Directorate of Advanced Concepts, Technologies,
and Information Strategies (ACTIS)
The Directorate of Advanced Concepts, Technologies, and
Information Strategies (ACTIS), at the Institute for National
Strategic Studies of the National Defense University, focuses
on the future composition and employment of instruments of
national power by Departments, Agencies, and organizations
that comprise the national security establishment. ACTIS is
responsible for developing an understanding of the mission
challenges that the United States will face and the technological
capabilities that will be available to meet these challenges.
ACTIS consists of the Center for Advanced Concepts and
Technology (ACT) and the School for Information Warfare
and Strategy.
Center for Advanced Concepts
and Technology (ACT)
ACT identifies and develops approaches to critical operational
problems of command and control. The Center pursues a
broad program of basic research in command and control
theory, doctrine, and use of emerging technology. It also
develops new concepts for command and control in joint,
combined, and coalition operations other than war. Additionally,
the Center promotes the study of command and control
at all service schools. To complement research, the Center
provides a clearinghouse and archive for command and
control research, publishes books and monographs, and
sponsors workshops and symposia.
What Is
Information
Warfare?
Martin C. Libicki
THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED
A€TJCOMMAND CONCEPTS AND
August 1995
Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology
Institute for National Strategic Studies
NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY
^CQTJAIOT INSPECTED 4
NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY
♦ President: Lieutenant General Ervin J. Rokke, USAF
♦ Vice President: Ambassador William G. Walker
INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES
♦ Director: Dr. Hans A. Binnendijk
DIRECTORATE OF ADVANCED CONCEPTS, TECHNOLOGIES
AND INFORMATION STRATEGIES (ACTIS)
♦ Director: Dr. David S. Alberts
CENTER FOR ADVANCED CONCEPTS AND TECHNOLOGY
♦ Director: Captain William H. Round, USN
♦ Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC 20319-6000
♦ Phone: (202) 287-9310 ♦ Facsimile: (202) 287-9239
Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations, expressed or implied, are those
of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the National
Defense University, the Department ofDefense, or any other U.S. Government
agency. Clearedfor public release; distribution unlimited.
Portions of this publication may be quoted or reprinted without further
permission, with credit to the Institute for National Strategic Studies,
Washington, DC. Courtesy copies of reviews would be appreciated.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
What is Information Warfare / Martin C. Libicki
1. Information Warfare. I. Title
U 163.L53 1995
355.3'43-dc20 95-32983
CIP
First Printing, October 1995
Second Printing, March 1996
Third Printing, September 1996
For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office
Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP
Washington, DC 20402-9328 • Phone: (202) 512-1800
Contents
Acknowledgments . . . vii
Acronyms viii
Preface ix
1 Is There an Elephant? 1
2 Seven Forms in Search of a Function ..... 7
3 Command-and-Control Warfare 9
Antihead 10
Antineck 13
To what effect? . 15
4 Intelligence-Based Warfare (IBW) 19
Offensive IBW 19
Defensive IBW 23
5 Electronic Warfare (EW) 27
Antiradar 28
Anticommunications 29
Cryptography 31
6 Psychological Warfare 35
Counter-will 35
Counterforces 39
Counter-commander 41
Kulturkampf 45
7 Hacker Warfare 49
Is it real? 52
Is it war? 58
Should the United States wage hacker
warfare? „ 61
8 Economic Information Warfare 67
Information blockade 67
Is it real? 68
Is it war? 59
Information imperialism . 72
9 Cyberwarfare 75
Information terrorism 75
Semantic attack 77
Simula-warfare 79
Gibson-warfare 81
10 Summary 85
11 Looking for the Elephant 91
Naval War Is to Navies as Information War Is
to What? 91
Is Information Dominance Possible? 94
Conclusions 95
Information Warfare and Information
Architecture 98
TABLES
1 Information Warfare—What's New, and What
is Effective 87
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the very kind
help of the following people who provided information
for or reviewed and commented on previous versions
of this report:
David Alberts
John Alger
Kenneth Allard
Dorothy Denning
Seymour Goodman
Delonnie Henry
Stuart Johnson
Brian McCue
Anthony Oettinger
Capt. Richard O'Neill
Ellin Sarot
Marilyn Z. Wellons
Acronyms
AWAC
C2W
CD-ROM
CDMA
CIA
CNN
DBS
DES
DoD
EIW
EW
FLIR
GPS
HARM
IBW
IR
JCS
JSTARS
MILSPEC
MOP
NASDAQ
NIST
NSA
OODA
PBX
PC
PKE
SAR
SOF
STU
TS
UAV
airborne warning and control system
command and control warfare
compact disk/read-only memory
code division multiple access
Central Intelligence Agency
Cable News Network
direct broadcast satellite
