By Dr Dan Kuehl, Chairman, Department of Information Operations, Information Resources Management College, National Defense University
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or United States Government.
Although the belligerents had all professed their hope that the conflict would not come, all had prepared for it. While all had seen the value of the new information technologies that were changing the face of global affairs and been exploiting them for strategic benefit, the leadership of Oceana had correctly seen one area in which they possessed a crucial advantage over their potential adversary, Teutonia, and planned accordingly. Based on their analysis of a conflict a decade earlier, in which this key information technology, although even more rudimentary at the time, had provided a critical advantage to one of the belligerents, Oceana’s strategic leadership correctly foresaw that if they could act swiftly they could gain a strategic advantage and exploit the global information environment to mount a strategic perception management campaign and shift global opinion decisively in their favor. This was particularly important concerning the stance of Neutralia, for if their populace and leadership could be convinced to join in Oceana’s cause, victory over Teutonia was certain. And their vision was correct: hours after the formal outbreak of the conflict, Oceana struck. Swiftly seizing control of a critical pathway into the information environment, Oceana not only disabled Tuetonia’s ability to operate in this medium but also began exploiting it for their own purposes, especially in Neutralia. Although the perception management campaign did not cause instant success, it was effective, and over the course of time as the conflict raged, the political and popular mindset and attitudes in Neutralia shifted perceptibly, from strict neutrality to outright hostility towards Teutonia. Once they finally entered the fray on the side of Oceana, Teutonia’s doom was sealed. This scenario sounds like something out of William Gipson (author of Neuromancer) or “Wired” magazine, but it’s not...it’s history. Perhaps it will be to point out that the three protagonists are really Great Britain (Oceana), Germany (Teutonia), and the United States (Neutralia), and that Oceana’s swift strike to seize control of the information medium took place on...August 5, 1914! That was the day that the royal cableship Telconia sortied into the North Sea and severed all five of Germany’s undersea telegraph links with the outside world. After that date, the view that the rest of the world had of The Great War increasingly passed through a lens located in London. This enabled British information warriors to mount a very effective strategic perception management campaign that eventually helped bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies, thus moving from strict neutrality to waging war to ‘make the world safe for democracy.” Thus Oceana—or rather, Great Britain-was waging strategic information warfare.1
What is Information Warfare?
Any effort to define or discuss strategic IW must tread a careful path to avoid falling into the subtle trap in which strategic airpower has been mired for the past several decades, that of defining the concept in terms of a technology or physical entity. For too many years strategic airpower has been viewed in terms of either a technology— nuclear weapons, or long-range bombers—or a physical target— cities or key industries. Even among the practitioners of airpower this erroneous paradigm had a tight grip that on ly in the wake of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 is finally being banished to the dustbin of history. Airpower doctrine is beginning to acknowledge that what defines a use of airpower as strategic is the intended effect.2 The same is true for strategic IW, but this discussion is immediately faced with a clamor of questions which must be addressed before moving forward, chief of which is... what is Information Warfare? A useful starting place is to briefly trace the evolution of the term Information Warfare. The earliest use of the term seems to have originated in the US Department of Defense, in the Office of Net Assessment, where Dr Tom Rona was exploring the relationships among control systems, a field known as cybernetics. Dr Rona described the competition between adversarial control ' systems as “information warfare”, in the sense that control systems can be described as the means for gathering, processing, and disseminating information, processes which can be diagrammed and described with flow and feedback charts of mind-numbing dryness and complexity.3 Not until the publication of a highly-classified DOD Directive, 3600.1, in 1993, however, was there an “official definition” for the term. To add confusion, there were actually several definitions, at differing levels of classification.4 Perhaps not surprisingly, this definition underwent frequent revision as the operational and organizational implications of the concept evolved.
The current definition has been the longest-lived, and has been in effect since the promulgation of the current guidance on Information Warfare—DOD Directive 3600.1—on 9 December 1996. With the pending publication of “Joint Publication 3-13: Joint Doctrine for Information Operations” it seems likely that the official DOD definitions of IW and 10 will remain in effect for some time longer.5 Which is not necessarily a good thing, if one is hoping to find a definition that helps to clarify and explain what might constitute the conduct and intent of IW. However, since one must understand what 10 is in order to move to its less comprehensive building block, IW, they provide a useful starting point:
Information Operations: Actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own information and information systems.
Information Warfare: Information operations conducted during time of crisis or conflict to achieve or promote specific objectives over a specific adversary or adversaries.
