Adm. Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations.

WASHINGTON: The Justice Department’s indictment of five People’s Liberation Army officers on charges of cyber-espionage may prove to be a double-edged sword for the US military.

The Department of Justice announced the indictments for cyber espionage on Monday. While the Justice Department accused the five of stealing things, the Chinese have a very different view. As Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year: “Their view is, there are no rules of the road in cyber so they aren’t breaking any.”

On a spectrum from delight at Justice’s tough stand to anxiety about the potential backlash, “I would be closer to the second[:] ‘Oh boy, I hope we can continue the momentum that we have with the PLA,” Navy Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert said when I asked him about the issue at this morning’s Defense Writers’ Group breakfast. “We’ve got to continue.” At stake are high-profile engagements like China’s first-ever participation in the annual Rim of the Pacific (RimPac) international exercises in Hawaii and Greenert’s own visit to China this summer to meet with PLA Navy chief Adm.  Wu Shengli.  “We haven’t had any signs of displeasure from our Chinese navy interlocutors at this point,” Greenert said.

Just wait, said one of America’s most iconoclastic strategists, Edward Luttwak. “It is the ancient American torture of a thousand cuts,” he told me. Indicting PLA officers may seem pure symbolism — no one expects them to stand trial — but it’s just the publicly visible tip of an Asia-Pacific iceberg, Luttwak said: “It was a measure at hand; there will be more.”

“We are sliding into a confrontation with China,” Luttwak warned. “Every time the Chinese challenge a neighbor — Japan, Vietnam, Vietnamese, Philippines, no matter — they are putting another brick in the wall of the emerging pan-Asian coalition…. In the process, US-China hostility increases.” That said, Luttwak noted, we have a long way to go before we reach Cold War levels of tension.

“This will be seen as enormously insulting,” said Dean Cheng of the conservative Heritage Institution. “Taken in conjunction with the comments by General Fang during his recent visit (as noted in Colin’s article), we are looking at a likely chilling of US-China relations, not just at the mil-mil level, but more broadly. General Fang’s comments clearly reflect a view that the US is fomenting problems for China, including encouraging its neighbors to challenge Chinese claims in places like the South China Sea. Now, we’re accusing their military of criminal acts.” That includes an open-ended charge of “conspiracy” that could potentially entangle more senior Chinese officers and complicate high-level visits to the US.

That said, Cheng added, “note that the Chinese did not take the most obvious retaliatory path, which was to cancel high-level meetings…or participation in RimPac.” That’s not necessarily a good thing, he added: “This would suggest that the information the PLA will obtain from RimPac likely outweighs their diplomatic pique — and should raise questions about just what we’re choosing to show the Chinese.”

Greenert, by contrast, sees RimPac as a pure win-win. Within the boundaries of security regulations and statutes, he said, “we’ve gone as complex and comprehensive with their attendance at RimPac as feasible and they’re pleased with that.” Greenert expects Chinese sailors to go aboard the USS Mercy and Americans to aboard the Chinese Peace Ark — both hospital ships, not combat vessels with highly classified equipment — and hopes to see the two ships embark detachments from each others’ navy on future operations. Beyond RimPac, he wants to routinize some types of exercises so the two fleets can conduct them without requiring high-level approval every time.

Greenert even wants student exchanges between the Chinese and the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. The goal: to build mutual understanding in the next generation of both navies’ leaders.

Greenert is certainly concerned about cyber espionage: In particular, he said, “I worry about our cleared defense contractors losing information and data” before that data gets classified and moves into better protected networks. “We’ve got to press” on cybersecurity, he said.

But Greenert sees the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) as a moderating influence on other security forces, notably the newly created Chinese Coast Guard, which has played the leading role in recent provocations in both the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea. This spring, after the two forces agreed to a new protocol for interactions at sea, “one of our ships was being kind of pressured — I hate to use the term harassed — [by Chinese coast guard vessels],” Greenert recounted. “One of the Chinese [navy] warships came in, spoke English, said what’s going on, had a discussion with our guy, and he stepped in and defused the situation. He said to the coast guard, ‘you need to move along, you’re too close'” to the American ship, the USS Spruance.

Even the notorious near-collision between the USS Cowpens and a Chinese vessel escorting their new aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, had a happy ending, Greenert said. While the protocol for at-sea incidents hadn’t yet been finalized at the time, Greenert said, “right after Cowpens came to a screeching halt, the aircraft carrier CO [commanding officer], in English… gets on the international net with the Cowpens CO [and] defuses the situation.”

Greenert made clear that the military, by itself, can only manage day-to-day interactions, not the grand strategic challenges of the US-China leadership. “The big problem, I leave to our leadership,” he said. “We need to keep negotiating.” Meanwhile, navy to navy, “we need to keep things cool.”