China is making a bid to become the dominant player in cyberspace, forcing the United States to increase its capabilities in the area of network attack, the US military has said.

A senior US Air Force commander charged with heading up a new 'cyber command' unit told reporters: "They're the only nation that has been quite that blatant about saying, 'We're looking to do that.'"

"We have peer competitors right now in terms of doing computer network attack ... and I believe we're going to be able to ratchet up our capability, " Commander Lieutenant-General Robert Elder of the 8th Air Force, said. "We're going to go way ahead."

General Elder leads a team at an air force base in Louisiana which focuses on the possibility of a network-based attack, addressing everything from infrastructure security to surveillance and communications.

The Barksdale Air Force Base is already home to to 25,000 military personnel working on issues relating to electronic defence and electronic warfare.

General Elder made his remarks a month after the US Defence Department's annual report on China's military capabilities claimed that the country had established "information warfare units" to develop viruses, and saw "computer network operations" (CNO) as "critical to achieving electro-magnetic dominance early in a conflict."

The People's Liberation Army had already established units to develop "tactics and measures to protect friendly computer systems and networks" and in 2005 "began to incorporate offensive CNO into its exercises, primarily in first strikes against enemy networks," the report said.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected the report as "brutal interference" in China's internal affairs, and insisted that Beijing's military preparations are purely defensive.

General Elder said that the majority of the China's alleged cyber-operations were aimed at stealing trade secrets to save time on high-tech developments.

A number of potential enemies were scanning US networks for defence and trade secrets, he told Reuters. He said that the culprits included "everyone but North Korea. We've concluded that there must be only one laptop in all of North Korea – and that guy's not allowed to scan."

Last month Estonia accused Russia of launching a wave of attacks against its computer systems as part of a campaign of unofficial sanctions.

NATO experts were called to investigate after Estonia said that it had traced the attacks, which paralysed Government websites and telephone networks, to computers used by Russian authorities.

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