Winning a prospective conflict with China could hinge on being able to destroy the communist regime’s crucial space and cyberspace assets before they take down American systems, a top military official acknowledged.
“Your best defense is a good offense,” Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday. “So, you’re going to have to have offensive capabilities, also, in space and cyberspace, in order to make sure that our national interests are preserved. There’s a lot of work to be done in these areas.”
Those comments hinted at the oft-invisible contest that could dictate the fate of millions, particularly if Beijing tries to invade Taiwan and the U.S.-China rivalry turns violent. A daily barrage of cyberattacks from China, Russia, and lower-profile hostile or criminal actors has forced U.S. officials to broaden their perceptions of threats taking shape in cyberspace and driven a philosophical shift in American cyber operations.
“We’re in competition every day,” said Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, the National Security Agency director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, who followed Milley at the forum, as he defined the “persistent engagement” doctrine that his team has followed since 2018. “We had a new strategy that said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna operate outside the United States, and we’re gonna look for adversaries that might be trying to do us harm, and we’re not going to just watch anymore.’ And I think that that was a pretty big watershed event.”
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Nakasone acknowledged that a recent ransomware attack on an energy pipeline forced him to recognize a new category of national security threats that he had regarded previously as “criminal activity” for a law enforcement agency to address.
“So, one of the things that we have done at both the agency and the command is we’ve conducted a surge,” he said. “We bring our best people together … the really good thinkers [about] how do you get after folks that are doing this? How do you get after, you know, the capabilities that they’re producing? How do you get after the flow of money? Those are all things that we have done over the past, really, three months.”
U.S. officials have “made a lot of progress” off the back of that innovation, but Milley underscored that the cyberattacks take place on a titanic scale.
“Every single day, our nation is literally being hacked penetrated, [a target of] espionage, intelligence operations going on all in cyberspace,” Milley told NBC News’s Lester Holt. “It happens millions of times a day.”
American companies and government agencies have sustained several high-profile cyber failures in recent years, such as the Russia-based ransomware attack that downed the Colonial Pipeline and another operation attributed to Russia that reportedly allowed cyberspies to embed malware in thousands of entities and target about 200 organizations for follow-up hacks.
Those hacks could pale in significance to the kinds of operations that could take place if China and the U.S. ever come to blows.
“With China, we’re going to need a full panoply of conventional forces, air, land, and sea, but also space and cyber,” Milley said. “Those are going to be key determiners of who has the decisive advantage at the beginning of a conflict. And those are areas that have great concern for us.”
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Milley emphasized that “we don’t want to have conflict in space,” but he underscored that it isn’t only American officials who should feel vulnerable.
“There are significant capabilities that happen in space today that our economy, our country, and our military entirely depend on — and the same thing with any modern, advanced industrial society,” Milley said. “Same thing with the Chinese, for that matter.”
