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What is Information Warfare?
by Martin Libicki
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WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
MARTIN LIBICKI
Preface
In recent years, a concept known as "information warfare" has become popular
within certain circles of the U.S. defense establishment. The concept is
rooted in the undisputable fact that information and information technologies
are increasingly important to national security in general and to warfare
specifically. According to this concept, advanced conflict will increasingly
be characterized by the struggle over information systems. All forms of
struggle over control and dominance of information are considered
essentially one struggle, and the techniques of information warfare are seen
as aspects of a single discipline. Those who master the techniques of
information warfare will therefore find themselves at an advantage over
those who have not; indeed, information warfare will, in and of itself,
relegate other, more traditional and conventional forms of warfare to the
sidelines. If it takes information warfare seriously enough, the United
States, as the world's preeminent information society, could increase its
lead over any opponent. If it fails to do so, proponents argue, it may be
at considerable disadvantage, regardless of strengths in other military
dimensions.
This essay examines that line of thinking and indicates several fundamental
flaws while arguing the following points:
Information warfare, as a separate technique of waging war, does not exist.
There are, instead, several distinct forms of information warfare, each
laying claim to the larger concept. Seven forms of information warfare --
conflicts that involve the protection, manipulation, degradation, and denial
of information -- can be distinguished: (i) command-and-control warfare
(which strikes against the enemy's head and neck), (ii) intelligence-based
warfare (which consists of the design, protection, and denial of systems
that seek sufficient knowledge to dominate the battlespace), (iii)
electronic warfare (radio- electronic or cryptographic techniques), (iv)
psychological warfare (in which information is used to change the minds of
friends, neutrals, and foes), (v) "hacker" warfare (in which computer
systems are attacked), (vi) economic information warfare (blocking
information or channelling it to pursue economic dominance), and (vii)
cyberwarfare (a grab bag of futuristic scenarios). All these forms are
weakly related. The concept of information warfare has as much analytic
coherence as the concept, for instance, of an information worker.
The several forms range in maturity from the historic (that information
technology influences but does not control) to the fantastic (which involves
assumptions about societies and organizations that are not necessarily true).
Although information systems are becoming important, it does not follow
that attacks on information systems are therefore more worthwhile. On the
contrary, as monolithic computer, communications, and media architectures
give way to distributed systems, the returns from many forms of information
warfare diminish.
Information is not in and of itself a medium of warfare, except in certain
narrow aspects (such as electronic jamming). Information superiority may
make sense, but information supremacy (where one side can keep the other
from entering the battlefield) makes little more sense than logistics
supremacy.
Chapter 1
Is There An Elephant?
In the fall of 1994, I was privileged to observe an Information
Warfare game sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Red, a middle-sized, middle-income nation with a sophisticated
electronics industry, had developed an elaborate five-year plan that
culminated in an attack on a neighboring country. Blue -- the
United States -- was the neighbor's ally and got wind of Red's plan.
The two sides began an extended period of preparation during
which each conducted peacetime information warfare and
contemplated wartime information warfare. Players on each side
retreated to game rooms to decide on moves.
Upon returning from the game rooms, each side presented its
strategy. Two troubling tendencies emerged: First, because of the
difficulty each side had in determining how the other side's
information system was wired, for most of the operations proposed
(for example, Blue considered taking down Red's banking system)
no one could prove which actions might or might not be successful,
or even what "success" in this context meant. Second, conflict was
the sound of two hands clapping, but not clapping on each other.
Blue saw information warfare as legions of hackers searching out
the vulnerabilities of Red's computer systems, which might be
exploited by hordes of viruses, worms, logic bombs, or Trojan
horses. Red saw information warfare as psychological manipulation
through media. Such were the visions in place even before wartime
variations on information warfare came into the discussion. Battle
was never joined, even by accident.
This game illustrated a fundamental difficulty in coming to terms
with information warfare, deciding on its nature. Is it a new art? the
newest version of some time-honored features of warfare? Is it a
new medium of conflict that issues from the burgeoning global
information infrastructure or one to which information technologies
have contributed but which originates in the wetware of the human
brain? Is it a unified covey of operations, or a random assemblage
of fowl perched on a single power line?
Information warfare is a hot topic at the Pentagon and unavoidable
in contemplating the future of warfare. It is linked to the
Revolution in Military Affairs, which has assumed almost totemic
importance in the conceptual superstructure of national defense.
Recent tomes such as the Tofflers' War and Anti- War Note 1 have
made it an article of faith that information technologies are
transforming second-wave (industrial) societies into third-wave
(information- based) ones. War must follow, which offers
considerable comfort to those who see the United States as having
supremacy in handling information while its former supremacy in
the industrial arts seems to be diminishing.
Coming to grips with information warfare, however, is like the
effort of the blind men to discover the nature of the elephant: the
one who touched its leg called it a tree, another who touched its tail
called it a rope, and so on. Manifestations of information warfare
are similarly perceived. Although some parts of the whole are
closely related in form and function (e.g., electronic warfare and
command-and-control warfare), taken together all the respectably
held definitions of the elephant suggest there is little that is not
information warfare.
Is a good definition possible? Does having one matter? Perhaps
there is no elephant, only trees and ropes that aspire to become one.
Clarifying the issues is more than academic quibbling. First, as the
metaphor suggests, sloppy thinking promotes false synecdoche.
One aspect of information warfare, perhaps championed by a single
constituency, assumes the role of the entire concept, thus becoming
grossly inflated in importance. Second, too broad a definition
makes it impossible to discover any common conceptual thread
other than the obvious (that information warfare involves
information and warfare), where a tighter definition might reveal
one. Third, the slippery inference derived from loose aggregation
points to the conclusion that the United States can and must seek
the dominance in information warfare it currently enjoys in air
warfare, as if these arenas were comparable.
Thomas Rona, an early proponent of information warfare, offered
the following definition:
The strategic, operation, and tactical level competitions across the
spectrum of peace, crisis, crisis escalation, conflict, war, war
termination, and reconstitution/restoration, waged between
competitors, adversaries or enemies using information means to
achieve their objectives.
This definition is broad, too broad: one way or another, it
subsumes most human activity. In a related view, information war
exists to ensure that one's own picture of a conflict is more correct
than that held by the other side. This perspective is useful but
incomplete. All viewpoints are incorrect, because data cannot be
incorporated without a conceptual structure to hang them on. Yet
even the best structures are abstractions of a complex world.
Whether the structures are biased in important and harmful or
trivial and harmless ways is what matters.
The Joint Staff has faced great difficulty in assigning precise
responsibilities even for military forms of information warfare
(nonmilitary forms, for instance, include the defense of national
financial systems against hackers). Command-and-control warfare
(C2W) is assigned to J-3 (the operations directorate) within the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. Designing command-and-control systems for
security and protection is as clearly the province of J-6 (the C4
directorate). Note 2 Forms of information warfare that involve
establishing and maintaining systems of battlefield intelligence,
reconnaissance, and surveillance naturally fall under J-2 (the
intelligence directorate). Finally, because most of the interesting
issues of information warfare presume that the information
architecture of the future will be different from that of the present,
information architecture would be associated with long-term
planning, which sits in J-5 (the strategic policy and plans
directorate).
This essay attempts to sort out definitions of information warfare.
Note 3 The first part reviews seven plausibly distinct forms of
information warfare, each identified by one or another expert as a
defining example of information warfare. Each is examined by
asking what does it do, in what sense is it war, what does it owe to
silicon technologies, and how well can the United States, compared
with others, wage it? Although information warfare is often
regarded as new, some forms of it are newer than others. Some have
been enabled by and others altered by information technology,
while still others have only marginally been affected by it.
The second part of this essay searches for underlying themes. Do
the forms of information warfare cohere well enough so that as a
whole they can be assigned to information warriors in the sense
that naval warfare is assigned to the Navy? To what extent are
traditional concepts, such as "dominance," applicable to
information warfare? Are there underlying principles, grasping and,
ultimately, mastery of which may provide a conceptual framework
for effective prosecution of information warfare? Indeed, is
information warfare truly warfare?
A caveat: Those who search for an ideal definition should look
elsewhere. The typology used here is intended to subdivide a large
field into tractable parts -- information warfare may better be
considered a mosaic of forms, rather than one particular form.
Chapter 2
Seven Forms in Search of a Function
Seven forms of information warfare vie for the position of central
metaphor: command-and-control (C2W), intelligence-based warfare
(IBW), electronic warfare (EW), psychological warfare (PSYW),
hacker warfare, economic information warfare (EIW), and
cyberwarfare. Note 4
As Anne Wells Branscomb has pointed out, "in virtually all
societies, control of and access to information became instruments
of power, so much so that information came to be bought, sold, and
bartered by those who recognized its value." Note 5 Branscomb
could have added, stolen and protected as well. This essay
examines information warfare as the struggle over information
processes rather than the efforts made to acquire information.
Although the information systems required to manage logistics are
substantial, they enter into information warfare only if and when an
opponent targets the logistics information system to degrade it;
similarly, weather collection systems enter information warfare
only if they are subject to attack. By contrast, IBW systems are part
of information warfare because they are used to read a target that
would avoid being read and that often has ways (e.g., cover,
concealment, and deception) to distort readings at the source.
The critical aspects of information warfare are information denial
(or distortion) and its counterpart, protection. C2, EW, hacker war,
and information blockade clearly fit into this definition. IBW may
be included, insofar as attacks on the instruments and integrity of
collection systems become important to conventional operations.
Psychological warfare also is about denial, in the sense that
elevating one perception usually subjugates its opposite (e.g., a
nation is either friendly or hostile). Cyberwarfare fits, too, as a grab
bag in which warfare and information are jumbled.
Chapter 3
Command-and-Control Warfare
The following is taken from a core Department of Defense (DoD)
dictum on C2W and information warfare:
C2W [Command-and control-warfare] is the military strategy that
implements Information Warfare (DoD Directive TS- 3600.1, 21
December 1992, "Information Warfare") on the battlefield and
integrates physical destruction. Its objective is to decapitate the
enemy's command structure from its body of command forces. Note
6
Defined in this way, U.S. forces demonstrated mastery of
information warfare in the Gulf by destroying many physical
manifestations of Iraq's command-and-control structure. These
operations have frequently been pointed to as the reason the bulk of
the Iraqi forces were ineffectual when U.S. ground forces came
rolling through. Note 7
Decapitation can be accomplished by a blow to the head or by
severing the neck, each thrust serving a different tactical and
strategic purpose.
Antihead
Gunning for the commander's head is an old aspect of warfare.
Examples abound, from the ancient practice of seizing the enemy's
king to the death of Admiral Nelson, shot by a shipboard sniper,
the employment of sharpshooters against opposing generals during
the Civil War, the downing of Admiral Yamamoto's plane in World
War II, strategic nuclear targeting theory, and attempts to find
Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War or Mohammed Aideed in
Somalia. What is new is that the commander's accessibility keeps
shifting. Command effectiveness used to require commanders to
oversee and thus remain near the range of combat. In World War I
wireline communications enabled commanders to operate beyond
the range of enemy arms. Later, the airplane and missile returned
the commanders to the target zone.
More important than the commander's physical location is the
transformation from the commander to the command center.
Today's command centers are identifiable by copious, visible
communications and computational gear (and the associated
electromagnetic emissions), the physical movement of paper and
other official supplies, plus enough comings and goings of all sorts
to differentiate these centers from other venues of military business.