Data Encryption Standard
Department of Defense
economic information warfare
electronic warfare
forward-looking infrared
Global Positioning System
High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile
information based warfare
infrared
Joint Chiefs of Staff
Joint Surveillance, Targeting, and Radar
System
military specification
Memorandum of Policy
National Association of Securities Dealers
Access Quotation
National Institute of Standards and
Technology
National Security Agency
observe orient decide act
private branch exchange
personal computer
public key encryption
synthetic aperture radar
special operations forces
secure telephone unit
top secret
unmanned aerial vehicle
Martin C. Libicki ix
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 indisputable 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.
x WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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:
(0 command-and-control warfare (which strikes
against the enemy's head and neck), (if)
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
Martin C. Libicki xi
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.
Is There An Elephant?
In the fall of 1994,1 was privileged to observe an
Information Warfare game sponsored by the Office of
the Secretary of Defense. Red, a middle-sized, middleincome
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
2 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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-War1
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
'Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War (Boston: Little Brown,
Martin C. Libicki 3
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
informationwarfare 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
4 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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
Martin C. Libicki 5
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).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.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
2
Late in 1994, the two directorates negotiated a formal division of labor. How
well that division holds up as the roles and missions of information warfare
come up for decision remains to be seen.
'Readers are also pointed to Julie Ryan, "Offensive Information War," a
paper presented to the Naval Studies Board of the National Research Council
(Washington, DC), 8 Sept. 1993.
6 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.
2 Seven Forms in Search of a
Function
Seven forms of information warfare vie for the
position of central metaphor: command-and-control
warfare (C2W), intelligence-based warfare (IBW),
electronic warfare (EW), psychological warfare
(PSYW), hacker warfare, economic information
warfare (EIW), and cyberwarfare.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."5
Branscomb could
have added, stolen and protected as well. This essay
examines information warfare as the struggle over
"Seminal works plural on information warfare include: George Stein,
"Information War-Cyberwar-Netwar," Air War College, 1993, and John
Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, "Cyberwar Is Coming!" Comparative Strategy,
12 (1993), 141-165. The definitions used there differ from those used here.
Netwar for those authors is akin to psychological warfare against both national
will and national culture; cyberWar is command-and-control warfare, which
broadly includes psychological operations against opposing commanders. The
title used by Arquilla and Ronfeldt suggests that cyberwar lies directly in the
future, yet Genghis Khan's use of psychological warfare gets a tenth of the
article as does the North Vietnam's use. Coming, as such, must perforce
include Came.
5
Anne Wells Branscomb, Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public
Access (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1994), 1.
8 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.
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.6
Defined in this way, U.S. forces demonstrated mastery
of information warfare in the Gulf by destroying many
6
MOP-30, which is currently being revised, slices and dices information
warfare out to operational units. Limited to military operations, it covers, "the
integrated use of operations security, military deception, psychological
operations, electronic warfare, and physical destruction, mutually supported by
intelligence, to deny information to, influence, degrade or destroy adversary
C2 capabilities while protecting friendly C2 capabilities against such
actions"(2).
Mapped on the schema used here, MOP-30 covers C2W, the
anticommunications aspect ofEW, defensive IBW, and unit-level psychological
operations: "these [PSYOP] forces used in C2W are, in most cases, the same
forces used to conduct other aspects ofwarfare, and unless they represent some
unique capability, will move in the same flow as the units to which they are
organic" (20).
