Cyberwar: Security, Strategy, and Conflict in the Information Age

by Alan D. Campen (Editor), Douglas H. Dearth (Editor), R. Thomas Goodden (Editor)

security internet

296 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1996

Reviews

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first blush it sounds so clear. So non-violent. So intangible. Then you get to thinking about it: Information Warfare.

This was a difficult book to rate, because on the one hand it wasn’t particularly readable, wasn’t well-edited, and didn’t turn out, in retrospect, to have much to say about the future. The writers tended to avoid specifics and mostly say what their clientele in the military and related industries wanted to hear. In general, the articles tended to be right. We were indeed “experiencing fundamental historical change on a global basis”. The change was “not historically unprecedented, but it is significant. In retrospect, the change now occurring in the world will easily rank with… the Reformation and the Renaissance in intellectual, philosophical, cultural, and social terms.”

On the other hand, it was an amazing look at what the future of information warfare looked like in the early to mid-nineties.

Much of the analysis was one-dimensional, or worse. For example, this was a joke, throwaway line:

According to Peter Schwartz, by the year 2001 there will be over 2 billion teenagers in the world, most of them living in Asia and Latin America. Imagine trying to get a telephone call through to someone’s home in Mexico City or Beijing when that happens!

The more astute joke would have been, “imagine how telephones will change when that happens!” Many people reading this review probably don’t even get their joke: that homes used to have a single landline, and that if one person was using the landline, neither the phone nor the home could receive any other telephone calls; if the home had devices that used data, data, also, was blocked for the duration.

This is similar to my complaint about hard science fiction: that too often it is called “hard science fiction” because it assumes that current problems with technology will remain a problem in the future, when in fact the smart money is always on such problems being solved. Like good science fiction, good analysis should focus not on how society will change because of this problem (the classic Malthusian-level analysis) but on how society will change when that problem is overcome.

A more serious failure to take a step further comes later in the same article:

With the destruction or disabling of his command and control capability and the ability to influence the perceptions of his policy elites and population, there is the possibility to work one’s will upon the opponent without necessarily wreaking physical havoc upon the infrastructure and population of one’s enemy.

What if the ability to influence the perceptions of policy elites was separate from the ability to influence the perceptions of the general population? Taking that next step might well have predicted, and vaccinated policymakers against, the kind of influence we’ve seen over how to handle a pandemic, where policy experts seem to be at war with the population.

Many of the writers also lump the news media in with the information revolution.

As the television media have trivialized the news, newspapers also have to seek ways of presenting their information in a lively and exciting way to retain their audience. That has meant not just a narrowing of the focus but a concentration on the trivial, the marginal, and the irrelevant in the search for excitement. In war fighting terms, this means that sound bites have replaced sense.

These are valid complaints, of course, but also nothing new even in 1996. Similarly, even in the eighties when we were using 8-bit computers that could barely talk to themselves, let alone other computers, everyone already knew that computers would eventually take over the information market.

As electronic commerce takes off, the problems could get much worse. We are quickly approaching a time when a substantial portion of the economy will be completely on-line, involving only the sale and purchase of information goods and services.

By 1996, however, it was becoming more obvious that we were, in fact, also quickly approaching a time when even the sale and purchase of physical goods and services would be completely on-line. That’s an important distinction, especially when it comes to public policy. For example, it meant that during the COVID pandemic, most of the things we needed to combat it were only available online—often from the country where the pandemic had arrived from and which thus needed those supplies too.

Even when something specific is mentioned, it’s difficult to tell what it means. Dorothy E. Denning and Peter F. MacDoran propose that for more secure logins we start using something called a “location signature sensor”; they call it unhackable, but the description of what it actually does sounds easily hackable. Searches on the term, however, come up mostly with its listing in an abbreviations site and variations on this article by those authors. It’s possible, of course, that the technique now has a different name and is widely used; it’s also possible it never went anywhere.

Of course, I’m not the market of this collection; it was meant for the decision-makers and other leaders in the military and in the industries that serve the media. While it mostly seemed to speak a similar language to my own, there were occasional bits of jargon that didn’t even make enough sense to translate:

In 2010, the focus of IW [Information Warfare] will be the aggregation and loosing of mega-data to confuse entire information fusion systems. Summations of minuscule stratagems and partially-fused mega-files will unite with false-images and faked reactions to drive correlation and fusion engines toward false results.

I want to either make fun of this for being ridiculously wrong or praise it for its astonishing accuracy, but I have no idea what it’s saying.

There’s an interesting parable about information warfare using the corporate world as an example. Nestle’s takeover of Perrier, was preceded by, and enabled by, various corporations engaging in leaks and lawfare to manipulate Perrier’s stock price.

Chuck de Caro provided similar examples regarding U.S. military power in the nineties. Despite emerging “as the only remaining superpower”, “Desert Storm has become Desert Drizzle… Saddam Hussein, the alleged vanquished, is growing again in stature… A pair of fifth-rate Balkan despots for years thumbed their noses at the U.S. and NATO, while making a mockery of U.N. efforts to preclude continuing acts of genocide… A tenth-rate sub-national tribal leader inflates a bloody tactical defeat and makes it appear to be a U.S. disaster, resulting in the ignominious U.S. withdrawal from Somalia… [and] A military junta in Haiti uses the Somali example, staging a riot and managing to make a U.S. warship… on a U.N. mission turn tail and head home.”

This was blamed on television, “an extremely effective, insidious and dangerous medium for delivery of propaganda.” Global television news “can be used by a foreign power to its advantage.”

Richard Szafranski writes specifically about “Preparing For 2020”. He emphasizes that information attacks can be focused not just on data, but on belief systems:

Since the aim of warfare is to influence adversary behavior by influencing adversary decisions, information warfare actions must be directed against both the adversary’s knowledge systems and belief systems. If an adversary is organized as a coalition of multiple and cooperative centers of gravity, many culturally conditioned belief systems may exist within the coalition. These may be engaged and defeated in detail.

Slightly more specifically, the United States must be prepared for such attacks, too.

The United States should expect that its information systems are vulnerable to attack. It should further expect that attacks, when they come, may come in advance of any formal declaration of hostile intent by an adversary state. When they come, the attacks will be prosecuted against both knowledge systems and belief systems, aimed at influencing leadership choices. The knowledge and beliefs of leaders will be attacked both directly and indirectly. Noncombatants, those upon whom leaders depend for support and action, will be targets. This is what we have to look forward to in 2020 or sooner.

That’s probably the most prophetic of the articles in the book, though it still is lacking in specifics.

The summary by the editors returns to the immediacy of the global media:

For the military—and government generally, the omnipresent and seemingly omniscient global media mean that every decision and action is immediately transparent to national and international scrutiny. The butcher’s bill of the Somme, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele will never again be paid by a democratic power. Even a single military casualty will be the subject of immediate coverage and public scrutiny. The risks will be: hyper-sensitive decision–making and timid military leadership in the face of fickle public emotions.

Which is true, important, and nothing new, even in 1996. As a glimpse into the mindset of the military advisory community, this is a fascinating book. I can’t imagine it has proved particularly useful, however, neither at the time nor in retrospect.

…the ability to dominate in cyberspace involves a dose of theology that is easier to expound upon than to explicate. Control of cyberspace may prove to be a phrase carelessly conceived in ignorance and arrogance.

[J.]

I've only skimmed this book but I wanted to jot this down for future reference:
I strongly like the layout and structure of this collection. The authors used a logical system and within the introduction gave succinct summaries of the articles included. The articles seemed appropriate choices for the sections.