An attack on a command center, particularly if timed correctly, can
prove disruptive to operations even without hitting a high-ranking
enemy commander. Despite the known disadvantages of single-
point vulnerabilities, most commerce in messages tends to circulate
within very small spaces. Fusing data and distributing them to
harmonize everyone's situational awareness requires either a central
set of ganglia or a major redesign of legacy systems. Determining
the location of a command center permits juicy targets to come
within gunsight -- an opportunity rarely passed up. Correctly timed
attacks can disrupt and distract operations beyond the immediate
effect of destruction.
Iron bombs are not the only way to attack command centers.
Systems can be disabled by cutting off their power, introducing
enough electromagnetic interference to make them unreliable, or by
importing computer viruses, yet none of these means is foolproof or
cost-effective compared with iron bombs on target. Most soft-kill
weapons require knowing the location of the target. Although some
of them have a larger effective radius than conventional munitions,
the difference is limited and finding before firing remains equally
essential.
How long will command centers remain visible? Bunkering can
protect headquarters, but at the cost of mobility (and newly
perfected penetrating ordnance requires deep and comparatively
immobile bunkers). Control of the signature of the command center
may be a better strategy. Computers can be shrunk to the desktop,
emissions of communications gear masked by electronic clutter
(both deliberate and ambient) or offloaded through multiply
redundant cables or line-of-sight relays away from headquarters,
and paper will yield to the paperless, perhaps optical, society
(someday). Networks can generally be decentralized. Note 8
Comings and goings and congregations that create valuable targets
can be reduced through videoconferencing and whiteboarding. Note
9 Power supplies can be supplemented by bunkered generators or,
more ingeniously, by relying on dispersed photovoltaic collectors
for electricity (which should be scattered so their presence will not
reveal the command center). These means can keep command
centers indistinguishable from any other inhabited space. Failing
this result, the degree to which an enemy is hurt by being struck
will depend on backup architectures (e.g., which nodes supply what
information, what information is vital for battlefield decisions).
Dispersion will take time; reconfiguration costs time and money
and increases the difficulty of command. Proponents may need real-
life demonstrations, rather than theoretical arguments, to convince
commanders that dispersion is needed and that a given level of
dispersion will suffice against attack. But the transformation will
eventually happen everywhere. How soon militaries in other
countries will make the shift will depend on technological
sophistication, the degree to which current command centers feel
vulnerable, the extent to which authority is vested in personal
contact or in ostentatious displays of silicon, as well as
miscellaneous cultural factors. In the long run, war planners would
be foolish to base their strategy on the assumption that the enemy's
command centers can be disabled.
Antineck
Modern militaries have been knit by electronic communications
since the mid-nineteenth century and by radioelectronic
communications since the 1920s. Cut these communications and
command-and-control is disabled, which, again, is old in warfare
Note 10. What is new is the size of the communications load in the
information age. Air defense systems, for instance, work better
when integrated across facilities than when each facility works
independently. The extent to which operations depend on the flow
determines whether efforts to cut communications are worthwhile.
Cutting communication links requires knowing how the other side
communicates. If its architecture is written in wire, the nodes (e.g.,
the AT&T building in downtown Baghdad) are easily identified
and disabled. Like command centers, communications systems can
be crippled by attacks on generators, substations, and fuel supply
pipelines (e.g., gas lines into power plants), such as U.S. forces
made in the Gulf. If the architecture is electromagnetic, often the
key nodes are visible (e.g., microwave towers). If satellites are used
for transmission and signalling, then communication lines can be
jammed, deafened, or killed.
The impact of attacks depends on how far the other side has
progressed from the mainframe era. A communications grid
composed of many small elements rather than a few large ones
radiates less and casts smaller shadows over the landscape; it offers
greater redundancy and confounds the enemy's targeting problems.
Redundancy is an attribute of both developed less developed states.
By the end of the Gulf War allied forces had more (if less
important) C2 targets left to attack than at the start, despite the
number destroyed. The Iraqis, as it turned out, had many
communications systems, more perhaps than even they were aware
of, from radio systems that Western oil contractors had left in place
to rural telephone systems that routed around major cities.
Deliberate redundancy, of course, is more efficient than accidental.
Systems that replicate message traffic multiply the likelihood of a
message getting through in highly degraded conditions, even if
redundancy reduces the system's overall capacity. Additional
robustness can be protected by new technologies such as spread-
spectrum (to guard against burst errors in heavy jamming
environments) and sophisticated error-correction techniques (e.g.,
trellis coding). A strategy of redundancy still leaves the
management problem of distinguishing vital bit flows from merely
useful ones. Bureaucratic, rather than technological, factors may
determine the vulnerability of any data-passing system.
To what Effect?
The potential influence of C2W on the outcome of conflict is
predicated on the architecture of command relationships among the
attacked. Iraq imitated its Soviet mentor, in part for political
reasons (Iraqi society rules through convictions, rather than
conviction). Cutting or thinning the links between head and body
could easily be predicted to immobilize the body. Front-line troops
were sitting ducks for U.S. air and ground attack and showed little
creative response.
Clearly, a rigid opponent like Iraq is only one end of a long
continuum of possibilities. Other societies may allow local
commanders more autonomy. Although the North Vietnamese also
were hierarchically organized, their operatives were capable of long
periods of untethered operations. An attack on central authority
could conceivably release field commanders to demonstrate an
initiative that would more than compensate for any lack of
coordination resulting from chaos at the center. Note 11
The opposite also merits thought: if the center can be induced to
come to terms, the last thing wanted is for peripheral forces to
continue to fight. Future General Robert E. Lees, one hopes, would
surrender whole armies rather than free them to fight on in guerilla
campaigns. Consider the difficulties in Bosnia: although Belgrade
signed a peace agreement in July 1994, the Bosnian Serbs refused
to sign and continue to fight. Note 12 Decapitating a military may
make it less effective but more troublesome.
Much of what passes for strategy to control nuclear war Note 13
consists of persuading an opponent to cease operations prior to
global conflagration. Attacks on command-and-control thus make
sense only if enemy forces are acting under positive (e.g., don't fire
until I tell you) rather than negative control. Otherwise, the strategy
could backfire.
C2W may do more good degrading or compromising the enemy's
ability to command forces than destroying its ability altogether. For
instance, destroying secure channels may induce the use of open
ones vulnerable to eavesdropping. Although a destroyed
infrastructure may prompt an immediate search for alternatives, one
only subtly degraded may not. Finding a way to slow down the
other side's ability to react at a precise moment (e.g., the moment of
attack) gets the attacker inside the other side's OODA Note 14
loop. All these capabilities come under the category of "nice work
if you can get it." As hard as it may be to degrade a system without
leaving marks (while evading periodic ping tests Note 15 of a
system's message cycling efficiency), it is harder to know whether
one's attacks have done anything -- even well after the dust settles.
Battle damage assessment of C2 warfare is so difficult (consisting
both of what was hit and what difference the hit made) that field
commanders understandably want to see visible craters to ensure
they had any effect at all.
C2W clearly is a valuable aspect of military operations, but it is
neither a perfect complement (or substitute) to counter-force
operations nor particularly new, except in certain respects.
Although the information revolution has made some military
operations hostage to the integrity of the center, the continuing
shift from mainframe to distributed processing is reducing the
center's vulnerability. The status of information warfare may reach
its apogee just as the target set is accelerating its shift out from
under the bombsights.
Chapter 4
Intelligence-Based Warfare
IBW occurs when intelligence is fed directly into operations
(notably, targeting and battle damage assessment), rather than used
as an input for overall command and control. In contrast to the
other forms of warfare discussed so far, IBW results directly in the
application of steel to target (rather than corrupted bytes). As
sensors grow more acute and reliable, as they proliferate in type
and number, and as they become capable of feeding fire-control
systems in real time and near-real time, the task of developing,
maintaining, and exploiting systems that sense the battlespace,
assess its composition, and send the results to shooters assumes
increasing importance for tomorrow's militaries.
Despite differences in cognitive methods and purpose, systems that
collect and disseminate information acquired from inanimate
systems can be attacked and confounded by methods that are
effective on C2 systems. Although the purposes of situational
awareness (an intelligence attribute) and battlespace visibility (a
targeting attribute) are different, the means by which each is
realized are converging.
Offensive IBW
Sharp increases in the ratio of power to price of information
technologies, in particular those concentrated on distributed
systems, suggest new architectures for gathering and distributing
information.
Platforms that host operator, sensor, and weapon together will give
way to distributed systems in which each element is separate but
linked electronically. The local-decision loops of industrial age
warfare (e.g., a tank gunner uses infrared [IR] sights to detect a
target and fire an accurate round) will yield to global loops (e.g., a
target is detected through a fusion of sensor readings, the operator
fires a remotely piloted missile to a calculated location). Because
networking permits the logging of all readings and subsequent
findings (some more correct than others), it can generate lessons
learned more efficiently than a system that depends on voluntary
human reporting. Note 16
The evolution of IBW may be understood as a shift in what
intelligence is useful for. Traditionally, the commander uses
intelligence to gauge the disposition, location, and general
intentions of the other side. The object of intelligence is to prevent
surprise -- a known component of information warfare -- and to
permit the commander to shape battle plans. Good intelligence
allows coordination of operations; great intelligence allows
coherence, which is a higher level of synchrony. Note 17 The goals
of intelligence are met when battle is joined; when one side
understands its tasks and is prepared to carry them out while the
other reels from confusion and shock -- thus, situational awareness.
Today's information systems reveal far more than yesterday's could,
permitting a degree of knowledge about the battlespace that accords
with situational awareness. The side that can see the other side's
tank column coming can dispose itself more favorably for an
encounter. The side that can see each tank and pinpoint its location
to within the effective radius of an incoming warhead can avoid
engaging the other side directly but can fire munitions to a known,
continually updated set of points from stand-off distances. This
shift in intelligence from preparing a battlefield to mastering a
battlefield is reflected in newly formed reporting chains for this
kind of information. Although the direct reporting chain to the
national command authority will continue, new channels to
successively lower echelons (and, eventually, to the weapons
themselves) are being etched. An apparent loss in status perceived
by the intelligence apparatus (thus one resisted) is turning out to
offer a large gain in functionality.
Tomorrow's battlefield environment will feature a mixed
architecture of sensors at various levels of coverage and resolution
that collectively illuminate it thoroughly. In order to lay out what
may become a complex architecture, sensors can be separated into
four groups: (i) far stand-off sensors (mostly space but also seismic
and acoustic sensors); (ii) near stand-off sensors (e.g., unmanned
aerial vehicles [UAVs] with multispectral, passive microwave,
synthetic aperture radar [SAR], and electronic intelligence [elint]
capabilities, as well as similarly equipped offshore buoys and
surface-based radar); (iii) in-place sensors (e.g., acoustic,
gravimetric, biochemical, ground-based optical); and (iv) weapons
sensors (e.g., IR, reflected radar, and light-detection and ranging
[lidar]). This complexity illustrates the magnitude and complexity
of the task for those who would evade detailed surveillance. Most
forms of deception work against one or two sensors -- smoke works
for some, radar-reflecting paint for others, quieting for yet others --
but fooling overlapping and multivariate coverage is considerably
more difficult.
The task of assessing what individual sensor technologies will have
to offer over the next decade or so is relatively straightforward;
globally available technologies will come in many types for use by
all. The task of translating readings into militarily useful data is
more difficult and calls for analysis of individual outputs, effective
fusion of disparate readings, and, ultimately, integration of them
into seamless, cue-filter-pinpoint systems. If the Army's
demonstration facilities at Ft. Huachuca Note 18 are indicative, the
United States has done a good job of manually integrating sensor
readings in preparation for the next step -- which is automatic
integration. Automation removes the labor-intensive search of
terrain through soda straws and takes advantage of silicon's ability
to double in speed every two years. Automatic integration will
depend, in part, on the progress (always difficult to predict) of
artificial intelligence (AI).