If these two definitions throw a less-than-blinding light on IW, let’s try a different approach. Most US Service concepts of IW rest in part on the concept of the “information environment”, and whether it is described as an environment, realm, domain, or whatever, there is a clear sense that information has become some kind of “place” in which crucial operations are conducted. The Army’s pathfinding doctrinal publication, Field Manual 100-6 “Information Operations”, even speaks of a “global information environment [and] battlespace” in which conflict is waged. The latest version of the USAF’s basic doctrinal publication explicitly addresses the need to dominate the information realm, and discusses information superiority as “...the ability to collect, control, exploit, and defend information while denying an adversary the ability to do the same...includes gaining control over the information realm...”6 Using this approach, then, IW can be described as the struggle to control and exploit the information environment. Needless to say, this struggle extends across the conflict spectrum from “peace” to “war” and involves all of the government’s agencies and instruments of power. One appeal of this approach is that if one replaces “information” with “aerospace” or “maritime”, you have defined air and naval warfare, or more appropriate to our purposes, airpower and seapower. Thus information warfare can be described as those activities that governments undertake to control and exploit the information environment via the use of the information component of national power. This immediately raises another question: what is the information component of national power? While it might seem to be just another bit of computer-age terminological fluff, its origins actually predate this decade, resting in the strategies developed by the Reagan Administration in its very real struggle with the former USSR. In 1984 the Reagan Administration issued National Security Decision Directive 130, “US International Information Policy”, which outlined a strategy for employing the use of information and information technology as strategic instruments for shaping fundamental political, economic, military and cultural forces on a long-term basis to affect the global behavior of governments, supragovemmental organizations, and societies to support national security.7 If one refers back to the 1914 example with which this paper opened, one can see that this is hardly a new concept, and clearly governments and leaders have been exploiting the information environment for centuries. Indeed, one could argue that the stone carvings that Assyrian rulers made of conquered peoples and cities being enslaved and pillaged were intended as much to cow and terrify current and potential subjects as to inform archeologists thousands of years later about what hard and cruel folks they were. Regardless of the fact that the information technology being employed was stone and chisel, this was exploitation of the information environment for strategic political objectives.
A New Geostrategic
Context By featuring the example of the Assyrians, of course, we immediately raise the question of what is so new and different about the current state of the “information environment” to warrant all the fuss. The answer is fourfold: cyberspace, digital convergence, global digital omnilinking, and computer control of infrastructures. It is a simple matter to determine one’s receptivity to the changes of the information revolution by observing the reaction to the word “cyberspace.” At the very mention of the word, doubters and skeptics literally grimace and display intellectual and sometimes even physical discomfort, while those at ease with the technologies of the information age nod their heads in acceptance as if someone had said “traffic” or “radio” or any other commonplace term. Almost everyone is familiar with the use of information as a tool, a process, even a weapon, yet while all of these remain applicable, none in isolation goes far enough. This paper argues that the synergistic effects of electronic digital technology with an information-dependent society have made information into a virtual environment, with cyberspace as its physical manifestation. Cyberspace, defined here as that place where electronic systems such as computer networks, telecommunications systems, and devices that exert their influence through or in the electromagnetic spectrum connect and interact, has always existed, but not until mankind invented technologies that operated via the electromagnetic spectrum did it become “visible” and noticed.8 A useful analogy is outer space-it’s always been there, but not until mankind developed technologies that enabled us to extend our affairs into it and use it to affect terrestrial affairs did we fully comprehend that it forms another physical and operational environment beyond the land, sea, and air. Outer space does not have the same physical presence or properties of land or water—you cannot “weigh” it or “measure” it in a useful sense~but it nonetheless exists because we can see the physical results of things that happen there.9 The physical laws and principles that govern and delineate how systems function in these environments are the borders that fix their boundaries.10 Submarines function very well in an environment governed by the laws of hydrodynamics, but they cannot fly; the Space Shuttle works in an environment governed by the laws of orbital mechanics, but it cannot function submerged under the water. All of these environments interact with each other and have synergistic effects, but they are distinct and unique. The same holds true for cyberspace. Those devices and systems that operate in cyberspace function because they were designed to conform to and exploit the laws governing radiated and electronic energy. We can date our use of this environment to the mid-19th Century and the invention of the telegraph, which was the first telecommunication system11 to operate in accordance with the laws of this medium. The next hundred years saw regular and ever-more technologically sophisticated advances in the ability to exploit and develop this medium-undersea telegraph cables, radio, television, microwave relay, even communications satellites-that extended the reach of communications to continental and eventually intercontinental distances, as with the example with which we opened this paper. We have enormously increased the volume of information that we can store, manipulate, and transfer. But it has only been in the past two decades, the closing quarter of the 20th Century, that the fortuitous marriage of these technologies with the microchip has led to attainment of “critical mass” and the emergence of cyberspace as a full fledged environment in which military forces and society in general are just beginning to learn how to operate.
