Building Peace, AKA Reach 364 -- who is just your typical Air Force pilot who is blogging on movies, learning Arabic and writing a novel -- offers this smart comment on Google's recent denunciation of Chinese hacking:

"We're seeing low-level warfare between a state and a corporation."

There's a good war college or SAMS paper to be written exploring that thought. I'd like to know more about precedents of states vs. companies, such as the British East India Company, and the merchant princes of Renaissance Italy, who seemed to have one foot in each camp. 

We're also seeing states hiring corporations (the United States using Blackwater instead of Marines to protect its diplomats) and corporations hiring states (Maersk contracting a Tanzanian warship to protect its vessels from Horn of Africa pirates). Reminds me a bit of the 30 Years' War in which bands of contracted fighters just roamed around endlessly devastating chunks of Germany.

My CNAS colleague Amanda Hahnel went to a dinner Monday night with most of the computer geeks in Northern Virginia. (A lot of defense and intelligence computers are humming away out there, so that's a big crowd.) The dinner speaker was Gen. George Casey, chief of staff of the U.S. Army. This is Amanda's report:

I found myself a bit out of place last night as I went to TechCelebration, the Northern Virginia Technical Council's big annual event. I'm not going to lie; sitting at a table with hardcore technology geeks is a little intimidating for someone who has trouble fixing basic computer problems.

I was excited to hear General George Casey speak about the future of the Army ... and he sort of did. Gen Casey broke his speech down to answer two distinct questions: How is the Army doing? And where is the Army going? Most people would assess present capacities and shortcomings before offering a future plan of action, but Gen Casey took a different tack.

He described what he believes to be the future operating environment, one filled with ideological struggles with opponents that need to be defeated. He looked at how globalization, technology, and demographic trends will all result in an increase in urban conflict. He went a bit further to predict that we would have "a decade or so of persistent conflict" with violence to achieve political and ideological goals. Mostly things you can read in the JOE.

The nugget of his speech that really struck me though, being a "natural security" nerd, was when Casey said that the "middle class in China is larger than the entire population of the United States; this will increase pressure on resources." A few sentences later he listed this as a source of future conflict.

While Gen Casey was certainly not saying we are about to go to war with China, I thought it was quite telling that he is watching global resources of raw materials as a source of conflict.

ELIZABETH DALZIEL/AFP/Getty Images

China has constructed what looks like an aircraft carrier -- but it is stuck far inland, and indeed dwarves the small body of water to which it is adjacent.

The thing is almost the size of a mammoth Nimitz-class carrier, and it has what appears to be jets and helicopters on what appears to be its flight deck.

But is not a mock carrier for practice, but actually part of a kind of Communist Disney World, reports this blog.

(HT to John McCreary and NightWatch)

My CNAS colleague Abe Denmark, who is scary smart on Chinese security matters, offers this commentary on the recent round of Chinese military parades, as seen here:

Very old-fashioned stuff. Fun things to look for:

• ­Happy ethnic minorities in traditional garb.
• Female soldiers, carrying submachine guns, clad in red miniskirts and white jackboots.
• Goose-stepping -- always popular.
• Mass choreographed dancing and sign-holding. Kim Jong-Il is very jealous.
• Tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square. 'nuff said.
• President Hu Jintao riding very stiffly in a motorcade to inspect the troops. Per tradition, he says "Greetings, comrades!" The soldier's traditional reply: "Serve the people!"
• Awesome blue-tinted naval camouflage on the anti-ship cruise missile launchers, and the sailors' uniforms. Radar and infra-red be damned!

STR/AFP/Getty Images

NightWatch excerpts a summary of a congressional report on Chinese hacking of American computers:

The Chinese cyberattackers -- whoever they work for -- sure are busy bees in cyberspace, according to the report of a Congressional hearing held in April by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was released last week." The report is dated 30 April.

A '... senior fellow at the Technolytics Institute, a cyber think tank, told the hearing that a survey of nonmilitary government outfits that monitor their Internet firewalls reported an average of 128 acts of "cyber aggression" a minute from China in March 2009.'

"That works out to 7,680 aggressive cyber acts an hour or 184,320 a day against non-Defense organizations. The senior fellow said all these attacks came from IP addresses in China but added that he did not know exactly who or what sits behind those IP addresses.'" 

Meanwhile, old Bill Gertz, who has made a full-time job of tracking Chinese misdeeds, passes along a report that a Chinese intrusion recently forced the FBI to shut down one of its computer networks. 

I wonder if the U.S. government has ever delivered a diplomatic note telling the Chinese government to knock it off. It just seems unfriendly to me, and not becoming a great power. Anyone know?

James Sarmiento/Flickr

NightWatch passes along this classic bit of diplo-babble, from a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry:

At present, the situation on the Korean peninsula is rather complicated with an increasing number of uncertain factors."

I think this observation could be applied to just about anything, not just the Korean peninsula. Kind of like the classic British universal retort, attributed to Stephen Potter, of "Yes, but not in the south."

If we are one month or so into a new American administration, it must be time for Chinese ships or planes to harass U.S. military ships or aircraft operating near Hainan Island.

This strikes me as kind of hokey on the part of Beijing -- more befitting the punks of Pyongyang than a great power.

Big-time strategic thinker Colin Gray serves up an ambitious article in the new issue of Parameters, discussing the 21st century security environment. He begins with some good common sense about the futility of trying to discern the future. "The challenge is to cope with uncertainty, not try to diminish it," he cautions. I like this point because it underscores the necessity of adaptability as a key principle of building, training, and educating our military leaders. (Hat Tip to Yingling and Nagl.)

Then, in an effort to outline the security environment, Gray leaps into a nervy bit of globe-twirling. These are the three comments that really struck me:

Warfare is quite likely between China and America over Taiwan, though not about Taiwan."

Too many people have become unduly fixated on the challenge posed by terrorism. ...Terrorism does not threaten our civilization, but our over-reaction to it could do so. ...Compared to interstate conflict, terrorism-even terrorism armed with weapons of mass destruction-is a minor menace."

NATO-Russian relations are an accident waiting to happen."

I have found Parameters pretty dull in recent years, but it appears to be coming back to life. Next I'll read, and probably blog, the article by Shawn Brimley on strategy in an age of transition. 

Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images