10 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.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.
7
An extended period of material deprivation coupled with continuous carpet
bombing prior to the ground offensive has also been cited.
MartinC. Libicki 11
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
12 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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-ofsight
relays away from headquarters, and paper will
yield to the paperless, perhaps optical, society
(someday). Networks can generally be decentralized.8
Comings and goings and congregations that create
valuable targets can be reduced through
videoconferencing and whiteboarding.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).
Physical (weak) and virtual (strong) decentralization are different: physical
decentralization retains a centralized information architecture but protects the
system by dispersing and replicating memory and processing; virtual
decentralization makes subunits capable of operating on their own but uses
coordination with the center to strengthen the quality of their decisions.
"Whiteboarding is a network application that permits what is put on one
person's screen to come up on another's.
Martin C. Libicki 13
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 commandand-control
is disabled, which, again, is old in
14 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
warfare.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
°Part of the Southern strategy in the Civil War was to conduct raids against
railroads and telegraph lines used by Union forces; by 1864, nearly half the
Union strength was devoted to occupation duties and protecting its lines of
communication.
Martin C. Libicki 15
greater redundancy and confounds the enemy's
targeting problems.
Redundancy is an attribute of both developed and
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
16 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.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
"U.S. officers in Vietnam must often have wished fervently (though silently)
that communications lines between them and Saigon were severed, or at least
those from Saigon to Washington.
Martin C. Libicki 17
to fight.12
Decapitating a military may make it less
effective but more troublesome.
Much of what passes for strategy to control
nuclear war13
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
12
It is also possible that the supposed disagreement between Belgrade and the
Bosnian Serbs may have been disinformation designed to reduce the West's
pressure on the Serbian economy.
13
See, for instance, Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear
Forces (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983); Bruce Blair, Strategic Command
and Control (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985); Ashton Carter
etal., ManagingNuclear Operations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution,
1987); or earlier classics such as Thomas Schelling, Nuclear Weapons and
Limited War (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1959) and Herman Kahn,
Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (N.Y.: Praeger, 1965).
18 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
of attack) gets the attacker inside the other side's
OODA14
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 tests15
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.
'"Observe Orient Decide Act.
''Sending a query to a system that is automatically answered.
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
20 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.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
16
See Eliot Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortune (New York: Free
Press, 1990), which argues, among other views, that the U.S. Navy's slowness
during World War II to institute a centralized learning process retarded the
development of proficiency in submarine and antisubmarine operations on the
Atlantic front.
Martin C. Libicki 21
operations; great intelligence allows coherence, which
is a higher level of synchrony.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.
l7
See, for instance, JeffCooper, "Toward a Theory of Coherent Operations,'
SRS Technologies, 30 June 1994.
22 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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); (Hi) 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 ofdeception work against one
or two sensors—smoke works for some, radarreflecting
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
Martin C. Libicki 23
seamless, cue-filter-pinpoint systems. If the Army's
demonstration facilities at Ft. Huachuca are
indicative,18
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).19
18
See Charles A. Robert, "Digital Intelligence Extends Army Force Projection
Power," in Signal, 48, 12 (August 1994), 33-35.
''Giving every soldier the commander's view of the battlefield can create a
major vulnerability. Capturing a soldier and his equipment can give the enemy
the same view. This could nullify, with one stroke, whatever prior advantage
the other side had at information-based warfare. It also would reveal how such
a view was obtained, and thus the capabilities—or even better, the blind
24 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.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.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
spots—of the other side. This creates a major problem. How does one explain
to troops at risk that information on the enemy that, as they see it, may affect
their survival must nevertheless be withheld from them, even though its
, transmission is physically possible, and, indeed, easy? Efforts to control such
information are more likely to be frustrated from within than from without.
20
Although most modern platforms will probably evolve to reduce
observability, cost considerations are likely to relegate stealth to specialized
uses (e.g., deep attack, support to special operations forces), and traditional
forms (e.g., submarines).
