Strategic Arts and Sciences Alliance
The Brand Name of the Media Revolution
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Idiosyntactix Strategic Arts and Sciences Alliance The Brand Name of the Media Revolution |
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DCOM - Chapter 1
DEFENDING CYBERSPACE AND OTHER METAPHORS MARTIN LIBICKI
Introduction
Information warfare, as any casual observer of the Pentagon can attest, remains a hot-button topic in the military community.
Broader claims for it have been toned down,[1] and few now argue that all aspects of warfare are now revealed as information warfare, but an ideology of information warfare has nevertheless wended its way into the heart of defense planning. The Air Force's Cornerstones of Information Warfare, for example, has approached the status of doctrine. The spring 1996 establishment of the 609th Squadron (at Shaw Air Force Base) dedicated to information warfare offers further evidence of the seriousness with which that ideology is maintained. In 1996 the National Defense University (NDU) ended its two-year experiment of offering a forty-four-week program on Information Warfare and Strategy after forty-eight students were graduated, but what has replaced it is a broader thrust in teaching the all four hundred students the rudiments of information warfare (and offering related electives). In 1995þ96 large portions of the Defense budget were designated information operations (although only a small portion represents information warfare).
Intellectually speaking, what clarity has been gained by the discovery of information warfare?
Some Insights: On the one hand, several insights have been brought to attention. One insight recognizes the deification of the observation-orientation-decision-and-action (OODA) cycle and maintains that an information warfare strategy that retards the enemy's decision cycle without physically destroying it may nevertheless be worthwhile.
Another insight is based on the near-tautology that one should not rely on capabilities on which one cannot depend (which is to say, defend). The U.S. military depends increasingly on computers and networks, particularly radio-electronic networks. This emphasis inevitably creates new vulnerabilities unless it is matched by attention to systems protection (e.g., defensive electronic warfare and operational security) or at least dependence management. How much security and protection are needed, what the tradeoffs are in security, cost and functionality, and to what extent technology favors offense or defense all are empirical questions, but the need to address them is beyond reasonable argument.
A third insight is that global computer and media networking carries risks, even if these risks are easily exaggerated. Computer networks might permit enemies to use hackers to attack the information infrastructure of the United States, rather than its military forces. The conventional defense establishment has been described as a Maginot Line, in which hackers are equivalent to Guderian's Panzer Korps, wheeling past prepared defenses to strike at the nation's unguarded flanks. Television networks are conduits through which foreign interests can wage psychological warfare using a mix of traditional propaganda, manipulation of truth by human and technical means, and even the exploitation of micromedia (e.g., specialized cable channels, mailing lists, or Web sites) to set one part of a target population against another.
New Threads: A previous monograph[2] made limited progress toward a theory that would unite the various aspects of information warfare. Because information turns out to be pervasive in human activity, segregating it as something particular over which combatants can struggle appears to be an unproductive approach. But as information warfare wanders off the military reservation, the question of whether it is indeed warfare grows increasingly urgent. Even though most techniques of information warfare have appeared in earlier wars, much of what is called information warfare may so fundamentally act at variance with warfare as to be a fabric woven from completely new threads.
One thread is that understanding how the other side uses information is critical to knowing what aspect of the enemy to attack. Because success in information warfare is strongly influenced by the quality of intelligence about the other side, most forms of it are highly opportunistic, with effects difficult to predict. Consider some examples. Success in decapitating the other side's command structure requires knowing where the command centers are (and who is inside it) and where are the lines that run from commanders to the field. If cryptographic codes are unbreakable, then signals collection requires waiting for opportunities arising from human error, such as talking in the clear or mishandling keys.[3] Computer systems can be entered because of uncorrected mistakes, so success in breaking and entering into them also varies widely.[4] The other side's commanders are more easily fooled if they cling to certain prior judgements about the nature and contents of the battlefield. Luck and circumstance play great roles in information warfare, while brute force seems to be a smaller factor.
A second thread, which echoes the critical role of intelligence in enabling information warfare, is the difficulty of battle damage assessment (BDA). Damage assessment is a frustrating exercise even when it cannot be masked or exaggerated -- as it can be with human and computer information systems. Was the particular command center that was identified and destroyed, for instance, really the intended one? Did a virus really disable the computer? How can one tell whether a microwave burst really put a tank's electronics out of action? Has every frequency used by a radar been covered by a jamming signal?
Some techniques help address the BDA problem. The human intelligence that relayed the identity of the command structure may be available to confirm destruction. The crippling of an air defense radar can be assumed by inactivity when one's own aircraft are overhead. Communications sent through secure channels may be diverted into the open when preferred channels are taken out. The destruction of a utility's switch can be inferred by the sudden blackout. Observers can report whether a propaganda barrage against a populace is having an effect. Yet, the victim may be able to mask the real damage. A system under hacker attack can generate false effects. The newly purloined data, were they valuable or was the enemy's grip purposely loosened so deception might be spread? Files might be established that appear valid, even files that correlate to other files but which are phony -- the cyberspace version of "The Man Who Wasn't There," (a ruse the British used during World War II to plant phony war plans on a corpse left for the Germans to find). Replicating fictive digital documents throughout a system is easier than replicating real ones (a few keystrokes suffice and storage space is cheap). A system could show false signs of failure by appearing to slow down or malfunction.
