Mike Gallagher: Taiwan Invasion Would Start With Cyberattack on US

A leading House Republican is warning China is going to conduct widespread cyberattacks on American infrastructure when it has decided to invade Taiwan.

"If Xi Jinping moves on Taiwan, we should assume he'll launch cyberattacks against the United States as part of the operation," Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chair of the House Select Committee on China, told Politico in an emailed statement. "This would likely include attacks on our electrical grid, water systems, and communications infrastructure — especially near key military installations."

The suggestion is not as new as it's increasingly more likely amid the global instability right now, foreign affairs experts like Gordon Chang are warning.

"We have to be ready for conflict at any time, and it's not just Xi Jinping waking up and saying, 'I want to invade Taiwan' or do something, it's the possibility of those dangerous intercepts that China is causing in the South China Sea and East China Sea — one of them leads to an accident that leads to death," Chang told Newsmax's "Saturday Report."

"So really what we're talking about right now as the possibility of accidental conflict, because China wants to cause an accident. They want to kill. They know better, but they really want to go to war."

President Joe Biden and his administration have been going with an appeasement approach that just is not curbing Chinese saber-rattling, Chang told host Rita Cosby.

"You should always believe when your adversary or enemy tells you something," Chang said. "You know that trial balloon? That really was a show of utter disrespect for the United States — that they think that they could fly that large object over our Air Force bases, over our strategic nuclear deterrence sites."

"And so really what we have is a Chinese regime that thinks the U.S. is no longer a factor. That's going to, I think, encourage them to do something really, really destructive."

China called Taiwan's president's recent meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., a "provocation" as it has sensed less American adherence to the One China policy, which suggests Taiwan is not an independent island nation.

Hacks of U.S. infrastructure might cripple any potential American response to Chinese aggression against Taiwan, experts warn.

"If you get the right supply chain, it can have a lot of effects against a lot of targets," Mandiant Intelligence Analysis at Google Cloud's John Hultquist told Politico.

Modern warfare has been waged in spurts online, but Chinese capability to conduct a widespread cyber campaign is something no one is able to measure before it happens.

"Those will be resilience tests for us," Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0 Director Mark Montgomery told Politico.

Among the cyber targets, according to the report:

Military and transportation networks.
Energy.
Water.
Businesses and financial markets.

"If Beijing feared that a major conflict with the United States were imminent, it almost certainly would consider undertaking aggressive cyber operations against U.S. homeland critical infrastructure and military assets worldwide," the U.S. intelligence community's annual threats assessment warned in February.

Gallagher will be at the forefront of the congressional preparations and response in the event China does wage a cyber war. He is chairman of the China committee and House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies and Information Systems (CITI).

"Part of CITI's role is to ensure the Department of Defense and the private sector are moving with a sense of urgency to harden this critical infrastructure before it's too late," Gallagher told Politico.

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