2,
In lower density realms—plains, deserts, blue water-a man-made object,
particularly a military one, will stand out as not belonging there, so, to avoid
becoming a target, an object should, instead, resemble the background, rather
than ambient man-made clutter.
Martin C. Libicki 25
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.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
22
As an example, a reasonably detailed (.1 meter resolution) multispectral (8
bits x 8 bands) image of a typical theater of operations (400 kilometers on each
side) generates an image that, uncompressed, takes up a million billion bits of
information. Even with compression and selective intelligent updating, the
bandwidth required to send the same information over the air to a location
behind the lines does not exist in the electromagnetic spectrum.
26 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 them. This is an
old technique in the game of intelligence: IBW inserts
the ethos, tendencies, and practices of intelligence
insistently into the battlefield.23
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 freefire
zones) aside, whether high-tech finders will
necessarily always emerge triumphant over low-tech
hiders remains unclear.
23/!3
As a perhaps apocryphal illustration, although Winston Churchill was said
to know through Britain's Enigma system of codebreaking that the Germans
would bomb Coventry, he decided to abjure countermeasuresthat might reveal
that the British had broken the German codes.
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.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.
24
Consider the close alignment between what was formerly named the
Joint Electronic Warfare Center in San Antonio, Texas, and now the
C2 Warfare Center and the co-located USAF Information Warfare
Command.
28 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
Antiradar.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
Antiradar techniques can be generalized to antisensor techniques
(e.g., the use of flares to confuse IR-guided missiles). The important
characteristic of radar is that it receives reflected, as opposed to
passive, electromagnetic radiation; radar signals can be attacked coming
or going.
Martin C. Libicki 29
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 antiradiationmissiles,
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 ofjammers 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 frequencyhopping,
spread-spectrum, and code-division multiple
access (CDMA) technologies, which are difficult to
jam and intercept. Communications to and from known
30 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
locations (e.g., satellites, UAVs) can use digital
technologies to focus on frontal signals and discard
jamming that comes from the sides. Digital
compressiontechniques 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.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
26
Voice calls have certain patterns in terms of who talks when and
what percentage of the time is filled with blank time (e.g., listening).
Encryption techniques can mask blank time patterns. False emitters can
generate false conversations from random locations.
Martin C. Libicki 31
dispersed weapons.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 standoff
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
27
In a trivial comparison, an F-18, with its pilot, FLIR sensors, and
attached weapons, can link all three with wires or in the pilot's mind
and is therefore far more resistant to jamming.
32 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 codes28
is A*N* (where x is the
key length, A is positive, and N exceeds 1) and the
power required to make the codes is B**"1
(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 signalhiding
techniques such as spread-spectrum and
frequency-hopping, will seal the codebreaker's fate.
For single DES, with its 56-bit key, x = 56. Triple DES is
comparable to an 80-bit key, or x = 80. The formula works differently
on PKE, because the challenge to the code breaker is to factor a
product of two prime numbers rather than guess a correct key.
Although today PKE software can support key lengths of 1,024 bits
(and thus unbreakable in the foreseeable future), PKE is roughly a
thousand times more computationally inefficient than DES and is best
used to pass DES keys back and forth.
Martin C. Libicki 33
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 messagegeneration
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.29
29
If the timing of the message is part of its content (e.g., Global
Positioning System [GPS] timing signals), a system could be fooled
when its original message would be blocked and retransmitted at a
slightly different time—provided the recipient lacked an accurate clock.
Psychological Warfare
Psychological warfare, as used here, encompasses
the use of information against the human mind (rather
than against computer support).30
There are four
categories of psychological warfare: (i) operations
against the national will, (ii) operations against
opposing commanders, (Hi) 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 ofpsychological war against
the national will through 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.
otherwise, every aspect of war might be included, because breaking
the enemy's will is generally the fundamental aim of military operations
(e.g., the Coalition's use of carpet bombing against Iraqi positions prior
to ground operations had an immense and perhaps decisive
psychological impact).
