Joel Brenner

“If the First Gulf War made PLA military planners pay close attention to American battle prowess, the appearance in Beijing in 1999 of a volume called Unrestricted Warfare returned the favor. This book gave Pentagon strategists an alarming window into Chinese thinking about the nature of their engagement with the Western world, particularly the United States. The authors were two senior PLA colonels from China’s rising military elite, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, whose work obviously had official sanction.19 Qiao and Wang argued that China should use all means, armed and unarmed, military and nonmilitary, and lethal and nonlethal, to compel the enemy to accept its interests.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“The lecturer’s name was Dr. Shen Weiguang, and although he’s now regarded as the founding sage of Chinese information warfare theory, his views were then on the fringe in strategic circles in the Middle Kingdom. “Virus-infected microchips can be put in weapon systems,” he pointed out. “An arms manufacturer can be asked to write a virus into software, or a biological weapon can be embedded into the computer system of an enemy nation and then activated as needed. . . . Preparation for a military invasion can include hiding self-destructing microchips in systems designed for export.” Tactics like these, he said, could have profound strategic implications if carried out carefully and systematically. They could “destroy the enemy’s political, economic, and military information infrastructures, and, perhaps, even the information infrastructure for all of society.” If China could do that, Shen said, it could achieve the greatest of all strategic military objectives: It could “destroy the enemy’s will to launch a war or wage a war.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World