If you weren’t paying attention last week, you might have missed the news
that Chinese hackers have accessed blueprints of our most advanced military
weapons and communications systems, including Patriot missile technology, the
V22 Osprey, the Aegis Ballistic Defense System, and the Navy’s Littoral Combat
Ship. This epic fail of our so-called “cyber security” efforts was
reported quietly in the mainstream news and met with mild indignation among the
Beltway Bubble’s punditry set.
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But not everyone sees this “failing war” as simple as all that. Gordon Adams, an
old school federal numbers cruncher, reminds us that it wasn’t so long ago that
the government built up its weapons budget on the warning the U.S. was
“falling behind” the Soviet Union. It turned out to be a lot of smoke
and mirrors and a huge cash cow for the defense industry.
“Throughout the Cold War, ‘falling behind’ was the boilerplate
justification for higher defense budgets. As [Secretary of Defense Caspar]
Weinberger once said at a press conference on the budget, ‘the defense budget
is written in Moscow, not Washington,'” Adams told Antiwar.com in a recent
email exchange. He said the chances that this struggle against cyber espionage
will ever be won are slim, considering that hackers will always find away
around new safeguards.
“To me, (it’s) important to recognize that it’s an arms race and the
reality is that we are deeply into it.”
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