36 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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
Mogadishu 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.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
Aideed's ingenious use of tom-toms, satellite terminals, and radio
transmissions that bounced off city walls and so were difficult to
geolocate has been cited as an indication that he understood other
aspects of information warfare.
Martin C. Libicki 37
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, or 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 deCNNization
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.
38 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
Given CNN, the arrival of DBS, and the
possibilities ofmicrobroadcasting 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
Martin C. Libicki 39
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 ofpublic 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
40 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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,
Martin C. Libicki 41
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
42 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.
Because unfavorable events always offer the
possibility of unhinging the commander32
introducing
them deliberately may be a good tool. How possible
is it to 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.33
In a World War II-ish
metaphor, a direct tank assault may have a higher
Masteipieces of the military art, according to Winston Churchill
contain "an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch'
which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten" (77H? World Crisis
1915 [London, 1923], 21).
"Although unexpected success can be disorienting, it is easier on the
ego and unlikely to induce a disturbing evaluation of one's
competence (few people dwell on an inability to forecast their
triumphs). The unexpectedly successful are also unlikely to be forced
into subsequent decisions.
Martin C. Libicki 43
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 is an important part
of information warfare34
. Historically, such deception
has worked best when one side has a good idea of
what the other side will and will not do.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
^See defensive intelligence-based warfare for mention of deception at
the tactical level.
35
Thanks to George Kraus (Science Applications International
Corporation) and Allen Carley (CIA) for suggesting this line of
argument.
44 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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
Martin C. Libicki 45
increasingly ubiquitous, however, more details must be
correct to achieve deception.36
Kulturkampf. Whether cultural struggle is a form
of psychological warfare is a rich topic, yet many nonWestern
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 civilizations37
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),
36
When cryptography was weak, one method of deception was for one
side to let a message fall into the other side's hands as though as it
were an accident. Now that cryptography is strong, such serendipity is
likely to be met with more suspicion.
37
Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs,
72, 3 (Summer 1993), 22-49.
46 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 sociopolitical
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
Martin C. Libicki 47
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.
Hacker Warfare
Winn Schwartau,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.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
38
Winn Schwartau, Information Warfare (N.Y.: Thunder's Mouth
Press, 1994; not necessarily recommended, but indicative). The
literature on computer crime and security is extensive. Much of what
sells is of the bogeyman variety, but serious works exist, for instance,
one from the Computer Science and Technology Board of the National
Research Council, Computers at Risk (Washington, D.C., National
Academy Press, 1991).
39
Many holes persist because they are concomitants of desirable
features. Passwords, for instance, chosen by users are easier to
remember but they are also easier for hackers to guess.
50 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
purpose of blackmail. Among the popular devices are
viruses, logic bombs, Trojan horses, and sniffers.40
The hacker attacks discussed here are attacks on
civilian targets (military hacker attacks come under the
rubric of C2 warfare).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,
"°A logic bomb is a program that some time after it is inserted
destroys a computer's programs and data. A Trojan horse is a program
taken in by a host computer which is then subject to attack from it. A
sniffer sits on a host network and collects passwords and other similarly
revealing information.
41
According to U.S. News and World Report's Triumph Without
Victory: The Unreported History ofthe Persian GulfWar (N.Y.: Times
Books, New York, 1992). the U.S. was able to hack Iraq's air defense
computers by slipping several cooked electronic microchips into a
French-made computer printer smuggled into Iraq during Desert Shield
(224-225). The chips contained a virus that disabled computer systems
by making it difficult to open a "window" on the computer screen
without losing data. Because a peripheral device is rarely the site of a
virus, it was a good entry point for insertion. Unfortunately for an
otherwise amusing tall tale, a printer is rarely checked for a virus
because it is designed to send control codes (e.g., "printer out of
paper"), not operational codes, back to the computer; an attempt to
send bits running code would be treated by the printer as erroneous or
irrelevant to printer control codes. Had this incident been a good hack
as the tale suggests, the United States might have wanted to do it again,
so why would anyone talk about it?
