Why a future fight between China and Taiwan might open with a devastating blow to a US city

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March 27, 2018 11:06 PM

A cyberwarfare expert told Business Insider that China would likely kick off a fight to take Taiwan by attacking the US with a devastating cyber attack.

China has lived with Taiwan just miles off its shores as an existential threat to the ruling communist party for years, but lately rhetoric has heated up and China's military has become more powerful.
A cyberwarfare expert told Business Insider that China would likely kick off a fight to take Taiwan by attacking the US with a devastating cyber attack.
This model follows how Russia took over Crimea in 2014, and most top military experts look at it as the future of warfare.

China's has long lived with what it considers an existential threat just a few miles off its shores, the breakaway province of Taiwan, a democratically ruled island whose very existence scares China's ruling communist party to its core.

But with President Donald Trump's friendly approach to the island, and a new, pro-independence government in power in Taipei, China has been seen flexing its military muscle and talking tough about Taiwan in increasingly alarming ways.

Though the US and other western countries provide weapons to Taiwan, the island of just 23 million can't reasonably expect to stand up to the massive mainland China alone.

As a precondition for any sort of relations with the mainland, Beijing demands states only recognize China's communist government, not the democratic one in Taiwan that claims to be the country's true leadership.

Dr. Ken Geers, a cybersecurity expert for Comodo with experience in the NSA, told Business Insider that if war ever broke out between the two countries that claim to be China's rightful government, the first step could be the devastation of a US.

"If there was a war that started where China wanted to retake Taiwan, the first thing that might happen is the lights might go out in New York City," Geers said.

Chinas future war plan

China is known to have formidable cyber warfare capabilities, and is thought to have stolen tons of sensitive military technology from the US. Trump is currently pursuing fixes to the leak of US intellectual property into Chinese hands, which some estimate to cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Geers saw first hand how Russia employed hybrid warfare, a mix of cyber, information, and conventional fighting, to attack the Baltic states in 2008 and later annex Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Geers, like other top military minds, consider this a preview of the future of warfare, which will likely take place in all domains simultaneously.

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