[Jd]

It is more than "what many Chinese firms" are doing; it is what the Chinese government in collusion with many Chinese firms is actively doing all the time at all levels of US infrastructure, including not only industrial espionage but also actively attempting to steal all military and other tech from every server connected to the internet. Everything stolen is then pushed back to the appropriate vendor, which includes of course whatever companies are capable of producing stolen tech. This then is produced at low cost overseas and shipped back to the American consumer, who purchases it at the expense of an American product, leading to a loss in revenues for the American company that originally designed and produced the stolen product and dozens or hundreds more unemployed Americans.

This isn't MAD, this is constant low-level warfare waged by a foreign power without any US response except for monitoring and sporadic defensive efforts. The problem with a counter-offensive, esp. one waged by proxy private sector forces is that, first of all, the US is continually fighting the last war over and over (oh yes, let's invade Libya and setup democracy there... ), second of all even if we can plant detonation devices in Chinese infrastructure like they most certainly have littered in ours (who knows how many electric grids they could shut off at a moment's notice) this doesn't prevent their offensive efforts at all. In fact, the only thing that can prevent theft on a large scale is penalizing that theft, which certainly no current administration is capable of doing (notice the long standing list of promises regarding IP protection that China has reneged on). So really the only solution here is to innovate much more quickly domestically (including whatever private sector partnerships are appropriate via DARPA, etc.) and to continue to develop offensive capacities (which undoubtedly exist but given the classified nature of such, it is hard to know quite how well developed or capable they are). Undoubtedly we should also try to knock off Chinese government servers periodically as they do to ours just to be certain that we can -- and a private Blackwater might be just the ticket.

Oh yes, I used to work for the DoD.