The emergence of cyberspace as an operational environment generates certain requirements that military forces will have to meet to be fully effective, requirements that mirror those of the other environments in which we operate...technology, people, organizations, and doctrine. It should be obvious that as the use of cyberspace depends totally on its technologies, we need to continuously advance and refine those technologies and seek for newer, faster and more comprehensive systems, both hardware and software, for öperating in this medium. We also need to continue to explore the interfaces between this environment and human beings, because unless one assumes that the ultimate cybernetic operator is a machine or “cyborg,” we will need intelligent and highly-trained people to develop the technology, operate the systems, and analyze the environment. Those people and technologies will need to be grouped into organizations that can exploit this new environment in order to exploit the opportunities and protect ourselves from the vulnerabilities that arise.12 As counterintuitive as it may seem, we need doctrine by which to operate and with which our operations in cyberspace can be integrated and synchronized with our plans and activities in the other environments in which we operate. Two additional advances of the information revolution which have transformed the strategic landscape are the increasing capability to transform almost any kind of information into ones and zeroes, in a development known as digital convergence, and the growing internetting of the world’s different telecommunications media in a condition referred to here as global omnilinking. While these developments are distinctly different they are at the same time synergistic and interdependent. Thomas Kuhn suggested in his landmark study of scientific revolutions that the history of technological advancement has not been one of steady discoveries or developments but rather one marked by spikes or sharp advances that flow from extraordinary finds or revelations that yield discontinuous and revolutionary changes.13 Such has been the case with information technology in this century. The changes in communication technologies prior to the middle of this century were relatively linear-telegraph to telephone to radio and so forth. The break point came with the invention of the microchip, because the synergistic advances in information storage, manipulation, and transmission capabilities made possible by digital convergence are being generated at an explosive and nonlinear rate, with no end in sight. These developments have occurred in two areas, the speed of information manipulation/transmission, and the volume of information that can be manipulated/transmitted. The marriage of these attributes with computer-enhanced and controlled telecommunications systems have led to the “omnilinking” of the electronic digital world. These two developments are the fuel for the explosion that has resulted from the application of the microchip to communications technologies to form the new science of telematics- -the marriage of computers and telecommunications. Telematics has created a new environment in which we must learn to operate. In some ways the “information age” is misleading and imprecise, because one can legitimately ask “hasn’t information always been around?” Of course it has, but the technology of the telematic age that enables us to use and exploit cyberspace is new, perhaps less than two decades old. This condition, referred to here as “omnilinking”, is inseparably tied to the emergence of cyberspace as an operational environment. Our machines that function in this environment are like early biplanes compared to the 747 or B-2, and our mastery of this environment is akin to our mastery of the air in the 1920s...like Lindbergh or Mitchell, we’re just learning our way. Even so, the omnilinking of the world is increasing every day, as more and more computer networks and telecommunications systems tie together and pass the lifeblood of today’s economic and political world...information. The degree to which our societal dependence on this environment is growing is startling. Our military forces already depend on it. The Gulf War simply could not have been fought in the way we fought it without precision information for precision weapons, command and control systems that enabled us to operate like a matador around a woozy and half-conscious bull, or satellite communications links that enabled organizations half a world away (NORAD) to monitor Iraqi missile launches and pass targeting information to Patriot batteries to engage the missiles.14 Our microchip-driven information collection and manipulation capabilities are sufficiently advanced, and the links that move the information around so intemetted, that we worry about TV news commentators skewing election results on the west coast by announcing that “analysis of east coast voting trends indicate candidate ‘Z’ has won the election.” The global economy cannot function without the constant supply of digital electronic information...it has become a form of energy or capital, and global business is utterly dependent on telematic systems and capabilities to keep the world’s economy going twenty-four hours a day. Business practices such as “just in time inventory” cannot function without the digital information that fuels it. The “internet” is less a finite place or thing than it is a description of the increasing omnilinking of the world, and thinking of the internet in terms of its useVs, such as “America OnLine” or “CompuServe”, is as shortsighted as describing the aerospace in terms of an airline. While some dismiss this environment and the Internet as merely entertainment or worse, this view ignores the fact that a very large percentage of the information available on TV or in print would fall into the same category. Few, however, would