ADFA expert predicts China will gain cyber dominance over Taiwan by 2030

It may seem odd to publish a military cybersecurity news item on an industrial automation website, but critical infrastructure organisations and companies associated with the Australian defence industry need to take heed and start taking industrial cybersecurity very seriously. There is no reason the following cannot also apply to our water and electricity supply, and other industrial systems.

In a recent presentation to an annual Cyber Security Summit in Canberra, Professor Greg Austin warned that China's cyberwar capabilities would change the strategic balance in Asia by 2030.

"Today, China is struggling to integrate cyber weapons and information dominance into its military strategies," he said. "By 2030, China will have acquired a total war capability in cyberspace against Taiwan. This will alter the strategic balance in the Western Pacific more than anything that is happening around the coral reefs in the South China Sea today."

Austin, the author of Cyber Policy in China (Polity, Cambridge, 2014), was addressing the final session of the two-day conference with a presentation on 'Shaping the Cyber Arms Race of the Future'. In it, he develops the arguments in a January 2016 paper, 'Australia Re-armed: Future Needs for Cyber-Enabled Warfare'. In the conference presentation, he argued that the new technologies will redefine both war and politics for East Asia.

"Australia's 12 new submarines, the first to be launched in 2030, at a total cost in excess of $30 billion, would have to operate in cyberspace even better than they can navigate under the sea," Austin warned. "Any major power that Australia confronts in conflict at sea after 2030 will use cyberattacks to try to prevent these boats from putting to sea, or failing that, to disable them or their weapons systems at sea. All of the critical systems will be cyber controlled and therefore cyber vulnerable, even if it meant simply manipulating and falsifying data inputs into various systems.

"Warfare in East Asia today could be described as 'cyber enabled'," Austin said. "After 2030, it will become 'cyber dominant' and Australia will have to build systems that can survive in that environment of electronic 'torpedos' and 'logic bombs'."

Greg Austin is a Professor of Cyber Security, Strategy and Diplomacy in the Australian Centre for Cyber Security at the University of New South Wales Canberra. He is the author or editor of six books on Asian security.