US military needs to talk to China on space, cyber issues, officials say

The U.S. and China are not having much-needed military discussions about risks in space, cyber, and nuclear defense—even as the relationship between the countries has thawed in the past year, a defense official said Wednesday. 

“The expansion of China's nuclear program raises the question of: what are all these nuclear weapons for, exactly, given that they have had this more limited doctrine in the past. And they haven't answered that question,” Ely Ratner, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said during a Center for Strategic and International Strategy event Wednesday. 

Bilateral engagement with the PRC has improved since President Joe Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping met in November 2023. But China has thwarted U.S. attempts to have high-level discussions about certain topics in the past year, Ratner said. 

“In terms of defense diplomacy, the State Department, others at the [defense] secretary's level have been trying to better understand and engage in substantive discussions with the [People’s Republic of China] and the [People’s Liberation Army] about their military modernization. And the answer so far has been no, we are not going to talk about that. Explicit refusal to talk about that. And that's a continued problem,” he said. “That's also true in some of the other emerging domains—space and cyber. We are not having the level of strategic conversations that we need to be having about risk reduction, and that is absolutely something, looking forward, that will need to mature in the military-to-military relationship.”

Ratner’s comments came as the Defense Department released its annual report Wednesday on China’s military and security developments, which highlights the PLA’s focus on information operations, of which cyber is a key component. 

“The PRC presents a significant, persistent cyber-enabled espionage and attack threat to an adversary’s military and critical infrastructure systems,” the report states. “The PLA is pursuing next-generation combat capabilities based on its vision of future conflict, which it calls ‘intelligentized warfare,’ defined by the expanded use of AI, quantum computing, big data, and other advanced technologies at every level of warfare.”

Moreover, the U.S. recently imposed sanctions on a Chinese cyber firm for a “potentially deadly” 2020 ransomware attack on critical infrastructure. Earlier this month, U.S. officials attributed a massive phone hacking campaign to the China-backed Salt Typhoon. And China’s national cyber center has accused a U.S. intelligence agency of stealing trade secrets from tech companies. 

In the past year, there have been some mid-level talks, such as operational safety talks about risks to U.S. forces, clarifying discussions around terminology, and discussions with the crisis communication and prevention working group, said Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. 

These talks may not dramatically shift relations, but they can provide clarity, particularly in cyberspace, he said. 

“For example, cyber activity, if you think that perhaps it's not being well understood on the other side, or being totally misunderstood how we might respond to a particular activity—to be able to communicate clearly…ahead of time, obviously, it can have an effect in terms of deterring that kind of activity,” Chase said. But at the very least, make sure that they have a clear understanding of what we're seeing and how we're going to respond to it.”

Keeping the U.S. competition with China from escalating into something more dangerous will require establishing clear lines of communication is key to prevent misunderstanding—an area the incoming Trump administration will now have to navigate. 

“Realistically, there are going to be very few areas of genuine cooperation,” Chase said, noting that the PLA is cooperative with the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which is in charge of accounting for missing personnel and prisoners of war, Chase said. “But when you get beyond that, I think we really look at a relationship that is largely about reducing the risk that competition veers into conflict, that's about trying to reduce the risk of misperception or clarify misperceptions, about trying to make sure that we've got channels of communication that are open so we can so we can do that.”