Cyberwar: The Next Threat to National Security & What to Do About It

by Richard A. Clarke

The most difficult part of finishing the war usually turned out to be finding who was still alive and in control of the military on the other side. What survivor was in command of Soviet forces, and how do we talk to him without either of us revealing our hidden locations? Part of the problem that the game controllers deviously planned for us sometimes was that the guy with whom we were negotiating war termination did not actually have control over some element of the surviving Soviet force, for instance, their nuclear missile submarines. What we learned from these unpleasant experiences was that if we eliminate the opponent’s command and control system, then he has no way to tell his forces to stop fighting. Isolated local commanders, cut off from communications with higher echelons, or not recognizing the authority of the surviving successor, made their own decisions, and often it was to keep fighting. It was the nuclear war equivalent of those lone Japanese fighters who kept turning up on remote Pacific isles in the 1950s, unaware that the Emperor had years before ordered them to surrender.