deny the impact of visual media on the American populace’s support of the Vietnam War or the impact of the printed word on democracy and freedom via the “Declaration of Independence” or “Emancipation Proclamation.” What’s different is that the internet and omnilinking make it increasingly possible for that televised image to be seen instantly by an ever increasing percentage of the world’s population, or for that opinion-shaping paper to be sent to tens or even hundreds of millions of people simultaneously and in their own language. Digital convergence, combined with connectivity, adds up to the second major part of the fundamental difference between the information age and the period “BMC”~”Before the Micro Chip”. The final major development, which is shaping the new geostrategic context, is the increasing reliance on computerized systems for the control and operation of key infrastructures in advanced societies. The growing reliance on SCADA systems (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) for the control and functioning of an increasingly large segment of the infrastructures on which societies depend for their economic, social, political, and even military strength is both a boon and a vulnerability for these systems and societies. Whether it be the supply of energy (electricity, oil, gas), the management of transportation (railroads, air traffic control, motor vehicle movement), the transference of digital wealth (electronic funds transfer, digital banking, control of stock exchanges), or the operation of the very telematic media that supports the entire structure, look below the surface of almost any segment of daily life in modem societies and one will find a computer.15 The degree to which this is invisible to the general populace can be illustrated by an incident from real life. In February 1996, Washington DC suffered a relatively typical industrial-age accident—a train wreck. During a snowstorm a commuter train carrying people into the capital collided with a freight train, and in the tragic fire that followed eleven people were killed. The investigations by the news media examined almost every aspect of the accident, including the signaling system that provided instructions to the train operator (who was killed, heroically trying to warn passengers instead of saving himself) via the ubiquitous red and green lights that line railroad tracks all over the world. The news media asked whether the operator saw the signals, whether they were properly placed, and whether they functioned properly. None of the news reports asked whether the signals had been electronically tempered with (they had not been) nor even raised the issue of how the signals were controlled or where those controls were located. Those types of signals are controlled, of course, by SCADA systems, and the computers which control the rail signals for that segment of track on which the accident occurred are located at the operations center for CSX Railways, in Jacksonville, Florida, several hundred miles distant. This is an illustration of how deeply imbedded within modem societies such control systems have become, and how unaware most of us are of their functioning.16 It is the responsibility of governments, however, to not only be aware of such developments but to take actions to mitigate potential disruptions to the effective functioning of systems upon which the society depends. In July 1996 the Clinton Administration issued Executive Order 13010, which directed the formation of a unique commission, the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, or PCCIP, that would bring together senior governmental officials and representatives from those private sector industries and businesses that comprised these key infrastructures into a commission tasked with studying the vulnerability of these infrastructures to disruption. The PCCIP examined a range of infrastructures, grouped into several broad categories. While the commission examined both the physical and cyber threats, they freely acknowledged that their emphasis was on the cyber threat, in part because it is less well understood than physical threats. Their conclusion that the threat is real and growing might seem unsurprising, but reflects nonetheless the growing awareness that our very dependency on computerized control of infrastructures creates an inherent vulnerability. It is this vulnerability that is at the heart of hypothetical scenarios for strategic information warfare in which computer network attacks on critical infrastructures “take down” key segments of those infrastructures and thus generate cascading effects on such systems as transportation, banking, or emergency services. It was the need to respond to this vulnerability that the Clinton Administration issued Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 63 on the 22nd of May this year, establishing a national coordinator for infrastructure protection and creating an organizational structure by which such threats and vulnerabilities could be mitigated. Called for a public sector-private sector partnership that would develop cooperative procedures and organizations to assess the threats and vulnerabilities and create countermeasures, PDD 63 thus stands as a latndmark step in what could be termed strategic defensive information warfare against the threat of what has in some quarters been termed “infrastructural warfare.” However, it will at best provide defensive capabilities in only two of the three possible target sets for information warfare.17
The “3 ‘Wares”