Martin C. Libicki 51
by a physical separation between those systems 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 low42
(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.
42
Schwartau discusses "bit flipping," the use of microwave beams as
a method to attack computers so that they generate random errors but
in a work characterized by anecdotes none is offered on this subject.
52 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.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 most of that total consists of toll-call fraud
perpetrated through private branch exchange [PBX]
telephone switches).
43
Eliot Cohen, "What to Do about National Defense," Commentary,
98, 5 (November 1994), 21-32. Cohen argues that "the networking of
military organizations by electronic communications will...create new
opportunities for warfare by...computer worms and viruses..." (23). He
adds that "Future tools of information warfare will include satellite
television broadcasts, the disruption of financial systems, the forging
of all kinds of electronic messages, and the corruption of databases"
(31), and goes on in the next paragraph: "Elite command units worry
about their members—trained in the black arts ofbreaking and entering,
not to mention other, far nastier, criminal skills—going bad. It has
rarely happened, in part thanks to successful screening and training; but
as the military breeds more information warriors, one wonders if such
screening will continue to be effective. The temptations of computer
hacking are far wider and stronger (among other things, it is much less
violent and can be far more lucrative) than, say, assassination for pay."
See also Peter Schwartz's interview with Andrew Marshall in Wired,
3, 4 (March 1995), 138.
Martin C. Libicki 53
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
54 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
generated data tend to result in error messages when
parsed).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.45
"One of the more outrageous fallacies to have garnered serious
research dollars was the concept that U.S. forces could somehow
broadcast viruses into enemy computers. It might be possible if the
computer systems ofthe opposition were designed to accept over-the-air
submissions of executable code, but who would design a system to do
that?
45
In theory, a communications system can be jammed—rendered
inoperable by having its nodes flooded with meaningless messages that
prevent meaningful traffic from getting through. In practice, jamming
requires knowing the precise architecture and capacity of the system
nodes and links. Straightforward jamming is difficult to accomplish
without leaving a fat bit-stream trail pointing back to the perpetrator.
Martin C. Libicki 55
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.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
Some networks can be rendered inoperative by "alert storms," in which
a glitch in the system causes the network nodes to send out alert
messages that slow the system and thus make it generate yet more alert
messages. Attacking a system this way, though, requires perhaps a
better knowledge of the system than its designers had.
46
Computer security experts whisper darkly that banks have buried
large losses due to computer fraud but have, of course, kept silent on
the subject.
56 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.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.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
471.l7
In an important exception to that generalization, the Internet has
become a conduit for a large chunk of the DoD's nonsensitive but, in
bulk form, essential logistics traffic.
48
The January 1991 incident, during which phone service in the
northeast United States was crippled, was traced to a specific piece of
software from one vendor.
Martin C. Libicki 57
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.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.
With that they could look for the kind of holes that
hackers need to find before they know if they can
punch through. If the testers's job is to make systems
foolproof, they can test faster than hackers can hack
(but if it consists of obscuring faults, the thorough
knowledge of the system prevents them from testing
"'Conversation with author at NIST, 9 March 1994.
58 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.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
50
More plausibly, a component in a military item meant for field use
may, on receiving a signal at a given frequency, either die or go crazy.
Similarly, equipment tied to networks may have trap doors available to
the original vendor. Both situations are more plausible security faults
than poisoned chips in commercial use.
Martin C. Libicki 59
separateness from the rest of the world) to defeat such
attacks.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
51
Military systems vary, of course, in security regimes—most are
office automation systems. A recent red team test suggests that a
moderately skilled hacker could assume superuser status on a
surprisingly high percentage of systems used by the DoD. In almost all
of these cases, penetration was not discovered. One reason is that
computer systems administration (hence security) is not a career track
in the military. The Defense Information Security Administration
(DISA) has been given almost $1 billion to lower those percentages.
60 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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
Martin C. Libicki 61
system suggests why this opponent must be dealt with
harshly.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 openlogistics
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 the 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.