Defensive IBW
Equally difficult to predict (or to recognize when they succeed) are
defenses developed to preserve invisibility or, at least, widen the
distance between image and reality on the battlefield. IBW systems
can be attacked in several ways. On one hand, an enemy would be
well advised to make great efforts against U.S. sensor aircraft (such
as AWACS or JSTARS). On the other, using sensors that are too
cheap to kill may be wiser (e.g., it is expensive to throw a $10,000
missile against a $1,000 sensor). Sensors can also be attacked by
disabling the systems they use (e.g., hacker warfare), and their
systems can be overridden or corrupted (e.g., EW). Note 19
The most interesting defense, in relation to likely opponents of the
United States in the next ten or twenty years, would be to use a
variant of the traditional cover (concealment) and deception with an
admixture of stealth. Note 20 When sensor readings are technically
accurate (that is, when the readings reflect reality), countering IBW
requires distorting the links between what sensors read and what
the sensor systems conclude.
In high-density realms (e.g., urban areas, villages crowded together,
forests, mountains, jungles, and brown water) counterstrategies may
rely on the exploitation or multiplication of the confusing clutter.
Note 21 In realms where the assets of daily civilian commercial life
are abundant, military assets would need to be chosen so they could
be confused with civilian assets (which tend to be more numerous
and less directly relevant to the war effort and so are not such
valuable targets -- contrary rules of engagement notwithstanding).
Decoys, broadly defined, will probably be popular, on the theory
that hiding a tree in a forest may be more practical than surrounding
it with an obvious brick wall. The success of such measures will
vary with the architecture of the IBW systems they are designed to
fool. Systems based on multiple and overlapping sectors are more
difficult to elude than single-sensor systems.
For the foreseeable future, battlefield sensors will not be able to
look at all information at the same time in sufficient detail. Note 22
Thus, the sensor system will need to use a combination of cuing,
filtering, and pinpointing (e.g., as a JSTARS system does to
indicate a group of moving vehicles so UAVs can be dispatched to
identify each of them). What sensors would be assigned which
functions? Would ambient sensors (e.g., acoustic, biochemical) be
used to cue while electro-optical ones pinpoint? Would IR readings
be used for cuing, neural with net devices as filters and ambient
sensors as discriminators? Which sensor readings would be
discarded as least reliable? How would the system compensate for
areas of relatively weak coverage?
An object may look like a duck, walk like a duck, but honk like a
goose; which is it? By carefully offering fowl for examination by
the other side and then noting which are classified as ducks and
which as geese, defenders may be yielded a clue to how an
observing system draws conclusions. Conversely, an observing
system observed may deliberately let ducks dressed as geese go free
to promote an illusion of its own inability to distinguish between
the them. This is an old technique in the game of intelligence: IBW
inserts the ethos, tendencies, and practices of intelligence Note 23
insistently into the battlefield.
Information technology can be viewed as a valuable contributor to
the art of finding targets; it can also be viewed as merely a second-
best system to use when the primary target detection devices -- a
soldier up close -- are too scarce, expensive, and vulnerable to be
used this way. Open environments (tomorrow's free-fire zones)
aside, whether high-tech finders will necessarily always emerge
triumphant over low-tech hiders remains unclear.
Chapter 5
Electronic Warfare
The first two forms of information warfare discussed here deal with
attacks either on systems (C2 warfare) or by systems (IBW). The
third form is EW, or operational techniques: radioelectronic and
cryptographic, thus war in the realm of communications. EW
attempts to degrade the physical basis for transferring information,
while cryptographic warfare works between bits and bytes.
Neither type of EW is truly new. In tandem, they underlay Britain's
success in defending its island against the Luftwaffe. In recent
years, as information warfare has acquired a certain cachet, efforts
have been made to reinvent EW under this new moniker. Note 24
Its supposed current rise in status is occurring just as technologies
are being developed that will favor the bits (like the bomber of
yore) getting through.
Antiradar
Note 25 A large portion of the EW community deals with radars
(both search and target) and worries about jamming and
counterjamming. Offense and defense keep coming up with new
techniques. Traditional radars generate a signal at one frequency;
knowing the frequency makes it easy to jam a return signal. More
modern radars hop from one outgoing frequency band to the next.
To counter radars, today's jammers must be able to acquire the
incoming signal, determine its frequency, tune the outgoing
jamming signal accordingly, and send a blur back quickly enough
to minimize the length and strength of the reflected signal. Jamming
aircraft that are riding in formation with attack aircraft often wipe
out return signals (which weaken as the fourth power of the
distance between radar and target) by overpowering them, but doing
so makes jammers very visible so they must protect themselves.
Coalition forces in the Gulf developed new synergies using
jamming aircraft en masse. Radars make themselves targets because
of their outgoing signals; antiradiation missiles (e.g., the HARM)
force radars either to be turned off or to rely on chirping and
sputtering. The aborted Tacit Rainbow missile was designed to
loiter in an attack area until a radar turned itself on; the outgoing
signal gave the missile an incoming beacon, and away it went. As
digitization improves, radar can acquire a target by generating a
transient pulse and analyzing the return signal before a false
jamming signal overwhelms the reflection.
The cheaper digital manipulation becomes, the more logic favors
the separation of an emitter from a collector. Emitters, the targets of
antiradiation missiles, would proliferate, to ensure the survival of
the system and to act as sponges for expensive missiles. The
missiles would create a large virtual dish out of a collection of
overlapping small ones. Because outgoing signals will be more
complex, collection algorithms too will grow in complexity, but the
ability of jammers to cover the more complex circle adequately may
lag. Dispersing the collection surface will also make radars less
inviting targets.
Anticommunications
EW against communicators is generally more difficult to wage than
EW against radars. The signal strength of communications weakens
with the distance to the transmitter squared (versus the fourth
power with radar). While radars try to illuminate a target (and
therefore send a beam into the assets of the other side),
communicators try to avoid the other side entirely and thus point in
specific directions. Communicators move toward frequency-
hopping, spread-spectrum, and code-division multiple access
(CDMA) technologies, which are difficult to jam and intercept.
Communications to and from known locations (e.g., satellites,
UAVs) can use digital technologies to focus on frontal signals and
discard jamming that comes from the sides. Digital compression
techniques coupled with signal redundancy mean that bit streams
can be recovered intact, even if large parts are destroyed.
EW is also used to geolocate the emitter. The noisier the
environment, the more difficult the task. One defense is to multiply
sources of background electronic clutter shaped to foil intercept
techniques that rely on distinguishing real signal patterns. Note 26
A thorough job, of course, requires expending resources to scatter
emitters in areas where they may plausibly indicate military
activity. Doing so diverts resources from other missions.
As suggested above, the work of finding targets is likely to shift
from manned platforms to distributed systems of sensors. Despite
the impending necessity of distributed systems, their Achilles' heel
is the need for reliable, often heavily used communications links
between many sensors, command systems, and dispersed weapons.
Note 27 In sensor-rich environments, EW -- expressed by jamming
or by soft- kill -- can assume a new importance. Interference with
communications from local sensors, for instance, can create virtual
blank areas through which opposing systems can move with less
chance of detection. The success of this tactic critically depends on
the architecture of the distributed sensor system to be disrupted. A
system that relies exclusively on distributed local sensors
(intercommunicating or relaying signals by low power to switches)
is the most vulnerable. A system that interleaves local and stand-off
sensors, particularly where coverage varies and overlap is common,
is more robust.
Cryptography
By scrambling its own messages and unscrambling those of the
other side, each side performs the quintessential act of information
warfare, protecting its own view of reality while degrading that of
the other side. Although cryptography continues to attract the best
minds in mathematics, sadly for an otherwise long and glorious
history, contests in this realm will soon be only of historical
interest.
Decoding computer-generated messages is fast becoming
impossible. The combination of technologies such as the triple-
digital encryption standard (DES) for message communication
using private keys, and public key encryption (PKE) for passing
private keys using public keys (so set up communications remain in
the clear) will probably overwhelm the best code-breaking
computers. The basic mathematics is simple: for any key length x,
for DES data encryption the power required to break the codes
Note 28 is A*Nx (where x is the key length, A is positive, and N
exceeds 1) and the power required to make the codes is B*Xm
(where B is positive and M exceeds 1). Regardless of the quantity
of A, B, M, and N, as soon as x exceeds some number, breaking a
code is harder than creating one and becomes increasingly harder as
x grows.
Although encryption is spreading on the Internet and all
communications are going digital, the transition to ubiquitous
encryption will take time. Analog will certainly persist in legacy
systems, although its lifetime is limited. Cheap encryption, coupled
with signal-hiding techniques such as spread-spectrum and
frequency-hopping, will seal the codebreaker's fate.
Digital technologies will make spoofing -- substituting deceptive
messages for valid ones -- nearly impossible. Digital- signature
technologies permit recipients to know both who (or what) sent the
message and whether the message was tampered with. Unless the
spoofer can get inside the message-generation system or the
recipient cannot access a list of universal digital keys (e.g., updates
are unavailable to that location), the odds of a successful spoof are
becoming quite low. Note 29
Chapter 6
Psychological Warfare
Psychological warfare, as used here, encompasses the use of
information Note 30 against the human mind (rather than against
computer support). There are four categories of psychological
warfare: (i) operations against the national will, (ii) operations
against opposing commanders, (iii) operations against troops, and -
- a category much respected abroad -- (iv) cultural conflict.
Psychological warfare prompts the same questions asked about
information warfare: Is it war? is it new?
Counter-will
The use of psychological war against the national will through both
either the velvet glove ("accept us as friendly") or the iron fist ("or
else") is a long and respected adjunct to military operations, with
antecedents found in the writings of Thucydides. The recurrent
"peace offensives" and May Day parades of the Soviets showed that
they were familiar with its uses, as are we.
The Somali clan leader Mohammed Aideed appears (if symposia
hosted by the DoD are an indication) to be a master of the uses of
psychological warfare. In a confrontation that cost the lives of
nineteen U.S. Rangers, Aideed's side reportedly lost fifteen times
that number -- roughly a third of his strength. Photographs of
jeering Somalis dragging corpses of U.S. soldiers through the
streets of Mogadisho transmitted by CNN to the United States
ended by souring TV audiences at home in the U.S. on staying in
Somalia. U.S. forces left, and Aideed, in essence, won the
information war. Note 31
Global broadcasters, CNN a leader among them, ensure that events
anywhere on the planet, whether authentic or arranged for show,
can be delivered to audiences in many countries. Those CNN
broadcasts indicated the immediacy satellites can now provide to
news organizations, but, this feature aside, the concept of
international news was not invented by CNN. More than twenty-
five years ago, the Vietnam War was broadcast nightly to U.S.
living rooms, time-delayed for the dinner hour.
Using direct broadcast satellite (DBS), the leader of one nation
does not need permission from overseas counterparts to speak live
directly to the people in other nations. This capability is now
available to anyone at low cost. The two-satellite 150-channel DBS
constellation the Hughes company launched over North America,
which began service late in 1994, cost roughly $1 billion, and
subsequent versions will probably cost less. A DBS transponder
over Asia might be profitably leased for an annual fee of perhaps $2
million (U.S.), well within the range of, say, Kurds, radical Shiites,
Sikhs, Burmese mountain tribes, who could then afford to
broadcast their messages to an enormous audience twenty-four
hours a day.