Information warfare can be waged against an extremely diverse group of target sets, and almost the entire DOD has seemingly been engaged in the effort to categorize these targets and their grouping into sets and categories. This effort is both valuable and thought provoking in that it has armed and supplied the intellectual firepower being directed against the problem of exploring what IW is, and although those who are unsettled by the lack of definite answers have sometimes become naysayers regarding IW, this intellectual effort is critical and will continue. One way of looking at the potential set of IW targets is to examine the different elements or components of an information or control system, as described by Dr Tom Rona in the 1970s and outlined in official Department of Defense analyses. These incorporate three distinct elements in any information system: the hardware, the software, and the "wetware".18 The hardware is easily the most visible element as it represents the physical components of the system. Telecommunication structures such as phone lines, fiber optic cables, satellite uplink stations, the satellites themselves, mainframe computers, desk and laptop models, the chips themselves-all these are part of the hardware of an information system. They are the physical means by which we store, manipulate, and transmit information, and are quite obviously an important target in IW, regardless of the means used to affect them. When an F-117 bomber destroyed the Iraqi "AT&T" building19 on the first night of Operation Desert Storm to cut Iraqi communications connections with the outside world, the intent was to gain control of the strategic information environment. The "AT&T Building" is a prime example of a hardware target. The software is the invisible and seemingly non-physical element of an information system; it represents the coded instructions that control the functioning of the hardware. A computer and the myriad microprocessors ("chips") contained within the computer are essentially useless until a program tells it what to do, after which other programs are layered onto the base program. In a simple desktop machine these programs, which we call software, establish the basic functioning of the system, control its word processing and graphics programs-i.e. MS Word and PowerPoint how it handles emails, how it interfaces with the Internet and other computer systems, etc. In more complex systems, such as the SCADA systems that control railroad and other transportation infrastructures, the software is the key element that makes the difference between efficient and cost effective operations and possible disaster. When President Clinton directed the formation of the Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection in July 1996- better known as the PCCIP-it was the potential threat from intrusion and tampering with the coded software that provided the driving force behind the Commission's work. The least well understood target for IW has, conversely, been around the longest-the wetware, or human element. This aspect is almost certainly the most difficult to confidently model or simulate, yet at the strategic level may be the most critical part of the information environment. When one reads ancient history from a military perspective, for example, one is struck by the numerous examples of what modem soldiers would call "psychological operations", or Psyops.20 The teachings of the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu—the “patron saint” of Information Warriorswere infused with the sense that the enemy's mind was the target that possessed the greatest potential payoff.21 Western armies, however, have perhaps for cultural reasons focused on the physical clash of arms as the ultimate arbiter. American training manuals during World War II, for example, proclaimed "battle is the payoff!", and the Western military’s adoption of Clausewitz in the centrality of most war college curricula is additional evidence of our focus on the physical and kinetic means of combat. It is not surprising that in this climate the military perspective on psychological operations was—and perhaps remains—focused on the battlefront and the potential impact on the morale and fighting spirit of the enemy's troops. While this is a vital and valid target for psychological operations, the potential target base is much larger and more diffused throughout society, thus the term "wetware centered" operations. The very word “wetware” itself is new, approximately a decade old, and it is used here to intentionally parallel the hard-and-software terminology to emphasize that in modem information systems the human cortex is as important as cables and code.
Strategic Information Warfare
We have now established some of the key technological and societal developments that are shaping the information age and which provide the key contextual milieu for strategic information warfare (SIW), and we have outlined the three key “target sets”, in a sense, against which SIW can be conducted. The last critical task is to explore what we mean by “strategic” information warfare, an issue that many publications or articles on IW treat only tangentially. Martin Libicki, one of the leading IW analysts, has not written about SIW directly, and has focused instead on attempts to analyze the component activities or actions that make up his conception of IW.22 A team at RAND, summarizing and drawing lessons from their “Day After” IW exercise, conceptualized SIW in terms of the potential risk to high-value national assets made possible by the information revolution. They characterized this activity, in which “nations utilize cyberspace to affect strategic military operations and inflict damage on national information infrastructures”, as strategic information warfare.23 This was perhaps the first serious attempt to explore and conceptualize SIW, and it contains some excellent work. The chapter on “Defining Features”, in particular, is an excellent analysis of the technological and societal changes resulting from the information age. A relatively little-known 1995 study of the internet by a DOD analyst, Charles Swett, provided useful examples of how the new information and communications medium of the internet