According to Congressman Mac Thornberry (R-TX), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, Beijing's threatening actions entail industrial espionage, massive cyber thievery, sending graduate students to attend American universities, establishing technology transfer organizations within China, and setting up associations in the US to recruit American tech talent.
"The US government does not have a comprehensive policy, or the tools, to address this massive technology transfer to China. And the US government does not have a holistic view of how fast this technology transfer is occurring, the level of Chinese investment in US technology, or what technologies we should be protecting," Thornberry said Thursday on Capitol Hill, quoting a recent Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) report.
"We don't have a strategy to counter what has been happening," Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) stated at the hearing. "We had a briefing yesterday, and it was showing how disorganized, unprepared, and quite frankly utterly clueless the branch of the military was that had been breached."
Smith did not specify what breach he had in mind and his staff refused to disclose these details following the hearing, USNI News reported Thursday.
Just a few weeks ago, some 614 gigabytes of data on a project that was not previously known to exist was stolen, reportedly by Chinese hackers. The compromised secrets had the incidental impact of revealing that the US Navy has not-so-secret-anymore plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile to be used by submarines sometime in the 2020s.
