we need special units within the U.S. government modeled after our special groups against terrorism. These would “launch cyber attacks against the Chinese as a deterrent.” Until then, Krauthammer said, our passive defense is a joke.
Think about it this way: China controls rare minerals and various manufacturing processes, and this can pose threats to U.S. defense. However, the other side of the coin is that the U.S. controls communication in China, and this is a huge strategic asset. We can shut down their communications or, perhaps even wiser, we can open up their communications in a way that takes away the regime’s ability to control information flow.
So there are things we can do, but as of now, we aren’t doing them. And Krauthammer is saying it is time to step it up.