"Thus, it might not have been in North Vietnam's interest to hire
hackers to disrupt U.S. systems just when the country was trying to
build support in the U.S. for disengagement of U.S. forces.
62 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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
know 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 nonmilitary
systems, which agency should take the lead?
The NSA clearly has the greatest expertise, yet in
civilian circles it is also one of the least trusted
agencies because of the highly classified nature ofmost
of what it does.53
If and when network security
receives more attention, adherence to minimal
standards of security may become a precondition for
"Another problem is that effective tools of computer security usually
require encryption and digital signatures, best served by PKE, but this
technology poses the greatest threat to NSA's core competence, signals
intelligence.
Martin C. Libicki 63
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.
64 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.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
M
If the United States were to take down Teheran's phone lines
without owning up, who would notice the disruption, given the number
of times those systems ordinarily malfunction?
Martin C. Libicki 65
security and the U.S. government55
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.
"Because computer security experts generally regard hacking as
immoral, most of them would be reluctant to cooperate even with
government hackers; and sensitive customers might want to see the
source code, to assure themselves of the security of a system.
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 selfsufficient
economically), it is also a natural exporter of
information.
An analysis of information blockades raises the
same questions raised by other forms of information
68 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 are less. For the most part,
information conduits are countable (by contrast,
opportunistic smugglers can penetrate the entire length
of a border).
Martin C. Libicki 69
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 bysubscription
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.
70 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 chancing 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
Martin C. Libicki 71
component of trade.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
56
Some information flows (e.g., television, broadcast, telephone
conversation) are also a large part entertainment. Although cutting them
off might hurt morale, it would remove a major distraction from the
war effort. Removing imported entertainment would leave a population
with no alternative to local, hence chauvinistic, sources of culture and
political influence.
72 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.
Martin C. Libicki 73
How does information play in this contest?
Although it is difficult in a paragraph to do justice to
a complex chain of causality,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
one 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
57
See M.C. Libicki, "What Makes Industries Strategic" (Washington,
D.C.: National Defense University, McNair Paper No. 5, November
1989), which explores this logic.
74 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 corporations58
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.
^Important exceptions include steel and military goods.
Cyberwarfare
Of the seven forms of information warfare,
cyberwarfare—a broad category that includes
informationterrorism, 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
76 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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?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.60
^Information Terrorism, a forthcoming book by Paul Strassmann, the
former DoD czar for information systems, presents a broader view of
hacker war than as personally directed attacks.
60/
""An intelligent agent might be used to book flights; it would know
that its owner, for instance, preferred an aisle seat in the back and, for
short connections, would rather rent a car and drive than take a puddle-
jumper.
Martin C. Libicki 77
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.
78 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 infosphere.
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 Potemkin 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 Perm Square
bank in Oklahoma to buffalo many other banks that
Martin C. Libicki 79
should have known better. In cyberspace, fraud can
occur more quickly than human oversight can detect.
Is a semantic attack a worrisome 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
80 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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
Martin C. Libicki 81
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 Neuromancer61
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
61
(N.Y.: Ace Science Fiction, 1984).
82 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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
Martin C. Libicki 83
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.
10 Summary
A summary evaluation of the various forms and
subforms of warfare asks: which are real, for which
does the United States have an advantage, which are
new, and how effective each might be.
(0 Which wars are real and which are theoretical
constructs, (which do not yet exist or, if they 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
86 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 intelligencebased
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, technoimperialism,
and Gibson-warfare. The United States
is vulnerable to psychological warfare against the
national will, information terrorism, and semantic
attack on computer networks.
(«0 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.
Martin C. Libicki 87
Table 1. Information Warfare—What's New, and
What is Effective
FORM SUBTYPE IS IT NEW? EFFECTIVENESS
C2W Antihead Command New technologies of
systems, dispersion and
rather than replication suggest
commanders, that tomorrow's
are the target. command centers
can be protected.