As the five hundred channels of a supranational information
superhighway eventually become reality, the proliferation of
microbroadcasters may promote a precisely opposite effect of
localizing, rather than globalizing, the way world events are viewed
-- a de-CNNization of perception. Communities of interest, too
small to be reached profitably by mass media, could be reached by
targeted means. As each community's version of the news becomes
subject to its own filters and slants, manipulating mass audiences
will become increasingly difficult. Viewers might maintain
computer agents, who would roam the Net to extract news and
commentary of interest to them from archived and real-time material
which they could then reshape into an individual's own news
broadcasts. Affluent societies may soon suffer from Me-TV.
Given CNN, the arrival of DBS, and the possibilities of
microbroadcasting and Me-TV, how far will one side go to
manipulate news to affect the other. Affluent countries (and
attractive victims) receive more attention than less well off nations,
accessible news stories are covered better than inaccessible ones
(starvation in Somalia compared with starvation in, for example,
Sudan), and video cameras follow good pictures and human-interest
stories. Staging demonstrations to maximize video coverage has a
long history.
Yet, random, understandable biases do not equal a consistent
ability to manipulate the presentation of events in a specific
direction. The international media are a powerful and systematic
influence in war but they rarely consistently favor one side or the
other. Many in the DoD complain that unscrupulous opponents of
the United States can persuade the American public by judicious
manipulation of the media. The truth is that television is ubiquitous
and that the United States gives as good as it gets (e.g., it exports
political consultants and public affairs services, which together are
a good proxy for skill at this enterprise.)
Oddly enough, given time the media may come full circle. As such
movies as "Forrest Gump" or "Jurassic Park" have profitably shown,
synthetic, manipulative events are possible (morphing figured
prominently in the advertising of both sides during the 1994
Congressional races). Sophisticated newswatchers already
understand how to use one channel to confirm flash reports on
another; if manipulation goes further, the notion of a personally
trusted news source may supersede current concepts of public news
sources. The side wishing to manipulate the other through the
media would find part of the target population predisposed to
believing anything, part believing nothing, part predisposed to
believe the opposite of whatever the media put out, and the rest
floating in worlds of their own.
Counterforces
The use of psychological methods against the other side's forces
offers variations on two traditional themes: fear of death (or other
loss) and potential resentment between the trench and the castle (or
home front). In the Gulf War, Coalition forces convinced many
Iraqis that if they abandoned their vulnerable vehicles they would
live longer. The Coalition's persuasiveness was fortified by
weapons that had just destroyed such vehicles during the fighting.
How will technology alter the ability of one side to speak to forces
of the other? Getting electronic messages to the other side dates
back at least to World War II (e.g., Tokyo Rose). Like short- wave
radio, DBS can beam from space to local TVs but with far greater
effect. Battery-powered TVs can be taken into the field. Whether
TV is more effective than radio is debatable; clearly, images offer
an immediacy and credibility sound alone lacks. The burgeoning
field of personal computer-based television (e.g., video toasters)
permits special units in the field to assemble complex, believable
video material for broadcast behind enemy lines.
The great shift in counterforce psychological operations would
come when information technology permits broadcasts of threats or
resentment-provoking information to individual opposing troops.
When the destruction of a target identified by location can be made
near-certain, surviving warfare will be a matter of evading
detection, rather than evading firepower. What would happen if
vehicle operators could be told they had been seen and were about
to be targets of deadly munitions unless they visibly disabled the
vehicles? The first few times the technique was used,
demonstrations, rather than actual attack, might be used to indicate
that discovery is the cousin of destruction and that warnings would
be ignored at peril to life and limb. With every demonstration, the
correlation might become clearer. Such psychological warfare
might save ammunition (and avoid subsequent broadcasts by CNN
of a grisly reality). Yet the demonstration must reflect underlying
realities, not create them.
By the same logic, telling soldiers that their wives and lovers are
sleeping around is more effective if those at home can be identified
by name. Gathering the data on individuals in primitive societies
might not be possible, but it would be easier in advanced societies,
which these days generate enormous computer- kept files on almost
everyone (e.g., from credit card histories, medical histories).
Broadcasting information to individuals might be less difficult than
it appears at first (even without the ability to locate individuals
within units). No one needs to watch TV every minute to receive
second-hand news of what is being said by the other side. At thirty
seconds per soldier (the length of a typical TV advertisement), an
entire division could be covered within one week of broadcasting
without anyone losing sleep.
Counter-commander
Nothing so much suggests the imminence of defeat than confused
and disoriented commanders. Yet confusing them with words alone
is a difficult task. In mass societies, commanders are the
instruments that translate the will of those to whom they report into
the duties of those they command. The commander neither
originates the ends, nor, in theory, allows personal considerations
to get in the way of optimizing military decisions. A good
commander should be able to transcend unnecessary emotion and
proceed directly to the tasks at hand.
Confusion and disorientation are cognitive as well as emotional
states. Commanders make decisions on the basis of unexpected
events. If reality is different from the basis used for decisions, it is
difficult and time-consuming to reconstruct a cognitive structure
(e.g., facts that lead to implications, actions based on conclusions)
based on the new reality (rewiring interpersonal relationships and
organizations to match the new reality may be almost impossible).
Simulation, thought experiment, and generalized what-if thinking,
which can prepare a commander to recognize wide alternatives
(each with its own decision logic), would facilitate coping with the
unexpected, but at a high price. Contemplating an assortment of
possibilities necessarily detracts from contemplating deeply those
presumably probable. Events of low probability are discarded
entirely; should they occur, few know how to cope.
Unfavorable events always offer the possibility of unhinging the
commander Note 32; but can information warfare compound a
disorientation that events on the grand scale would have caused in
any case? If so, among otherwise comparable courses of action,
logic would seem to favor the course that would exacerbate
differences between what the other side expects to see and what it
actually sees. Note 33 In a World War II-ish metaphor, a direct tank
assault may have a higher probability of success of throwing the
enemy back compared to a parachute-led assault. If the opposing
commander is confident that a parachute- led assault against him
would fail, being wrong could force him to rethink the assumptions
of his strategy. How accurate must this psychological portrait be
before a parachute assault becomes the preferred approach? How
likely is the commander's disorientation, and what is it worth in
outcomes? The decision to adopt a strategy that trades immediate
outcomes for increased confusion depends on how data affect the
other side.
The attempt to mislead the other side's commander at the
operational level Note 34 is an important part of information
warfare. Historically, such deception has worked best when one
side has a good idea of what the other side will and will not do.
Note 35 In World War II, for example, the Germans were convinced
that the Allies would try to breach the Atlantic Wall at Calais; the
Japanese believed equally strongly that U.S. forces would strike
from the Aleutians. In both cases, Allied forces played to those
fears, keeping the opponent's forces pinned down where the
opponent would need them least when the ultimate attack came.
Similarly, Iraq was led to believe that the United States would use
aerial warfare for only a limited time and only to soften the field
immediately prior to ground attack (rather than, as it turned out, for
forty days and nights). Iraq also believed that the United States
would try to recapture Kuwait from the sea. U.S. quasi- public
commentary carried over international media, such as CNN, was
shaped to support the first belief; more conventional devices (e.g.,
having ships sail up and down the coast) supported the second.
Information warfare can also be applied to the everyday task of
deceiving opposing bureaucracies -- diplomats and spies -- about
one's intentions and capabilities. Weapons can be said to be more
or less efficient or speedy than they actually are. A nation's
preparations for war can either be highlighted for effect or
downplayed for soporific value. Such activity is so common and
historical that labelling it warfare rather than the everyday business
of statecraft it has always been would prove difficult.
How could advancing information technology accentuate or
mitigate operational deception? Institutions (e.g., CNN, again) and
tomorrow's technologies (e.g., DBS) ease the dissemination of
deception. In the future, a transition from CNN to narrowcasting
might create the possibility that one side could generate different
(perhaps even incompatible) messages to competing components of
the other side's polity. Proliferating media would permit
promulgation of confusion. As technologies of inspection become
increasingly ubiquitous, however, more details must be correct to
achieve deception. Note 36
Kulturkampf
Whether cultural struggle is a form of psychological warfare is a
rich topic, yet many non-Western nations are disturbed by the
extent to which their traditional cultures are being invaded by
Western -- that is, largely U.S. -- popular culture (e.g., fast food,
Hollywood movies, blue jeans). More than one seer has forecast a
coming clash of civilizations Note 37 arising not because countries
will take issue with the Madonna but, for example, because her
present-day namesake is seen as assaulting a traditional value
structure. The trip from fear and loathing to accusations of direct
cultural attack is short.
Is cultural warfare a creature of the new information technologies?
Hardly. The outcome of the cultural struggle between the Hebrews
and the Syriac Greeks is celebrated every December, and fears of
U.S. cultural imperialism certainly predate network television.
Cultural challenges are facilitated by such instrumentalities as the
multinational corporation (which require advanced communications
to function), the Internet, satellite video feeds, or, most recently,
DBS.
Is cultural warfare a form of war (that is, again, policy by other
means)? Not as seen from Peoria. First, the entire concept of
national culture simply remains alien to most Americans, bred, as
they are, to the idea that this nation is defined by norms of political
and social behavior, rather than by cultural habits. The U.S.
Constitution (with antecedents in English common law) may be the
best single expression of this socio-political behavior. Americans
tend to be impatient with the whole notion of culture, unlike the
French, who, at least to American eyes, imbue their language, arts,
and cooking with heavy national responsibility. Steeped in national
myths of pioneer and immigrant, Americans readily defend the right
to pick and choose -- or invent -- cultural choices rather than settle
for one set of them. If the Japanese, say, wish to try to sell
Americans on calligraphy, family bathing, daikan, or karaoke here,
they are as welcome as anyone else is to try.
Cultural warfare is something the United States is more likely to do
to others. Cultural products are one of the only categories in which
the United States enjoys a consistent export surplus. When the
French or Canadians complain about U.S. cultural exports to their
countries, the United States sees those complaints as threats to
world trade and refuses to treat such cultural concerns as
legitimate. Yet U.S. policy wants to see U.S. political culture (e.g.,
majority rule, minority rights) exported and adopted overseas; trade
rules aside, policy is completely and properly silent about other
cultural influences.
Chapter 7
Hacker Warfare
Winn Schwartau, Note 38 among others, uses the term information
warfare to refer almost exclusively to attacks on computer
networks. In contrast to physical combat, these attacks are specific
to properties of the particular system because the attacks exploit
knowable holes in the system's security structure. Note 39 In that
sense the system is complicit in its own degradation.
Hacker warfare varies considerably. Attackers can be on site,
although the popular imagination can place them anywhere. The
intent of an attack can range from total paralysis to intermittent
shutdown, random data errors, wholesale theft of information, theft
of services (e.g., unpaid-for telephone calls), illicit systems'
monitoring (and intelligence collection), the injection of false
message traffic, and access to data for the purpose of blackmail.
Among the popular devices are viruses, logic bombs, Trojan horses,
and sniffers. Note 40
The hacker attacks discussed here are attacks on civilian targets
(military hacker attacks come under the rubric of C2 warfare). Note
41 Although attacks on civilian and military targets share some
characteristics of offense and defense, military systems tend to be
more secure than civilian systems, because they are not designed
for public access. Critical systems are often disconnected from all
others -- "air gapped," as it were, by a physical separation between
those system and all others.
From an operational point of view, civilian systems can be attacked
at physical, syntactic, and semantic levels. Here, the focus is on
syntactic attacks, which affect bit movement. Concern for physical
attacks (see above, on C2W) is relatively low Note 42 (although
some big computers on Wall Street can be disabled by going after
the little computers that control their air-conditioning). Semantic
attacks (which affect the meaning of what computers receive from
elsewhere) are covered below, under cyberwarfare.
