A Land War in Asia (A Narrative History of the Third World War) by Adam Yoshida

Author:Adam Yoshida [Yoshida, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Yoshida Media Company
Published: 2012-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Another Bitter Winter

They called themselves the Cybermen, a typically-obscure reference to a cult British television show, and by the fall of 2017 their work, largely dismissed before the war as the purview of obsessive nerds, had become vital to the survival of a large portion of the human race.

By the second decade of the century the entire world had become digital. Communications between individuals and within and between governments and businesses were absolutely dependent upon the continued functionality of the internet. By 2017 most business had been entirely digitized for twenty or thirty years. Most Americans no longer even owned a landline telephone. It was not merely that returning to a pre-digital world would be inconvenient or slow down operations: the truth was that the knowledge and the infrastructure that would have been required to operate the world offline no longer existed. Because of this the President had, from his first day in office, identified the defense of America's online infrastructure, as well as that of its allies, as a vital national priority.

The United States Cyber Command had been created in 2011 as a subordinate unit of the Strategic Command. Even though the threat of a cyber-attack by a hostile power had increased with each passing year, and though cyber warfare had been proven effective when used against Iran, Cyber Command remained relatively small and underfunded at the outbreak of hostilities in 2017. During the first days of the war, in spite of valiant efforts by the American national security establishment, often assisted by freelancers acting out of largely-patriotic motives, the Chinese had managed to cause havoc with American and Allied computer system. Critical industrial equipment had been sabotaged. Bank records were altered or destroyed. Power grids were disrupted and damaged. Chinese hackers had had years to prepare for their initial offensive actions and they had used that time well.

In response, the Congress had passed the Internet Protection Act of 2017, which elevated the Cyber Command to the same level as the Strategic or Special Operations Commands and provided the budget for the recruitment of up to 30,000 individuals to fill out the ranks of the new formation. In order to mount an effective online defense, it was decided, it would be necessary to have humans constantly monitor vital infrastructure since, after all, malware would be able to evade automated software-based protections more easily than they would human eyes.

Colonel Andrew Durden was in the twelfth hour of his shift, shortly after 2AM on January 4th, 2018, when he noticed an unusual spike in activity. Cyber Command, which had been operating on a war footing for nearly a year now, had been maintained at a level of super-readiness ever since Hainan Island. The Chinese would have to respond to such an attack with some sort of reprisal directed against the American homeland and a cyber-assault seemed, given the physical distances involved, to be one of the most promising means by which such an attack might be launched.

The Chinese had, of

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