Antineck Communication New techniques
links are now (e.g., redundancy,
proliferated efficient error
across the encoding) permit
spectrum and operations under
landscape. reduced bit flows.
IBW The cheaper The United States
the silicon the will build the first
more can be system of seeking
thrown into a systems, but, stealth
system that aside, pays too little
looks for attention to hiding.
targets.
EW Anti-radar Around since Dispersed generators
WWII. and collectors will
survive attack better
than monolithic
1 systems.
88 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
FORM SUBTYPE IS IT NEW? EFFECTIVENESS
Anti-
commu-
nications
Around since
WWII.
Spread spectrum,
frequency hopping,
and directional
antennas all suggest
communications will
get through.
Crypto-
graphy
Digital code
making is now
easy.
New codemaking
technologies (DES,
PKE) favor code
makers over code
breakers.
Psycho-
logical
Warfare
Anti will No. Propaganda must
adapt first to CNN,
then to Me-TV.
Anti troop No. Propaganda
techniques must
adapt to DBS and
Me-TV
Anti
commander
No. The basic calculus
of deception will
still be difficult.
Kultur-
kampf
Old history. Clash of
civilizations?
Hacker
Warfare
Yes. All societies are
becoming potentially
more vulnerable, but
good housekeeping
can secure systems.
Martin C. Libicki 89
SUBTYPE IS IT NEW? EFFECTIVENESS
Economic
Infor-
mation
Warfare
Economic
Blockade
Yes. Very few countries
are yet that
dependent on high-
bandwidth
information flows.
Techno-
Imperialism
Since the
1970s.
Trade and war
involve competition,
but trade is not war.
Cyber-
Warfare
Info-
Terrorism
Dirty linen is
dirty linen
whether paper
or computer
files.
The threat may be a
good reason for
tough privacy laws.
Semantic Yes. Too soon to tell.
Simula-
warfare
Approaching
virtual reality.
If both sides are
civilized enough to
simulate warfare,
why would they
fight at all?
Gibson-
warfare
Yes. The stuff of science
fiction.
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
92 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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-toshooter
cycle.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
62
See, for instance, Martin C. Libicki and CDR Jim Hazlett "Do We
Need an Information Corps?" in Joint Force Quarterly, 2, 88-97.
Martin C. Libicki 93
warfare, to almost all economic information warfare,
and to who knows what percentage of cyberwarfare.
No DoD corps, regardless of how broadly constituted,
could have 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
engage 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.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
63
Even though potential opponents of the United States are likely to
try almost everything (e.g., ground-to-air systems or target stealth and
hardening) but air-to-air combat to neutralize U.S. air power, the U.S
Air Force's desire to purchase the F-22 for air supremacy persists.
94 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 Dominance 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-andcontrol
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
Martin C. Libicki 95
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 agile64
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 power 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.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
^That is, it can detect and counter the frequency hopping, spread
spectrum, or chirping systems of another side quickly for the same
effect.
^For instance, if 1.2 KHz bandwidth signal (sufficient for an STU-3
digital signal) is spread over a 120 MHz band, then a blind jammer
must be roughly a hundred thousand times as powerful as the original
signal generator (assuming the distances are the same) to do its job.
96 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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
Martin C. Libicki 97
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
98 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 the United States's
open information systems are by their nature more
likely to be understood than systems of other countries.
Information WarfareandInformationArchitecture:
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
Martin C. Libicki 99
(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 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.
100 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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 sensorto-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 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
Martin C. Libicki 101
threads66
(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
^According to this concept, a piece of intellectual property (e.g., a
video) would be altered or salted slightly with pseudo-random bits for
each customer, who may then choose to copy the product illegally for
a friend. If the friend's copy is found, enough bits in the original will
indicate the original (and guilty) party.
102 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
(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.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.
67
Worse, the Services are cutting back on Foreign Area Officers, so
that the cultural context of this wiring may be missing.
Martin C. Libicki 103
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
104 WHAT IS INFORMATION WARFARE?
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.
»U.S. G.P.0.:1996-405-201:40011