Hacker warfare can be further differentiated into defensive and
offensive operations. The debate on defensive hacker warfare
concerns the appropriate role for the DoD in safeguarding
nonmilitary computers. The debate on offensive hacker warfare
concerns whether it should take place at all. In contrast to, say,
proponents of tank or submarine warfare, only a few hackers argue
that the best defense against a hacker attack is a hacker attack.
Whether hacker warfare is a useful instrument of policy is a
question that defense analysts and science fiction writers may be
equally well placed to answer. Hacker warfare would, without
doubt, be a new form of conflict, but it raises not only the usual
questions -- is it real, is it war -- but also a third: should the United
States wage it?
Is it Real?
Perhaps emblematic of the new concern about hacker warfare
among defense analysts, in November 1994 the dean of the breed,
Eliot Cohen, mentioned it three times in an analysis of the future
defense posture of the United States Note 43 Incidents of network
penetration by hackers are on the increase, rising faster than the
total population of the Internet. The total cost of silicon fraud is
several billion dollars (although two-thirds of that total consists of
toll-call fraud perpetrated through private branch exchange [PBX]
telephone switches).
It seems excessive, however, to extract a threat to national security
from what, until now, has been largely a high-tech version of car
theft and joy-riding. Even though many computer systems run with
insufficient regard for network security, computer systems can
nevertheless be made secure. They can be (not counting traitors on
the inside), in ways that, say, neither a building nor a tank can be.
To start with the obvious method, a computer system that receives
no input whatsoever from the outside world cannot be broken into.
If the original software is trusted (and the National Security Agency
[NSA] has developed multilayer tests of trustworthiness), the
system is secure (whether the system functions well is a separate
issue). A system of this sort is, of course, of limited value. The real
concern is to allow systems to accept input from outside without at
the same time allowing core operating programs to be
compromised. One way to prevent compromise is to handle all
inputs as data to be parsed (a process in which the computer
decides what to do by analyzing what the message says) rather than
as code to be executed directly. Security then consists of ensuring
that no combination of computer responses to messages can affect a
core operating program, directly or indirectly (almost all randomly
generated data tend to result in error messages when parsed). Note
44
Unfortunately, systems need to accept changes to core operating
programs, all the time. The trick is to draw a tight curtain of
security around the few superusers granted the right to initiate
changes. Although they might complain, their access methods could
be tightly controlled (they might, for instance, work only from
particular terminals that were hardwired to the network, which is an
option in Digital's VAX operating system). The rapid speed and
greater bandwidth of today's computers have made ubiquitous use
of encryption and digital signatures possible. A digital signature
establishes a traceable link from input back to the user attempting
to pass rogue data into the system, and although it will not prevent
all tampering (e.g., bugs in the parsing engine), it can eliminate
most avenues of attack on a system. Note 45
Stringent security may make certain innovations in the global
network difficult to implement, such as the practice of
communicating by exchanging software objects (which bind
potentially unsafe executable code to benign data). Systems can
(with work) be designed to retain full functionality in face of
necessary restrictions. Security comes with costs, particularly if
legacy and otherwise reliable operating systems (e.g., Unix) must
be rewritten in order to minimize security holes. If the threat is big
enough, the dollars spent to protect mission-critical national
systems may not seem so large. At present, civilian mission- critical
systems can, for policy purposes, be limited to those that run phone
lines, energy, and other utility systems, transfer funds transfer
networks, and maintain safety systems.
One reason computer security lags is that incidents of breaking in
so far have not been compelling. Note 46 Although many facilities
have been entered through their Internet gateways, the Internet itself
has only once been brought down (by the infamous Morris worm).
The difficulty in extrapolating from the current spate of attacks on
the Internet is that the Internet was designed to trust the kindness of
strangers. If it is to be considered a mission-critical system for
which compromise is a serious problem, it must evolve and will
necessarily become more secure. Note 47
Although the signalling systems that govern the nation's telephones
have permitted hackers to affect service to specific customers, the
system itself has yet to experience a catastrophic failure from
attack. None of the few broad phone outages that have occurred has
been shown to have been caused by anything other than faulty
software. Note 48 No financial system has ever had its basic
integrity become suspect (although intermittent failures occur, such
as NASDAQ's frequent problems). An analogy has been drawn
between the threat of hacking and the security of the nation's rail
system: train tracks, especially unprotected tracks in rural
countryside, are easy to sabotage, and with grimmer results than
network failure, but such incidents are rare.
Although important computer systems can be secured against
hacker attacks at modest cost in usability, that does not mean that
they will be secured. Increasing and increasingly sophisticated
attempts may be the best guarantor that national computer systems
will be made secure. The worst possibility is that the absence of
important incidents will lull systems administrators into
inattention, allowing some organized group to plot and initiate a
broad, simultaneous, disruptive attack across a variety of critical
systems. The barn door closes but the prize racehorse has been lost.
Are today's hackers doing us a favor? Not everyone thinks so;
Dorothy Denning, of Georgetown University, has argued that
today's volume of random hacking raises the sophistication of
hackers, thus raising the cost of recapturing the desired level of
systems security. Note 49
Is it useful to test systems against hackers the way new software is
tested against computer illiterates? Probably. Much of hacking is
determining the construction of a system -- which rarely is obvious
to the outside user -- that is, finding where the holes are and
pinpointing and exploiting them. Testers could be given the source
code that says how the system works and set the problem of
converting that into the kind of search for holes hackers undertake
to see if they can punch through. If the job of testers is to make
systems foolproof, they can test faster than hackers can hack (but if
it consists of obscuring the faults, their thorough knowledge of the
system prevents them from testing how well the system can protect
itself through self-obfuscation).
Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of hacker warfare is that by
creating a dense aura of magic around hacking it raises the status of
professional paranoids. One particularly egregious hobgoblin has
whispered that deliberate flaws are planted from overseas in a
popular computer chip or operating system and that the flaws can
disable the world's microcomputer systems just when the United
States will be confounded by an opponent's military challenge.
Getting two such events to coincide would in itself be an
engineering tour de force. Note 50
All told, hacker warfare appears to be a problem that is not a
problem until it is a problem, when it will shortly cease to be a
problem.
Is it war?
Hacker attacks on military information systems can reinforce
conventional military operations as well as any other form of
information warfare. Crucial military systems are supposed to be
designed with sufficient security and redundancy (and sufficient
separateness from the rest of the world) to defeat such attacks. Note
51
Hacker attacks on commercial information systems, precisely
orchestrated, can distract the political leadership from national
security duties. How effective are hacker attacks as warfare? That
is, what power do hacker attacks have to affect the power of the
state to defend its vital interests?
A flurry of hacker attacks can rival terrorist attacks for annoyance
value, and, indeed, can disrupt the lives of more people. Is
annoyance without political content an act of war? Can hacker
attacks force change any more than terrorist attacks do? If so,
repeated terrorist attacks would have to tire the target populace and
erode support for countering those for whom the terrorists work.
Yet hacker warfare depends for effect on specific, thus remediable,
characteristics of the target system. Repeated attacks presume either
a population of doltish systems administrators or increasingly
clever hackers. Can either be counted on? Applying the terrorist
model, again, perhaps hacker attacks could force change by
inducing repressive state countermeasures, which then would
alienate uninvolved citizenry. But hacker warfare is not liable to set
off random repression of undesirables. Although populations may
chafe a bit at computer security measures instituted in the wake of
attacks, such measures are a long way from invading houses and
hauling the usual suspects off to police headquarters.
In its ability to bring a country to its knees, hacker warfare is a pale
shadow of economic warfare, itself of limited value. Suppose that
hackers could shut down all phone service (and, with that, say,
credit card purchases) nationwide for a week. The event would be
disruptive certainly and costly (more so every year), but probably
less disruptive than certain natural events, such as snow, flood, fire,
or earthquake -- indeed, far less so in terms of lost output than a
modest-size recession. Would such a hacker attack prompt the U.S.
public to demand the United States disengage from opposing the
state that perpetrated the countermove, just because of great
inconvenience? Probably not. The United States is more likely to
disengage from an overseas conflict in the face of opponents whose
neighborhoods are judged less important than initially estimated. It
is less likely to withdraw in the face of an opponent whose power
to strike the U.S. economic system suggests why this opponent
must be dealt with harshly. Note 52
Should the United States Wage Hacker Warfare?
The answer depends on whether defensive or offensive hacker
warfare is intended. Defensive hacker warfare is an essential but
everyday task of bolstering network security. Few doubt that
military information systems should be guarded against attack
(unclassified open-logistics system are of particular concern); the
same is true for mission-critical civilian systems, and perhaps even
for the coming national information infrastructure.
Should the government ensure the security of systems critical to the
national economy? On one hand, threatening the economy by
targeting its systems may affect the state. On the other hand, is
systems security a problem whose solution should be socialized
rather than remain private? If a foreign missile hits a refinery that
blows up and damages its neighborhood, would the damage be
refiner's fault? No: the problem has been socialized in that the
United States has a military to protect itself against such attacks. If
a gunman hits a refinery tower and causes a similar explosion,
would that be the refiner's fault? Yes and no: the problem is
partially socialized through public law enforcement. Yet, the
refiner -- as an owner of potentially dangerous equipment -- is
reasonably expected to take precautions (e.g., perimeter fencing,
security guards). If a hacker on the Internet gains access to the
refiner's system and commands a valve to stay open, creating an
explosion and damaging the neighborhood, should the refiner be at
fault? Yes: it should know everything about its information systems
whereas the government may now absolutely nothing. Thus, the
refiner should be responsible for protecting its internal systems and
ensuring that software-generated events (e.g., software bugs) cannot
do catastrophic damage. If a bank's deposit records were destroyed,
do the depositors lose their money? No: a deposit constitutes a
promise made by the bank to replay a loan. The bank's legal
obligations cannot be erased by erasing its silicon memory of these
obligations.
If the government is to protect the security of non military systems,
which agency should take the lead? The NSA clearly has the
greatest expertise, yet in civilian circles it also one of the least
trusted agencies because of the highly classified nature of most of
what it does. Note 53 If and when network security receives more
attention, adherence to minimal standards of security may become a
precondition for federal regulatory approval (e.g., phone system or
power-generation franchises often carry legal obligations for certain
levels of assured service), for federal contract approval (e.g., bank
systems), or for handling certain records (e.g., personal health
data). Care must be taken lest the criteria used to define adequate
security reflect military specifications (MILSPECs) and the array of
threats particular to military systems, rather than criteria more
appropriate to critical civilian networks.
The question of whether to develop a U.S. capability for offensive
hacker warfare echoes arguments attendant on any discussion of
nouvelle weaponry. If the United States forgoes, will others also
forgo? Analogies to atomic weaponry suggest that hacker offensive
warfare is not at all like atomic warfare (where linkages existed
between the level of U.S. and Soviet stockpiles and delivery
systems). Nations against which the United States might be
preparing hacker warfare capabilities are less likely to react to U.S.
capabilities than those against whom the United States might be
preparing nuclear capabilities (in part because hacker warfare
capabilities tend to be developed in and need to be used in great
secrecy). It is also difficult to argue that attacking a society's
computers with malevolent software is especially immoral when
almost all are other targets are acceptable.
The argument against developing a capability for offensive hacker
warfare concerns glass houses and stones. The United States is far
more dependent on computer systems than other nations are. Note
54 The U.S. edge in perpetrating hacker attacks may be narrower
than imagined. Roughly 60 percent of the doctorates granted here
in computer science and security are awarded to citizens of foreign
countries, two-thirds from Islamic countries or India. Analogies to
biological warfare suggest that the United States should stop
contemplating certain types of attacks until it has developed
antidotes for them. It would be quite embarrassing if a virus
intended for another country's computer systems leaked and
contaminated ours.