is being exploited for political purposes.24 Finally, a series of US government studies, such as the previously-cited report of the PCCIP, have focused on the threat of an “electronic pearl harbor” and the potential damage that could be inflicted on national infrastructures. What all of these studies have done is to focus primarily on the means used or the physical assets affected, to the neglect of the intent or objective. In other words, they have made the samemistake that strategic airpower fell victim to, that of trying to develop a concept by describing the instruments instead of the goal. Strategic information warfare is simply the exploitation of the information environment for strategic purposes. The RAND study, for example, discussed at length information actions against “electronic power, money flow, air traffic, oil and gas, and other information dependent items”, and stated that damaging these assets using IW would “inevitably take on a strategic aspect.”25 While this is almost certainly true, it does not get into the critical “why” question, and that is the factor which makes something strategic. To illustrate, let’s use another analogy from airpower. Cargo planes have been delivering things like food and fuel for decades, and they’ve done this at a wide variety of locations, from isolated firebases to entire cities. So what differentiates “tactical” airlift from “strategic” airlift? Answer: the political level of the objective.26 Thus airlifting food to a group of soldiers on an exercise is tactical, but supplying the population of Berlin to achieve the political objective of resisting Soviet domination of Europe was strategic. The same distinction can be made regarding strategic information warfare. The example with which this paper opened was strategic because the ultimate objective of the operation was at the national political level. It becomes immediately apparent that “national political objectives” can have a broader meaning in the information age than the term might have been understood to have a few decades ago, perhaps because our understanding of what groups can be seen to have political objectives has expanded. This is due in part to some of the factors discussed above, particularly digital convergence and global omnilinking. Three years ago (1995), when Ecuador and Peru engaged in a brief skirmish over a disputed segment of their shared border (not strategic to us, perhaps, but certainly so to them) the Ecuadorians made rapid and adroit use of the internet and a series of websites to vociferously make their case to a global audience. This author spoke personally with representatives from both the Peruvian and Ecuadorian embassies in Washington, and was told by both that Ecuadorians gained a significant diplomatic advantage during the dispute. In previous decades the plight of the East Timorese might not have made even the back pages of the global news. Now you type “Timor” into your search field, which yields 11,000+ “hits” that electronically link you to an unbelievable number of resources that examine and propagandize the situation in East Timor from almost any direction imaginable. In all of the above-mentioned example the ultimate objective for the information activities underway has been at the national strategic level, and thus constitutes SIW. The “target category” for these operations has been somebody’s “wetware”: the mindsets, attitudes, and beliefs that shape how human beings make decisions and act on them. The information age has created many new tools and media for influencing and shaping perceptions. The crude propaganda of World War I depicting German troops joyfully murdering Belgian babies has been replaced with extremely sophisticated technical means for shaping perceptions, and by equally sophisticated human tools for understanding what perceptions can be most effectively manipulated. You don’t believe it? Try watching the commercial advertisements during the American “Super Bowl” football championship or its Australian Rules equivalent! The use of radio in the recent (1994) genocide in Rwanda, in which radio broadcasts were a key means to incite entire population groups to ethnic violence and megamurder, was an example of strategic information warfare because it featured the exploitation of the information environment—in this case the radio realm—for national political objectives.27 The critical arena rests in the junctions of the different “target categories”, or where the “three wares” come together. How could an adversary use the hardware of global telecommunications systems to alter content or software, thus leading to an alteration of the target group’s wetware and a strategic result? The intersections of these three elements of the information environment are perhaps the critical nodes or “centers of information gravity” via which one adversary could act against another. These would change depending on the situation or scenario, and would require detailed and difficult analysis in order to prepare a plan for a strategic information operation. It might well require an analysis of first the hardware comprising the telecommunications network to be used, then the coded software, and finally the human analysis to determine how to shape the perceptions (“wetware”) in order to generate the desired political impact. Virtually all of the hypothetical (and rather farfetched) discussions in the “IW press” create scenarios in which national infrastructure elements such as banking or electricity are “taken down”, with serious national impact. While this threat should not be minimized, the question often left unasked is...why were these infrastructures attacked? Has a segment of the national electric grid been attacked in order to degrade the effectiveness of an airbase and thus delay operations from that base? That could be a strategic event, but it might also be of merely tactical impact.
