China’s Military Intelligence System is Changing

As American families dined on turkey and stuffing, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) was hard at work in Beijing hammering out military reforms. These reforms were then announced to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by President Xi Jinping, who also serves as the CMC chairman. The proposed organizational changes may make this round of reform the most significant since those of the 1950s, when the PLA transitioned from a revolutionary army to the arm of a party-state. First impressions of the proposals provide mostly descriptive analyses at what Xi Jinping proposed for the PLA, but what the PLA publicized does not tell the whole story. The proposed creation of a separate headquarters for PLA ground forces and reorganization of the military regions will reverberate throughout military intelligence — a subject omitted entirely in Beijing’s propaganda blitz. Once the PLA moves beyond the inevitable organizational growing pains, the Chinese military intelligence system will be better positioned to manage its responsibilities for informing policymakers and supporting military operations.

Current Organization

The PLA’s basic organization of intelligence includes the General Staff Department (GSD), the military regions, and intelligence departments within the PLA’s two services and one autonomous branch — respectively, the PLA Navy (PLAN), PLA Air Force (PLAAF), and the PLA Second Artillery Force (PLASAF).

The focal point of the PLA’s intelligence effort lies within the GSD, giving any substantial change to the general staff potential to shake up the military intelligence system. The GSD’s Second Department (2PLA) manages clandestine and overt human intelligence operations (HUMINT), the latter of which includes defense attachés and at least one think tank, the China Institute for International and Strategic Studies. This department also has some responsibility for China’s satellite imagery and possibly other overhead intelligence assets, but the organizational structure of Chinese space operations is difficult to understand. The GSD Third Department (3PLA) is the national signals intelligence (SIGINT) authority, roughly comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency or the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters. Like its Anglo-American counterparts, the Third Department also has responsibilities for defending Chinese computer networks and securing government communications. The GSD Fourth Department (4PLA) is responsible for electronic intelligence (ELINT) and electronic warfare (EW), and remains the youngest GSD element, dating to sometime between 1977 and 1990, depending on the source.

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The Truth About SpyWar and How 21st Century Espionage Really Works

Espionage is a constant in human civilization. Spying features prominently in theOld Testament and it’s often called the “second oldest profession” with good reason. The ancient Chinese sage Sun Tzu wrote eloquently about the strategic importance of espionage and counterespionage fully 2,500 years ago. As long as people have lived in anything resembling societies, they have been stealing secrets from each other.

Although America has the world’s best-funded intelligence services, and our behemoth seventeen-agency Intelligence Community is sufficiently vast to please any Beltway bureaucrat, there are persistent calls for our spies to do more. This has become a drumbeat of late, as the Obama White House fumbles aimlessly around the Middle East in its not-quite-a-war against the Islamic State, the notorious ISIS.

Beyond the politicization of our intelligence regarding ISIS, which is known to be a problem, with inaccurate good news being valued over more accurate bad news by certain senior policymakers, many believe that we simply don’t know enough about what the black-clad jihadist madmen in Syria and Iraq are up to.

In particular, we’re hearing increasing cries for more spies on the ground, what professionals term human intelligence or HUMINT. Ritualistic chants for “more HUMINT” occur any time Uncle Sam finds himself in a jam somewhere, and they usually come from people who don’t know much about the spy business. They also find fault with our alleged overreliance on technical espionage, and their particular bugbear is signals intelligence or SIGINT.

American spies work the embassy cocktail circuit, just like in the movies, hoping to land a golden source.

Above all, the “more HUMINT” crowd pretends our Intelligence Community doesn’t do plenty of it already, when in fact we do more of it than almost anybody. This is often accompanied by implied criticism that risk-averse American spies are just sitting around in embassies worldwide, not doing much. They need to “get in the fight,” advocates state from their comfy chairs. Inevitably there will be cries to recreate the derring-do of the Office of Strategic Services of World War Two fame, when brave men jumped out of airplanes behind enemy lines and did… something. That the espionage track record of the OSS can be charitably termed mixed is always omitted.

Read the Remainder at The Observer

A Sneek Peak at Russias High Tech War Machine at work in Syria

Russia has been sending fighter jets, drones, and bombers to Syria to bolster the regime of Bashar al-Assad, generating concern and outrage among the United States and its allies. Far less attention has been paid to Moscow’s simultaneous deployment of advanced surveillance, signals intelligence, and electronic warfare equipment that could deal a new blow to the beleaguered, American-backed rebels working to oust him.

In recent weeks, Russia has deployed the IL-20 surveillance aircraft, better known by its NATO name “Coot” and roughly equivalent to the U.S. Navy’s P-3 Orion, a mainstay of the Pentagon’s spy tools. The Russian plane is bristling with high-tech equipment like surveillance radar, electronic eavesdropping gear, and optical and infrared sensors. One of the Kremlin’s premier spy planes, it provides Russian forces with a powerful tool for locating rebel units and assigning targets to its fighter planes. In late September, Syrian rebels posted a video purporting to show the plane flying over a battlefield.

The Russian buildup of intelligence assets and tools of electronic warfare also includes the deployment of the Krasukha-4, an advanced electronic warfare system used to jam radar and aircraft. Its presence in Syria was reported by Sputnik News, the Russian state outlet, which claimed to have spotted the distinctive jamming system in a video report on Russian jets at a Syrian airfield in Latakia. The system and its parabolas are visible at the 6-second mark in the video below.

Read the Remainder at Foreign Policy