Defensive hacker warfare presents a fundamental barrier to
offensive hacker warfare. One way to promote the security of U.S.
systems is to develop and distribute tools, tests, and code that ease
the burden of securing civilian systems, and, thus, many
multinational systems. If the tools have merit, potential adversaries
will install them, too. Trap doors could be built into these products,
but pulling that off requires greater cooperation between the
vendors of systems security and the U.S. government Note 55 than
the current debate over the Clipper chip suggests may be possible.
As the world becomes interlinked, most defenses the U.S. might
employ defend not only this country but others as well. Out of the
desire to ensure that U.S. corporations deposits in banks in foreign
countries are secure, the United States cannot help promoting
operational practices that in turn ensure that the deposits of evil
dictators in the same bank are equally secure. Because hacking is
cheap, nations at war might as well see what mischief it can be used
to cause, and those that fall victims to such attacks will then have
only themselves to blame.
Chapter 8
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Economic Information Warfare
The marriage of information warfare and economic warfare can take
two forms: information blockade and information imperialism.
Information Blockade
The effectiveness of an information blockade presumes an era in
which the well-being of societies will be as affected by information
flows as they are today by flows of material supplies. Nations
would strangle others' access to external data (and, to some extent,
their ability to earn currency by exporting data services). Cutting
off access would cripple the economies of those nations, bringing
them to their knees.
For the next few decades at least, the United States is more likely
to perpetrate rather than find itself the victim of information
blockades. It is more likely to be united with the rest of the world
than our rogue opponents would be; not only is it, by far, the best
connected and thus would be the hardest to cut off from
information flows (not to mention the most self-sufficient
economically), it is also a natural exporter of information.
An analysis of information blockades raises the same questions
raised by other forms of information warfare: is it real? is it war?
Could the United States truly blockade information, and, if so,
would that make much difference to the behavior of other nations?
Is it Real?
Information blockades can be understood as a variant on economic
blockades. Cutting off trade in goods can affect the well-being of a
country by disrupting production flows and, in the long run,
eliminating the benefits of foreign trade. An information blockade
works similarly by forcing the target country to work in the dark
and, in the long run, by removing the benefits of information
exchange. It also limits the ability of the blockaded country to
engage in psychological warfare.
To blockade a nation's information flow without blockading its
physical flows is to block only one avenue of commerce, the one
that flows electronically. If physical flows remain intact, printed
(e.g., technical manuals) material could be acquired and even large
databases transferred by CD-ROM. The information blockade
would interrupt real-time interactions and restrict access to very
large information flows (e.g., raw satellite imagery). It would be
both easier and harder than blocking the country's supply of goods.
With less opportunity for physical confrontation (in contrast to,
say, boarding suspect ships at sea), the odds of violence is less. For
the most part, information conduits are countable (by contrast,
opportunistic smugglers can penetrate the entire length of a border).
How well can electronic data flows be cut off? Physical linkages,
such as copper or wire, can be cut off at the border, in the waters,
or at the nearest switch. In World War I, England severed
Germany's cable links to the United States. Terrestrial
radioelectronic connections can be silenced either by silencing the
nearest transmitter (e.g., microwave towers) or by selective
jamming. Space-based communications pose a bigger problem.
Even if all sources uploading to geosynchronous satellites ceased
transmissions (most are institutions, such as phone companies or
media services), some services such as direct broadcast satellite
would be nearly impossible to block. Free channels would just
radiate. The benefits and lack of penalty associated with cracking
by-subscription channels (which may carry tomorrow's digital
business traffic) would probably motivate enough people to try, as
video piracy in the United States shows.
Eliminating person-to-person linkages (e.g., Iridium, Inmarsat)
could be confounded by the efforts of those on the outside whose
communications were cut off. Third parties could establish
accounts on global networks to pay for users inside the country. It
is almost impossible for satellites to know where signals are going
and even harder to determine where they come from. Encryption
would hide who was talking to whom.
Is it War?
Under what circumstances would a nation be vulnerable to
information-economic warfare? Those who would block
information could do so only by controlling a sufficiently large
percentage of information resources and by being themselves
relatively invulnerable to reverse pressure. In this respect, the
United States alone would have a comparative advantage.
Comparisons to economic warfare are apt. The effectiveness of
economic warfare depends on the target country's need for trade (or
on the scale of disruption an unexpected cutoff of trade would
imply). Countries that need food (e.g., the United Kingdom) or raw
materials (e.g., Japan) or that live by selling specific resources (e.g.,
Iraq) are vulnerable to economic warfare. Those that for ideological
or geographical reasons can forgo trade (e.g., the former Soviet
Union) are harder to affect. A reigning article of faith holds that
economic growth requires active participation in the global
economy. Any nation only beginning to integrate its economy with
the rest of the world's would see a blockade more as opportunities
missed than as output lost; either would mean taking a risk.
For an information blockade to have power similar to that of an
economic blockade, the target nation would need to be dependent
on external information flows, although information exchange is
only one component of trade. Note 56 A nation that had lost access
to electronic information exchange could be hindered yet not
prevented from conducting trade. Iraq, for instance, could still sell
oil. Without real-time access to commodity exchanges or the ability
to tap databases on usage patterns, a targeted nation might have
somewhat more difficulty writing the most advantageous contract
for itself -- but that constitutes a far lower loss.
Conversely, dependence could arise more from importing
information, rather than from exporting it. The growth of
computers, communications, and simulation suggests the growing
attractiveness of offering services, especially expert services, over
the net. Both carbon-based and silicon-based consultants could
advise farmers on crop conditions, diagnose failures in complex
machinery or factory systems, navigate the shoals of global
commerce and finance, prepare surgical procedures, even supply the
educational system. Such bandwidth-dependent applications are
especially vulnerable to blockade.
As with many forms of conflict, threats may be more effective than
acts. Nations seeking greater information intercourse (e.g., to
attract industries) would be more sensitive to the risks of untoward
actions to their participation in the info-sphere; but nations that
decide the risk is worth taking might be less likely to come to terms
once information warfare has commenced. After all, societies were
known to function before television.
How dependent on information flows could nations become? Some,
the Philippines and several in Caribbean, are acquiring low-tech
information export sectors (e.g., credit card operations). Would
ambitious countries see their prosperity linked to status as a
competitive base from which to sell goods and services and still
risk provoking an information blockade that could sour potential
investors?
If the threat of information war is present, few countries might
allow themselves to become so vulnerable. Yet, under peaceful
conditions, the prospect of a blockade may seem remote.
Dependence on global information links will increase, and even
leaders with hostile intent may not perceive that such dependence
leaves them vulnerable to retribution if and when the leadership
carries out hostile acts.
Information Imperialism
To believe in information imperialism means believing in modern
day economic imperialism. Thus, trade is war. Nations struggle
with one another to dominate strategic economic industries.
How does information play in this contest? Although it is difficult
in a paragraph to do justice to a complex chain of causality, Note
57 the logic is as follows. Nations specialize in certain industries;
some industries are better than others. The good industries
command high wages and, usually, feature high growth rates. They
tend to be knowledge- intensive; they require and reinforce skills
against which other nations, particularly those with low-wage
workforces, cannot easily compete. Acquiring and maintaining a
position in these industries is a reinforcing process. Consider
Silicon Valley. The advantages of working there include easier
access to customers, suppliers, and to workers sophisticated in
electronics. The constant exchange of information, in particular,
early access to interesting technical questions and information
resources, provides on an edge in coming up with interesting
solutions that, in turn, increases the likelihood that the area may
enjoy a like advantage in the next round of problems. National
policies may reinforce virtuous cycles. Japanese automobile
manufacturers, even U.S. transplants (e.g., Toyota in Georgetown,
Kentucky) have been accused of giving interesting work to their
friends and boring work to others; Japanese vendors are said to
offer their wares to domestic buyers one or two years before the
wares go overseas. U.S. firms have a hard time tapping into these
networks of opportunity, either as suppliers or buyers. Targeted
acquisition policies by governments (e.g., lucrative, research-
intensive defense contracts) can have similar effects promoting a
particular sector.
Is this war? Analogies to kulturkampf may be useful here. The
United States does not export movies or pop fashions with an eye
to subverting other cultures; it is something it does at a comparative
advantage and wishes to extend through markets in goods and
services. The Japanese could argue that, similarly, they do not wish
to place the rest of the world into an inferior and dependent
technological position. They simply want to make enough money to
pay for their imports, and they believe they have a comparative
advantage in certain high-technology manufacturing. Whether
characterizing trade as a country-versus-country competition is
meaningful in an age of multinational corporations remains an open
question. Most large manufacturing corporations Note 58 in the
United States and Europe are rapidly losing national coloration --
and, in any case, they source components globally. Japanese and
other Asian corporations remain noticeably national, but they are
moving in the same direction.
Chapter 9
Cyberwarfare
Of the seven forms of information warfare, cyberwarfare -- a broad
category that includes information terrorism, semantic attacks,
simula-warfare and Gibson-warfare -- is clearly the least tractable
because by far the most fictitious, differing only in degree from
information warfare as a whole. The global information
infrastructure has yet to evolve to the point where any of these
forms of combat is possible; such considerations are akin to
discussions in the Victorian era of what air-to-air combat would be.
And the infrastructure may never evolve to enable such attacks. The
dangers or, better, the pointlessness, of building the infrastructure
described below may be visible well before the opportunity to build
it will present itself.
Information Terrorism
Although terrorism is often understood as the application of
random violence against apparently arbitrary targets, when
terrorism works it does so because it is directed against very
specific targets, often by name. In the early days of the Vietnam
War, the Viet Cong terrorized specific village leaders to coerce
their acquiescence. Done well, threats can be effective, even if
carried out infrequently; targeted officials can be forced to accede
to terrorists and permit their reach to spread. As the term is used
here, information terrorism is a subset of computer hacking, aimed
not at disrupting systems but at exploiting them to attack
individuals.
What would the analogy for information war be to that kind of
terrorism? Note 59 Targeting individuals by attacking their data
files requires certain presuppositions about the environment in
which those individuals exist. Targeted victims must have
potentially revealing files on themselves stored in public or quasi-
public hands (e.g., TRW's credit files) in a society where the
normal use of these files is either legal or benign (otherwise,
sensitive individuals would take pains to leave few data tracks).
Today, files cover health, education, purchases, governmental
interactions (e.g., court appearances), and other data. Some are kept
manually or are computerized but inaccessible to the outside, yet in
time most will reside on networks. Tomorrow, files could include
user-built agents capable of interacting with net-defined services
and therefore containing a reliable summary of the user's likes,
dislikes, and predilections. Note 60
The problem in conducting information terrorism is having to know
what to do with the information collected. Many people, for
instance, might be embarrassed if the information in their collected
datasphere were opened to public view; but that does not
necessarily make them good objects for blackmail. Similarly, the
hassle created by erroneous entries in a person's files might be
significant, but threatening to put them there has only limited
coercive appeal (a person so threatened could seek to limit the
damage by requesting repeated backups of existing data to archival
media along with the demand that all incoming data must be
authenticated).
If information terrorism is to succeed, a more plausible response
than fear of compromise might be anger at the institutions that
permitted files to be mishandled. Before a systematic reign of
computer terror could bring about widespread compromise of
enough powerful individuals it would probably lead to restrictive
(perhaps welcome) rules on the way personal files are handled.
