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- February 12: Chinese military strategists have called
for expedited development of electromagnetic pulse bombs or missiles as
a means to destroy American aircraft carrier fleets, the Shanghai Jiefang
Ribao reports. The PLA claims the "high degree of electronization,"
as the Achilles heel of US aircraft carrier fleets, whose electronic equipment
is its "central nervous system." Also, carrier groups are easy
for satellites to track and target for saturation attacks by satellite
[GPS] guided missiles, which could paralyze the fleet's electronic equipment
and render ships helpless to conventional air and sea attack.
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- A saturation attack by [short or medium-range] electromagnetic
pulse bombs [missiles] do not have to hit the carrier or support ships,
the article states. They only need to explode "within dozens of miles
around the carrier to destroy all important ship-board integrated circuits
and IC chips of the electronic equipment, thus paralyzing the radar and
telecommunication system of the aircraft carrier and vessels around it,
as well as ship mounted missiles and aircraft . . . If the central nervous
system of an aircraft carrier is paralyzed, even a comparatively backward
naval vessel or aircraft [like a Chinese J-6] will be able to attack the
aircraft carrier as a conventional target, thereby thoroughly changing
the balance between the strong and the weak."
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- February 15: China's People's Liberation Army continues
to own important Chinese corporations -- especially dual-use telecommunications
-- despite a government ban on their involvement in commercial enterprises,
Reuters reports. The PLA has both kept its dominance in the giant China
Great Wall Communications company and has formed a new regional company,
Hebei Century Mobile Communications, that operates networks in 11 cities
that connect Great Wall systems. These companies enable the PLA to gain
open-market participation in US standard code division multiple access
[CDMA] cellular telecommunications networks. The PLA began acquiring CDMA
systems to secure military transmissions in the late 1990s, because the
technology is less vulnerable to eavesdropping. "The military has
[government] permission to build local CDMA joint ventures," says
an official at China's Ministry of Information Industry.
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- February 16: US Government documents, such as a 1996
memorandum by then-US Ambassador to China James Sasser, identify CDMA systems
as the PLA technology of choice to establish a secure mobile telephone
network, writes Caroline Katzin in the Free Republic.Com. Export security
experts in the United States say that the PLA is able to evade US export
restrictions by establishing front-companies to act as free market purchasing
agents. Former US Defense Department regulator Peter Leitner says that
the Chinese are using US-made fiber-optic lines, cellular phones, satellite
dishes and encryption technology to potentially build a network immune
to jamming or interference. "The problem," Leitner observes,
"is that no one [official] is doing an assessment of what it will
mean when all of these [commercially purchased] technologies are put together.
Many of these technologies were created for military use. So it shouldn't
surprise anyone that the Chinese would want to use them that way."
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