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China Hacking of U.S. Antimissile Designs Likely Looked at Decoy Issue: Physicist
A U.S. Terminal High-Altitude Area
Defense missile interceptor takes off during an October 2012 intercept
test over the Pacific Ocean. Designs for the THAAD system and other U.S.
antimissile systems with a role in East Asia ballistic missile defense
were reportedly hacked by China (U.S. Missile Defense Agency photo).
The Washington Post
reported this week that designs for a number of weapon systems with key
roles in Washington’s strategy for defending against missile attacks in
East Asia had been compromised by cyber hackers from China. That
conclusion was made by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board in a
confidential section of a public report on cyber threats released in January.
The assessment said at least some of the cyber spying appeared to be
"attributable directly to the Chinese government and military,”
according to the Associated Press.
The United States is basing its regional framework for East Asia
ballistic missile defense primarily on three different systems -- the
Standard Missile 3, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, and the Patriot
Advanced Capability 3 interceptor. All three technologies were among
those reported to have been hacked by China.
Putting herself in the shoes of Chinese military strategists, space
physicist Laura Grego said she would be most interested in gaining
access to the designs for sensor components that could provide greater
insight into the technology’s capacity to distinguish separated warheads
from decoys or the debris associated with the deployment of warheads
from their missiles.
“The Achilles heel of missile defense is well-known,” said Grego,
senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security
Program, in a Thursday interview.
The difficulty that U.S. sensors have in distinguishing between warheads and other moving aerial objects has been known for some time and was highlighted as recently as last September in a Pentagon-funded study by the National Research Council. Independent experts have strongly cautioned
against the United States assuming too much confidence in its ability
to defeat a possible ballistic missile attack so long as the targeting
weakness remains unaddressed
In order to exploit this vulnerability, foreign nations in a real-life
attack could release countermeasures such as metal chaff and decoy
aluminum balloons from ballistic missiles in mid-flight that would be
aimed at confusing U.S. radars as to what is the actual threat. The
United States is acquiring more interceptors but they are expensive and
complicated to manufacture while decoys are simple and cheap, meaning
that there will never be enough U.S. missiles to go after every single
detected possible warhead.
China has said it is developing “penetrative” countermeasures
to U.S. missile defenses. This is generally taken to mean it is
focusing on exploiting the discrimination weakness with decoys,
according to Grego.
Even if U.S. interceptors in an actual attack are able to destroy nine
out of 10 enemy nuclear warheads, the remaining weapon would cause
massive devastation. For this reason, independent experts say it is crucial that the threat discrimination weakness be fixed and quickly.
China is likely interested in knowing if the United States is moving
any closer to solving this problem, according to Grego. “What keeps
China up at night is not the reality of [present-day U.S.] missile
defense but the dream.”
The Chinese Defense Ministry officially denies
ordering the hacking of the missile defense systems and other U.S.
weapons technology. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is expected to discuss
the subject with a Chinese military delegation this weekend at a
regional security conference in Singapore. Beijing's suspected
large-scale cyber espionage activities are also likely to come up during
next month's summit between President Obama and Chinese President Xi
Jinping, according to AP.
It is not clear exactly which blueprints the hackers were able to
access. Missile defense systems come with multiple components such as
interceptors, launchers, radars, command-and-control units, and kinetic
kill vehicles.
The Defense Department has a number of primary contractors for its key
antimissile programs. The big defense firms in turn subcontract out work
on various components of the systems, spreading out the number of
targets that the Chinese might have hacked. The confidential section of
the Defense Science Board report did not disclose whether it was U.S.
government networks or private defense computers that were breached.
It is also not known whether the schematics for entire antimissile
systems were accessed or if it was just the blueprints for specific
components.
Pentagon spokesman George Little said the department maintains “full
confidence in our weapon platforms” and insisted that the reported cyber
hacking had not led in any way to the diminishment of U.S. military
capabilities or “technological edge.”
“A weapon system is so complicated and has so many features that can
play a role in making it effective or not that the kinds of data that
you would need to be able to really get any insight either positive or
negative about the system would be really quite vast,” said Theodore
Postol, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a
prominent critic of the utility of U.S. missile defense technology.
Postol in a telephone conversation said he believes it is highly
unlikely that China through its cyber espionage would have been able to
extract enough detailed information to allow it to build complete
antimissile systems based off the U.S. designs.
Grego said she is also having a hard time coming up with anything the
Chinese could have learned by hacking the antimissile designs that would
be a “game changer,” given that the targeting discrimination problem is
already so widely known.
In the event that China’s cyber sleuthing was aimed at learning how it
could adapt U.S. technology to improve its own domestic missile
defenses, that would not mean much for the United States, the Union of
Concerned Scientists expert said.
Washington could still be assured that any massive ICBM strike it might
launch would overwhelm China’s indigenous missile defenses. The same
holds true for any large-scale ICBM attack China might carry out on the
United States.
No country has figured out how to defend against a massive
intercontinental ballistic missile attack. What existing U.S. defenses
could do -- to varying degrees and depending on where the technology is
deployed -- is defend against a small-scale ballistic missile attack
mounted by North Korea or Iran.
China, unlike the United States, is not worried about being attacked by
Tehran or Pyongyang. If China is focusing on improving its antimissile
capabilities against anyone, it is likely focusing on neighboring
nuclear-armed India, according to Grego.
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