Semantic attack
The difference between a semantic attack and hacker warfare is that
the latter produces random, or even systematic, failures in systems,
and they cease to operate. A system under semantic attack operates
and will be perceived as operating correctly (otherwise the semantic
attack is a failure), but it will generate answers at variance with
reality.
The possibility of a semantic attack presumes certain characteristics
of the information systems. Systems, for instance, may rely on
sensor input to make decisions about the real world (e.g., nuclear
power system that monitors seismic activity). If the sensors can be
fooled, the systems can be tricked (e.g., shutting down in face of a
nonexistent earthquake). Safeguards against failure might lie in,
say, sensors redundant by type and distribution, aided by a wise
distribution of decisionmaking power among humans and
machines.
Future systems may try to learn from their info-sphere. A health
server might poll participating physicians to collect histories, on
the basis of which the server would constantly compute and
recompute the efficacy of drugs and protocols. A semantic attack
on this system would feed the server bad data, perhaps discounting
the efficacy of one nostrum or creating false claims for another.
Similarly, a loan server could monitor the world's financial
transactions for continuing guidelines about which financial
instruments merit trust. If banking server systems work the way
bankers do, a rush of business to a particular institution could
confer legitimacy upon the institution, and if that rush of business
were phony and the institution a Potempkin savings and loan, the
rush of legitimate business, by bytes and wire, could result in a
rapid decrementation of assets by supporting banks. This scenario
is similar to what allowed Penn Square bank in Oklahoma to
buffalo many other banks that should have known better. In
cyberspace, fraud can occur more quickly than human oversight can
detect.
Is a semantic attack a worrying prospect? Few servers like those
just described exist. By the time they will, enough thinking should
have gone on to develop appropriate safeguards, such as digital
signatures, to repel spoofing and enough built-in human oversight
to weed out data that computers accept as real but a human eye
would reject as phony.
Simula-warfare
Real combat is dirty, dull, and, yes, dangerous. Simulated conflict
is none of those. If the fidelity of the simulation is good enough --
and it is improving every year -- the results will be a reasonable
approximation of conflict. Why not dispense with the real thing
and stick to simulated conflict? Put less idealistically, could
fighting a simulated war prove to the enemy that it will lose?
The dissuasive aspect of simulation warfare is an extension, in a
sense, of the tendency to acquire weapons for more demonstration
than for use, the battleship being perhaps a prime example. Had the
United States possessed more atomic weapons during World War
II, it might have chosen to light the first off Tokyo harbor for effect
rather than in Hiroshima for results. The use of single champions
rather than full armies to conduct conflict has both Biblical and
Classical antecedents, even if the practice has now fallen into
disuse. The gap between these practices and simulated conflict,
with both sides agreeing to accept the result, would be a chasm.
Unfortunately, the realities of war and the fantasies of simulation
make poor bedfellows. Environments tailor-made for simulation are
composed of individual elements, each of which can be
characterized by behavior but whose interaction is complex; for this
reason, air tunnels simulate well. In tomorrow's hide-and-seek
conflict, it will be almost impossible to characterize the attributes
of combat. Much of warfare will depend on each side's ability to
fool the other, to learn systematically from what works well and
what poorly, to disseminate the results into doctrine, and, by so
doing, to move up the sophistication of the game notch after notch.
These operations are precisely the ones least amenable to
simulation.
Needless to add, in the unlikely event that both sides own up to the
capability and number of their systems and the strategies by which
these are deployed, would the hiding or finding qualities of these
systems be honestly portrayed? Mutual simulation requires
adversaries to agree on what each side's systems can do. The reader
may be forgiven for wondering whether two sides capable of this
order of trust could be even more capable of resolving disputes
short of war.
The attractiveness of today's simulation technology is its ability to
model the battlefield from the viewpoint of every operator.
Marrying operators and complex platforms in simulation is being
promoted just when operators and their complex platforms are
shuffling off the combat stage. Information systems, and over-the-
horizon weaponry are more and more what war is about; and they
are largely self-simulating systems.
A less ridiculous version of the game -- and one that forgoes
computer simulation -- tests the hiding and finding systems in the
real world but replaces real munitions with virtual ones -- e.g., laser
tag equivalents. Private war games and the National Training
Center do this. That no war in memory has ever been replaced by a
war game casts doubt on whether, despite great advances in
simulation, any future war will be either.
Gibson-warfare
The author confesses to having read William Gibson's Neuromancer
Note 61 and, worse, to having seen the Disney movie "TRON." In
both, heroes and villains are transformed into virtual characters
who inhabit the innards of enormous systems and there duel with
others equally virtual, if less virtuous. What these heroes and
villains are doing inside those systems or, more to the point, why
anyone would wish to construct a network that would permit them
to wage combat there in the first place is never really clear.
Why bring up Gibson's novel and the Disney movie? Because to
judge what otherwise sober analysts choose to include as
information warfare -- such as hacker warfare or esoteric versions
of psychological warfare -- the range of what can be included in its
definition is hardly limited by reality.
The Internet and its imitators have produced virtual equivalents of
the real world's sticks and stones. Women have complained of
virtual stalkers and sexual harassers; flame wars in the global
village are as intense and maybe as violent as the village gossip they
have supplanted; agent technology, coming soon, permits a user to
launch a simulacrum into the net, armed with its master's wants and
needs, to make reservations, acquire goods, hand over assets, and,
with work, to negotiate terms for enforceable contracts. What
conceptual distance separates an agent capable of negotiating terms
from another capable of negotiating concepts, hence, conducting a
discussion? What will prevent an agent from conducting an
argument? Arguments may require the support of allies, perhaps
other agents wandering the net, who may be otherwise engaged in
booking the best Caribbean vacation but who have spare bandwidth
available for engaging in sophomoric colloquy. Allies might then
form on the other side. The face off of allies and adversaries, of
course, equals conflict and perhaps even a disposition of goods and
services that will depend on the outcome. Thus, war, in the guise of
information war, even while the originators of the argument are fast
asleep.
Possible? Actually, yes. Relevant to national security? Not soon.
Chapter 10
Summary
A summary evaluation of the various forms and subforms of warfare
asks: which are real, for which the United States has an advantage,
which are new, and how effective each might be. (i) Which wars are
real and which are theoretical constructs, (which do not yet exist
or, if it did, could stretch the definition of warfare)? Specifically,
which are war as commonly recognized -- a destructive, extralegal
struggle between two forces for control of a state's powers, its
actions, or its assets (e.g., territory)? Real forms of warfare include
everything under C2W, EW, IBW, and psychological operations
against commanders and forces. Arguable forms of warfare include
psychological operations against the national will and culture, as
well as techno- imperialism. Hacker warfare, information
blockades, information terrorism, and semantic attacks are potential
forms of warfare. Finally, simula-warfare and Gibson-warfare are
unlikely in the foreseeable future. (ii) How would the United States
fare against a prototypical sophisticated foe of the future (e.g., a
middle-income country with access to global markets for electronic
equipment and engineering talent)? The United States is powerful
at antiradar and cryptographic aspects of EW, offensive
intelligence-based warfare, psychological warfare against
commanders and forces, and simula- warfare; it has distinct
advantages in kulturkampf and blockading information flows. The
United States is both powerful but vulnerable when it comes to
C2W, defensive intelligence-based warfare, hackerwarfare, techno-
imperialism, and Gibson-warfare. The United States is vulnerable
to psychological warfare against the national will, information
terrorism, and semantic attack on computer networks. (iii) The
following table lays out which of these forms are new in whole or
in part. It also sketches the effectiveness of each form of
information warfare against its likely defenses.
Table 1. Information Warfare -- What's New, and What is Effective
FORM SUBTYPE IS IT NEW? EFFECTIVENESS
C2W Antihead Command systems, New technologies of
rather than dispersion and repli-
commanders, are cation suggest that
the target. tomorrow's command
centers can be pro-
tected.
Antineck Hard wired com- New techniques (e.g.,
munication links redundancy, efficient
matter. error encoding) permit
operations under reduced
bit flows.
IBW The cheaper the The United States will
more can be build the first system
thrown into a of seeking systems, but,
system that stealth aside, pays too
looks for tar- little attention to
gets. hiding.
EW Antiradar Around since Dispersed generators and
WW II. collectors will survive
attack better than
monolithic systems.
Anticomms Around since Spread spectrum, frequency
WW II. hopping, and directional
antennas all suggest
communications will get
through.
Crypto- Digital code New codemaking techno-
graphy making is now nologies (DES, PKE) favor
easy. code makers over code
breakers.
Psycho- Antiwill No. Propoganda must adapt
logical first to CNN, then to
Warfare Me-TV.
Antitroop No. Propaganda techniques
must adapt to DBS and
Me-TV.
Anti No. The basic calculus of
commander deception will still
be difficult.
Kultur- Old history. Clash of civilizations?
kampf
Hacker Yes. All societies are be-
Warfare coming potentially more
vulnerable but good house-
keeping can secure systems.
Economic Economic Yes. Very few countries are yet
Infor- that dependent on high-
mation bandwidth information
Warfare flows.
Techno-Im- Since the Trade and war involve
perialism 1970s. competition, but trade
is not war.
Cyber- Info- Dirty linen The threat may be a good
Warfare Terrorism is dirty reason for tough
linen wheth- privacy laws.
er paper or
computer files.
Semantic Yes. Too soon to tell.
Simula- Approaching If both sides are
warfare virtual civilized enough to
reality. simulate warfare, why would they fight at all?
Gibson- Yes. The stuff of science
warfare fiction.
Chapter 11
Looking for the Elephant
Slicing, dicing, and boiling the various manifestations of
information warfare produces a lumpy stew. Information takes in
everything from gossip to supercomputers. Warfare spans human
activities from by-the-rules competition to to-the-death conflict.
Some forms of warfare use the human mind as the ultimate
battleground; others work just as well even if people go home.
Information warfare, in some guises, almost seems to predate
organized societies; in other guises, it may continue long after
human society has evolved to transcend today's organization
whatsoever.
With the background of the first part of this essay, it seems
reasonable to return to the underlying issue of information as a
medium of conflict. Is information warfare sufficiently coherent to
permit the emergence of information warriors? Does information
dominance have any meaning, and, if it does, is that dominance the
core goal of information warfare or a distraction that either applies
so selectively that it is only one of many possible viewpoints or so
broadly that further discussion is useless?
Naval War Is to Navies as Information War Is to What?
Can information be considered a medium of conflict parallel to
other media? If so, is a separate service needed to house
information warriors, however defined? There is a certain logic, for
instance, to organizing a corps capable of managing the sensor- to-
shooter cycle. Note 62 It could develop and organize the elements
of the system, oversee their emplacement, interpret their
emanations, maintain their integrity, and convey the results
generated to the units that need them. This task would encompass
IBW directly; the defense of the cycle would complement other
information warfare efforts, such as defensive C2 warfare, counter-
EW, and antihacker warfare. If information architectures are similar
across competing militaries, than this corps may have the best feel
for how the other side goes about developing its own sensor-to-
shooter cycle. Conceivably, this corps would contribute to broader
efforts in offensive C2 warfare, EW, and hacker warfare (as
industrial economists helped pick targets of the U.S. strategic
bombing campaign in World War II), but it would not conduct the
war.
As the author can attest, the notion of an information corps falls
short of intuitive obviousness. Even true believers understand that
many forms of information warfare transcend the DoD: from certain
aspects of intelligence collection, to the defense of civilian
information systems, to most psychological warfare, to almost all
economic information warfare, and to who knows what percentage
of cyberwarfare. No DoD corps, regardless of how broadly
constituted, has cognizance of more than perhaps half the territory
of information warfare.