A third thread is the impact of information warfare on the need for force. The world's most successful coercive organization, which extracts more than a trillion dollars from a public that would just as soon keep its money, is the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS works almost entirely in the information realm. Those who choose to work against the IRS manipulate or withhold information, while the IRS develops information-gathering mechanisms to fill the national exchequer. Behind a vast information apparatus lies the law that compels taxation, and behind that lies the threat of physical force as a collection device and as a general deterrent. The taxpayer who calculates the correlation of forces before filing a 1040 is rare, and the amount of force used in the collection of taxes is small. Still, the taxpayer perceives its lurking presence, and were force absent, the flow of taxes might be greatly reduced. Force also remains the stone in the snowball of tomorrow's high- tech militaries. The ratio of stone to snow grows smaller. It may not even be our stone (the United States might supply targeting information to an ally that did the actual shooting), but without a stone, military force would have no meaning.
A fourth thread is the mutability of the information medium. The eternal seas and their geological, physical, and meteorological characteristics are immutable foundations of naval warfare. The art of air combat rests on the immutable aerodynamic characteristics of the earth's atmosphere. The characteristics of space satellites descend from immutable laws of orbital mechanics. For the most part, even the land terrain precedes ground combat and is the context for what works and what does not work in war. The information domain, however, is almost entirely man-made.[5] Thus command-and-control warfare may attack the enemy's command structure but the command structure, itself, can be shaped, almost at will. Hacker warfare proceeds entirely over a terrain of the defender's making -- be it hardware, networks, operating systems, applications, or access architecture. The success of attempts to deceive the other side's system of systems are a function of its makeup from one year, day, or minute to the next. Psychological warfare against enemy commanders or troops works best when it works off preconceived notions they share. Warfare, in general, has been likened to chess in which two players contest over a fixed board using pieces with predetermined behaviors. In information warfare each side brings its own board; one which each can change as much or as often as it needs to.
So To Metaphor: These threads suggest that information warfare remains a phenomenon that must be understood separately from warfare as a whole. Yet people rarely think about information warfare from first principles; for the most part, information warfare involves phenomena few people have experienced. It is warfare by virtue of analogy, or, better, metaphor. It is warfare because it resembles activities that surely are warfare. Used properly, a metaphor can be a starting point for analysis, a littoral, as it were, between the land of the known and the ocean of the unfamiliar. A good metaphor can help frame questions that might otherwise not arise, it can illustrate relationships whose importance might otherwise be overlooked, and it can provide a useful heuristic device, a way to play with concepts, to hold them up to the light to catch the right reflections, and to tease out questions for further inquiry.
But before analysis proceeds and policy recommendations can be justified, metaphors must be put back into the box from whence they came so that issues can be understood for what they are, not what they look like[6]. To use metaphor in place of analysis verges on intellectual abuse. It invites the unquestioning extension of a logic that works across the looking glass but lacks explanatory power in the real world. Those who forget this are apt to try to make their metaphors do their thinking for them. It is easy, for instance, to get caught up in the syllogism that effortlessly links stages of economic production with modalities of warfare.[7] According to the Defense Science Board,[8]
The objective of warfare waged against agriculturally-based societies was to gain control over their principal source of wealth: land. . . . The objective of war waged against industrially-based societies was to gain control over their principal source of all wealth: the means of production. . . . The objective of warfare to be waged against information-based societies is to gain control over the principal means for the sustenance of all wealth: the capacity for coordination of socio- economic inter-dependencies. Military campaigns will be organized to cripple the capacity of an information-based society to carry out is information-dependent enterprises.
Thus does war follow commerce into cyberspace, pitting foes against one another for control of this clearly critical high ground. But does this facile comparison have a basis in reality?
Essays: In this iconoclastic spirit, the following six essays are characterized by a continuing search for the meaning of information warfare.
The first essay, "Perspectives on Defending Cyberspace," concedes that the United States is increasingly dependent on its infrastructure but finds that the risks to the national security from that dependence are easily overstated.[9]
The second essay, "Deterring Information Attacks," continues the examination of the metaphor that information warfare is indeed warfare by discussing the problems of retaliation and asking whether an explicit policy of retaliation is workable and thus likely to deter.[10]
The third, "Indistinguishable from Magic," notes a potential gap between what information warfare can do and what it can appear to do and asks whether that gap can be exploited for psychological warfare.
The fourth, "The Retro Revolution," examines information warfare as a throwback to forms of national security that supposedly ended with the end of the Cold War. Information warfare appears to have given new life to concepts borrowed from strategic theology, from the world of strategic intelligence, and even bygone habits of defense acquisition.
The fifth, "Postcards from the Immune System," suggests more useful metaphors for information warfare than the simple connection between defenses against real viruses and defenses against computer viruses. The immune system must attack foreign antigens but not attack the human body. In refining this delicate distinction the immune system is revealed as an information-warfare machine that uses a rich selection of redundancy, fail-safe devices, stimulants, and suppressors.
The last essay, "Point, Counterpoint, and Counter-counterpoint," was inspired by a search for a new metaphor for new kinds of warfare. Conflict has classically been modeled by orthogonal lines of defense and attack. Today's asymmetric warfare is about points, blots, and gated fences, topological forms with particular applicability to information warfare.
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