Conclusion
Information warfare is not a fad or a trendy buzz word that defense planners and contractors use to make their presentations and view graphs appear up to date, but rather reflects the growing recognition that the global information environment is atn arena of strategic importance to the safety and security of modem nation states and political groups. The information environment and the evolving form of warfare that seeks to control and exploit that environment— IW—does not relegate the other environments and forms of warfare to the dustbin of history, but they are changed, and those that do not or cannot adapt to these changes—intellectually, organizationally, doctrinally—may have to learn via the harsh mechanism of defeat. Strategic information warfare is one of those changes. As this paper pointed out at its opening, SIW has been going on for at least this entire century, and while it is not solely dependent on technology, the adversary that can best exploit the synergy of technology and human factors has an advantage. As the technologies of the information revolution have expanded, and as the global populace has become more dependent on those technologies ands more adroit in their use, the opportunities for its use—and the vulnerabilities to its use—have expanded apace. Strategic information warfare is here, now, and how we respond is up to us—as a tool with which to meet our national strategic objectives and safeguard our national security, or as a victim to its use by someone more mentally, organizationally and doctrinally agile than we. The choice is ours.
Fodnoter
1 Daniel R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851-1945, (New York, NY: Oxford, 1991), pp. 140-141. Although the US Department of Defense draws a clear distinction between information “warfare” and “operations”, this distinction is lost on most of the world, and this paper will use the terms interchangeably. 2 In Richard T. Reynolds’ eye-opening account of the initial planning for the Gulf War air campaign, Heart of the Storm: The Genesis of the Air Campaign Against Iraq (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1995), pp, he provides an insightful example of this in recounting the initial reaction that many Air Force members had when they first learned of the proposed “strategic” air campaign. For a more scholarly and analytical account of the tactical-strategic dilemma see Edward C. Mann III, Thunder and Lightning: Desert Storm and the Airpower Debates (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1995), p. 15.
3 This author first met Dr Rona and heard his concepts in 1994, during a presentation on 13 June 1994 at the Information Resources Management College, National Defense University, in Washington DC. He defined IW as “...the sequence of actions undertaken by all sides in a conflict to destroy, degrade, and exploit the information systems of their adversaries. Conversely, information warfare also comprises all the actions aimed at protecting information systems against hostile attempts at destruction, degradation and exploitation. Information warfare actions take place in all phases of conflict evolution: peace, crisis, escalation, war, de-escalation and post conflict periods.” Dr. Rona, a gentle man and brilliant analyst, unfortunately passed away in December 1997.
4 This author has vivid memories of the initial classroom meeting of the School of Information Warfare & Strategy’s first class in August 1994, during which the sixteen students reacted with dismay to the plethora of official and unofficial definitions of information warfare. While some argue, with sound logic, that any attempt to formally define IW is premature and counterproductive* others argue with equally sound logic that some degree of consensus is essential, and that unless the different organizations that are involved in the issue have some common language and currency, any attempt to develop and execute DOD and governmental plans and operations are doomed to frustration and failure. While this author agrees that trying to put a “stone tablet on the wall” degree of finality on the terminology of IW is futile because the discipline is still evolving, some kind of terminological commonality is vital, even if it only provides a target at which all the parties can shoot together.
5 One of the reasons for the creation of the term 10 is the visceral dislike and mistrust of the word “war” by many of the agencies and people who are beginning to find that the information age envelops their activities and mission. Thus the creation of a term—10—that points at the larger arena in which information “stuff’ is conducted, but does not tie those operations so visibly to the military.
6 See Field Manual 100-6, “Information Operations”, (US Army Training and Doctrine Command, or TRADOC), dated August 1996; also see Air Force Doctrine Document-1, “Air Force Basic Doctrine”, (USAF Doctrine Center) dated September 1997, pp. 31- 32.
7 See “National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 130, “US International Information Policy” 6 March 1984. The concept described above is based on NSDD 130 but paraphrases it and expands on some of its key components.
8 While it’s impossible to say when the term “cyberspace” was first used, several authors stand out as being among the leaders. William Gibson’s classic work of science fiction, Neuromancer, (NY: Ace, 1984) first raised the concept of humans seamlessly operating within a cybernetic, virtual reality environment, while Nicholas Negroponte’s book Being Digital (NY: Knopf, 1995) is an exploration of the impact of cyberspace on our daily lives. The term itself has only recently come into widespread use. A search of several automated databases, for example, covering the years 1986- 89 and 1986-91 contained only 17 “hits” on the term; the same databases for 1996 contained 754!
9 Of course outer space can be measured in a scientific sense, but not in terms which are useful in a lay sense.
10 The question of where the borders of cyberspace lay is an intriguing one. Michael Benedikt has written perceptively on it in his book Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991), while Anne Wells Branscomb in a recent monograph “Cybercommunities and Cybercommerce: Can We Learn to Cope?” (Harvard University, Program on Information Resources Policy) suggests that the borders of cyberspace are discernible at the interconnection points between segments of the inter let, with network managers and systems administrators acting as the border guards, in a sense.
