The United States is the leading nation in the world when it comes to cyber capability, with China being the closest competitor for the title, even surpassing the United Kingdom. Since China is the closest to the US in terms of cyber capability, I will mostly be focusing on China vs the US, though I may bring up some other countries to compare with the two. While China has become very technologically advanced in the past few years, their digital economy has not caught up to the US, and probably won’t for at least the next few decades. This doesn’t mean that the US is invincible, however, since cyber-attacks can come from all over the world, and even from your own citizens.

One thing that puts the US at a disadvantage is hackers. Hackers can come from any country and are hard to track down, and even harder to incarcerate. Many ethical hackers in the US are not likely to fight back against hackers from other countries due to how legally constrained hacking is the US. Having rules and legal codes for US hackers isn’t a bad thing on its own, but the lack of action against hackers from other countries has put the US at not only a disadvantage, but also a major risk, since a loss of crucial information could be the disastrous on a nationwide scale. You don’t even need to be the most technologically advanced to successfully hack someone, so the US and its heavy reliance on technology can actually be considered a disadvantage in some scenarios.

China’s cyber security law only came into effect in 2017, and the goal of cyber security in the nation today is to create a separate cyberspace used only by their own nation that can make information the crosses the Chinese border transparent. If the nation actually manages to successfully create a separate cyberspace, then that could completely change the game in terms of cyber and military capabilities.