Carpenter had never seen hackers work so quickly, with such a sense of purpose. They would commandeer a hidden section of a hard drive, zip up as many files as possible and immediately transmit the data to way stations in South Korea, Hong Kong or Taiwan before sending them to mainland China. They always made a silent escape, wiping their electronic fingerprints clean and leaving behind an almost undetectable beacon allowing them to re-enter the machine at will. An entire attack took 10 to 30 minutes.
The story appears to have re-broken. Allan Paller from the SANS institute seems to be echoing Carpenters words:
"These attacks come from someone with intense discipline. No other organization could do this if they were not a military organization," Paller said. The perpetrators "were in and out with no keystroke errors and left no fingerprints, and created a backdoor in less than 30 minutes. How can this be done by anyone other than a military organization?"
In addition to intrusions at Lockheed Martin and Sandia mentioned in Carpenter's interview, Paller claims flight planning software from the US military's Redstone Arsenal were stolen.
Bruce Schneier who also wrote about this in August claims to know people involved who confirm that the attacks are "very well organised."
Without more information, I think claims that professional hacking can only come from a military organisation are tenuous. The Chinese government has denied the claim. The trend of an increasing criminal presence on the internet shouldn't be discounted in this situation. Chinese Triads are famous, and at least at a sensationalist level shouldn't be discounted. If anything, this would fit their MO. Which leads me to believe the counterhacking missions discovered more than just "the attacks came from Guangdong." Why is no one making the link to Carpenter's story, or maybe I'm not reading the right blogs?
This is what a real security threat is, and what more effort should be expended defending against. This is why I believe vendor patch management policies fail. They help the average administrator protect against script kiddies, but they don't secure against the skilled attacker.
Take a look at the patches just released by Microsoft. MS05-054 provides patches for which attacks have already been observed for the last month.
UPDATE: Chinese government denies it. Until someone provides more proof than 'discipline and expertise were evident' this isn't going to hold any water.