11 This construct omits communication methods such as signal flags, smoke signals, drums or even heliograph because they did not require manipulation of the electronic environment.
12 This does not mean, however, that those need to be “physical” organizations. The technology makes “virtual” organizations ever more plausible and perhaps in some scenarios even desirable. Four people physically located on the Greenland Icecap, in the Australian Outback, in the Amazon Rainforest, and halfway up Mount Everest will be able to meet in cyberspace, discuss a problem, develop a solution, and monitor the corrective actions via information technologies. Already, totally global voice communication is possible via the satellite-based telephone system Iridium (see their website at www.iridium.com), and within a few years it is planned to have the same capability for heavy bandwidth data transmission; see, for example, the Teledesic plan at www.teledesic.com.
13 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1970)
14 This warning system used Air Force Space Command’s spacebased platforms to note Iraqi Scud missile launches, US Space Command assessed the indications, and Paitriot missile systems operated by US Central and European Commands to engage the Scuds. This system thus crossed several physical boundaries (outer space, several oceans, and cyberspace), national boundaries (the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, at a minimum), and organizational boundaries (one Service major command and at least three joint Unified Commands) all at the speed of light. This example illustrates the capabilities, opportunities, and difficulties of warfare in the information age.
15 Richard S. Berardino, “SCADA and Related Systems: Critical and Vulnerable Elements of Domestic Components of National and Economic Security”; unpublished research paper, in author’s files at NDU.
16 See the Washington Post, 24 February 1996, page 4, for a detailed analysis of the accident.
17 For the PCCIP see the Commission’s report, “Critical Foundations: Protecting America’s Infrastructures”, which at the time of this writing is electronically available via the Commission’s website at www.pccip.gov. For the text of the White Paper announcing PDD 63 see the White House’s website, www.whitehouse.gov. The concept of “infrastructural warfare” has even generated an electronic journal, The Journal of Infrastructural Warfare, at www.iwar.org.
18 This construct sets aside the content of any information transmission, although that content is quite obviously critical. It is the content, for example, that impacts the wetware.
19 At least that was what those of us involved in air campaign planning called it; in actuality it was an Iraqi telecommunications center that had nothing whatever to do with the AT&T corporation.
20 One could certainly argue that when Joshua paraded around the city of Jericho with trumpets blaring he was depending more on the psychological impact of his music rather than its wall-shattering power; see the Old Testament, “Joshua 6: 1-17”.
21 Sun Tzu has enjoyed a renaissance within the American military community in recent years, with the realization that there might be merit in his wise aphorism that "the acme of skill is to subdue the enemy without fighting." The very phrase "military philosopher" would until recent years have seemed to be a complete non sequitur in American military parlance.
22 See especially his monograph, What is Information Warfare? (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1995), in which he uses a reductionist approach to delineate seven activities that comprise IW: command and control warfare; intelligence-based warfare; electronic warfare; psychological warfare; hacker warfare; economic information warfare; and cyberwar. The danger of this approach, in this author’s opinion, is that it misses the gestalt of IW, and the possibility that the whole may be—because of the synergies amongst the parts—much greater than the mere sum of those parts.
23 Roger C. Molander, Andrew S. Riddile, and Peter A. Wilson^ Strategic Information Warfare: a New Face of War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996), pi. See especially Chapter 4, “Defining Characteristics of Strategic Information Warfare”, pp. 15-34. See the RAND website, www.rand.org.
24 Charles Swett, “Strategic Assessment: the Internet” (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, 1995). This paper provided many example of how the Internet is being used politically, and this tr end has intensified in the three+ years since the preparation of the paper.
25 Molander, et al, “Strategic Information Warfare”, p. xiii.
26 There is an excellent discussion of political objectives in a recent and seminal (but still unpublished) dissertation on information warfare; see Gregory J. Rattray, “Strategic Information Warfare: Challenges for the United States” (Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1998).
27 For the importance of radio as a medium for SIW see Kevin J. McNamara, “Reaching Captive Minds with Radio”, Orbis (Vol 36, #1, Winter 1992), pp. 23-40. For details of the use of radio to incite Hutus to massacre tens or hundreds of thousands of Tutsis see “Sounds of Violence”, The New Republic (Vol 211, #8-9, 22 August 1994), p 18; and “Rwanda’s Mass of Murderers”, The Economist (Vol 333, #7887, 29 October 1994), p. 43.