Even within that subset, however, the notion of an information
warfare corps defined in terms of in its medium is problematic.
Corpsmen of all stripes tend to see their primary job as facing off
against their opposites. Tank drivers know that the best weapons to
take on tanks are other tanks: ditto for submariners. Jet drivers may
be last to recognize how few countries believe their own jets can
win air-to-air engagements with U.S. forces Note 63. Denizens of
the U.S. Space Command admit only grudgingly that their role in
life is to help air-breathing commanders; given their druthers, they
would rather conduct dustups with the space systems of other
countries.
Unless an information corps is continually oriented to supplying
(and protecting) information to support operations (a mission that
overshadows the possession of raw firepower in determining
conventional engagements) it may be tempted to orient itself
against its counterparts. How ironic it would be if an information
corps took defeat of the other side's systems as its mission -- just
when such warfare becomes increasingly difficult to pursue,
unproductive of results, and generally irrelevant to outcomes.
Is Information Warfare Possible?
Is information warfare a struggle for control of the information
battlespace? Does information dominance -- a counterpart of, say,
maritime supremacy, air superiority, or territorial control -- make
sense as a goal? A nation claiming maritime superiority
demonstrates its strength when its vessels have unquestioned right
of passage over open oceans and can deny the same to enemy
vessels. Similar claims to air superiority, or air supremacy, arise
when one side can send its warplanes everywhere in the heavens
while the other cannot even guarantee its birds' survival on the
tarmac long enough to launch them.
Information warfare admits of the concept of superiority. One side
in a conflict may have better access to information than the other. It
has more sensors in better places, more powerful collection and
analytical machines, and a more reliable process for turning data
into information and information into decisions. It can rely on the
integrity of command-and-control systems, while the enemy might
have only a probabilistic set of weak links over which its messages
pass. This state of affairs does not mean that one side's systems can
keep the other side from functioning (in contrast to England's
ability to bottle up the German surface fleet after Jutland).
Does the possibility of superiority say anything about supremacy?
Only in some cases. One side's jamming device may be powerful or
agile Note 64 enough to block radioelectronic emissions from the
other side, yet this superiority would be local and may not imply
that its devices can transmit without interference. Because radiation
falls off to the square of distance (to the fourth for reflected radar),
a wide-area superiority translates poorly into local unintelligibility.
Even so, one side might overcome power using such techniques as
nulling, directional antennas, or spread spectrum (hiding a
narrowband signal in a broadband swath). The result might not be
to silence the other side but to reduce its bandwidth to only
essential messages. Note 65 More likely, both sides' bits get
through.
Can psychological warfare be understood as a zero-sum contest
over mind-share? If two messages are opposed to each other, one
side's message may dominate the other's, whose bits are received
but whose messages fade. In practice, debates are not usually
conducted as a direct clash of opposites (crime is down versus
crime is up) but through selective emphasis or deemphasis (crime is
up versus educational scores are up). Given enough conflict,
listeners could resolve the issue by saying they're both lying.
Overarching concepts such as an information warfare corps or
information dominance end up having limited application over the
entire or even a large segment of whatever falls under the rubric of
information warfare. A comparison can be made to logistics
supremacy; clearly one side's trucks do not prevent those of the
other side from getting through. Opposing information systems can
probably each expect to go about their business without
overwhelming or even corrupting the other.
Conclusions
First, almost certainly there is less to information warfare than
meets the eye. Although information systems are becoming more
important, they are also becoming more dispersed and, if prepared,
can easily become redundant (e.g., through duplication,
compression, and error-correction algorithms). Other commercially
employed techniques, such as distributed networking, spread
spectrum, and trellis coding, can ensure the integrity of messages.
The growth of networking systems has created new vulnerabilities,
but they can be managed once they have been taken seriously. A
strategy that strangles the other side by applying pressure on its
information pipe may be self-defeating; if the other side's
bureaucracy is well understood it may be defeated even more easily
by flooding it with more information than it can handle.
Second, information warfare has no business being considered as a
single category of operations. Of the seven types of information
warfare presented here, two -- information blockade and
cyberwarfare -- are notional and a third -- hacker warfare --
although a real activity, is grossly exaggerated as an element of war
viewed as policy by other means. Disregarding these as premature
forms of information warfare, and associating EW techniques with
whatever ends they support (e.g., C2W, IBW), three forms remain:
C2W, IBW, and psychological operations, each of which can stand
as a separate discipline. As it so happens, command-and- control
systems are vulnerable because they tend to be centralized, while
IBW systems are vulnerable because they rely on communications
to unify a decentralized sensor architecture. C2W and IBW are
linked in that EW techniques can be used against both command
and intelligence systems.
Third, most of what U.S. forces can usefully do in information
warfare will be defensive, rather than offensive. Much that is
labelled information warfare is simply not doable -- at least under
rules of engagement the United States will likely observe for the
foreseeable future. Information systems are more important to U.S.
forces than they are likely to be to opposing forces; what the
United States might do in offensive operations is limited by the
restrictive rules of engagement it operates under; and because the
United States's open information systems are by their nature more
likely to be understood than systems of other countries.
Information Warfare and Information Architecture
One concept that recurs in almost all forms of information warfare -
- and thus offers a unifying subtext -- is that the details of a
system's architecture determine the effects of attacks on it -- far
more than details, of say, a city's architecture determines the effects
of its being bombed.
Following Sun Tzu, the side that understands its enemy better is
better prepared for conflict. Understanding the enemy's culture and
the ways in which its society uses information remain important.
These days, grasping the way the enemy uses information systems -
- notably, communications networks, databases, and, someday,
systematic knowledge algorithms (e.g., neural nets) -- is equally
important.
At the core physical level, architecture incorporates sensors and
emitters and their power, acuity, availability, and reliability. At the
network level, architecture encompasses the interconnection of
those elements: do they feed into the core processor directly, are
they filtered through particular systems (algorithmic or human or
some combination) or intermediate nodes (e.g., whether a field
processor extracts semantic information and passes it along or just
filters bits). At a higher level are the integrity systems: encoding
and encryption, message prioritization (e.g., filtering systems to
replace what hierarchies used to do; useful for heavy EW
environments), access (who can see what), digital signatures (to
ensure that a sensor's readings come from a sensor or that
commands come from a valid source), and redundancy (at the levels
of bytes and semantics).
Architecture speaks to the way bits are transformed into
information. A commander in one headquarters may pay attention
to little else but the three top aides (who apply intuition to what
they hear from lower echelons). The commander in another may
insist on a large group of analysts who look examine raw data, the
relative influence of each analyst varying with the commander's
estimate of their ability and with the correlation between the
analysis and reality. Yet a third commander may reserve looking at
slightly massaged bit streams for himself; analysts at this
headquarters may suggest interpretations, but the analysis would
get its due only if it is both out of the box but within the ballpark.
Clearly, each commander has a different decisionmaking style, and
a campaign of C2 warfare would have very different effects on each
command apparatus.
Architecture links information to decision: how readings are
interpreted, what readings are correlated to one another, what
constitutes recognition, where boundaries are set to eliminate false
positives and false negatives, and under what circumstances sensor
bit streams are given higher relative priority. Are data from
heterogeneous streams melded to influence decisions or to support
them after the fact? The sensor-to-shooter complexes of tomorrow
are but one channel; other channels include political direction,
rules of engagement, and the status of one's own forces.
Information warfare waged without regard for the architecture of
decisionmaking is no better than a shot in the dark. U.S. forces in
the Gulf exploited a long period of preparation doing figuring out
how Iraq's leadership was thinking: extracting from Soviet doctrine
and from recent Iraqi history (e.g., the tenets of Baath ideology,
lessons from the war against Iran), listening to intercepted
messages, exploring Soviet equipment, perhaps even feinting to test
Iraqi systems. By 17 January allied forces had a fairly good feel for
the way Iraq used information.
Architectural issues pervade civilian systems under attack from
tomorrow's hackers. Most issues of access and security are
essentially questions of who the system will let talk to it. How are
messages and messengers are linked -- for example, by digital
signature (proposed for electronic commerce) or telltale threads
Note 66 (proposed for intellectual property protection)? Issues of
whether others can feed the system executable code or parsable text
are questions of what the system can absorb without rejecting.
Unerasable archiving schemes are connections between the possibly
corrupted present state of a system and its past, presumably
uncorrupted state. To say that a system is hackable because it is
physically open is scarcely to offer an adequate description of a
system with complex and often correctly thought-out architectures.
Psychological warfare must correspond to media architectures, in
multiple dimensions, if it is to have an effect. The first issue is the
seemingly simple one of how to inject bit streams into the media
mesh of another country: directly (e.g., through DBS), indirectly
(e.g., through CNN), or reflection (e.g., through media reaction to
particular events). Is the target population "pre- media" (e.g., when
information mainly is word of mouth), mass media (e.g., one or, at
most, only a few outlets), or "post-media" (e.g., five hundred
channels or even Me-TV)? How do most people treat information --
as gospel, as advertising claims, as reliable indications of the
opposite view (e.g., popular reaction to Soviet newscasts)? How do
official news sources respond to anomalous information -- ignore
it, flood it, refute it, suppress it? In this example, architecture has
both a simple technical component and a more complex cultural
one.
The dependence of information warfare on the other side's
architecture suggests that its effectiveness is only as good as its
intelligence on that architecture. To conduct C2W requires,
minimally, knowledge of who talks to whom about what using
which systems wired how. Equally necessary is a feel for the way
command systems operate under stress or in degraded mode. To say
that this information is difficult to collect (let alone verify) is an
understatement. With the Cold War over, the number of countries
needing to be mapped is larger and the resources to do it smaller
than while the Cold War raged. Note 67 In contrast to the forty
plus years the United States spent studying the Soviet Union, new
enemies now can arise in weeks. Yet, most potential enemies of the
United States have acquired information systems from Western
firms, a source of intelligence that was not available about the
Soviets. If the knowledge required to conduct and assess attacks on
the other side's command systems is sufficiently below what the
United States has or can get, resources devoted to such attacks may
be wasted.
Now, consider that foreign defense systems designed to
interoperate with U.S. IBW collection systems will be easier for the
United States to understand should the tides of friendship ebb. The
international assimilation of computers and communications
through the global information infrastructure is giving rise to
information systems that respond to a variety of requests and
generate a variety of answers (e.g., airline reservations systems,
environmental monitoring systems, interbank fund transfers) -- and
perform in relatively understandable ways. This situation leads to
several conclusions.
First, to know the other side's systems in wartime, it may be enough
to know them in peacetime. Is it too much to expect that other
people's peacetime systems will be influenced partly by their need
to interconnect with U.S. systems during years when they and the
U.S. enjoy mutual comity?
Second, little will help the United States to know the other side's
architecture in peacetime better than helping to shape it. Other
nations' systems are strongly influenced by the extent to which their
architectures are subsystems of those of international systems,
(hardware, software, content, and systems integration).
Third, the shrewdest U.S. national security strategy may be
expressed through support for the development of a global
information infrastructure. Favorable pricing policies, accessible
software and technology, and mutually accepted standards offer one
method. Common networks help; so, too, does global availability
of services both for data dissemination, and for intelligent
dataprocessing. Sensors and other space information systems for
which common interfaces are available, and global access promote
a shared visibility of the earth. Public key infrastructures and
interlinked ambient monitoring systems can assist information
security. The exact architecture of such emerging information
systems need not be detailed immediately, but its most important
feature -- a global system that is an extension of the U.S. system --
remains.
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