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 6
DEFENDING CYBERSPACE AND OTHER METAPHORS MARTIN LIBICKI
Point, Counterpoint, and Counter- Counterpoint
Sections
Conflict in the Physical Realm As Applied to Information Warfare Conclusions One problem with applying metaphors from conventional warfare to information warfare may be that these metaphors are growing obsolete. Classical warfare is dominated by lines, which are one dimensional. In a densely populated battlefield, "front lines" separate opposing military forces; in local engagements, the advantage goes to the side that can break or outflank the other's "line." An aggressor seeks to develop "lines of attack," which usually run orthogonally to the front; in a large battlefield, various echelons are separated by "fire-control lines."
Today's patterns of conflict may be better characterized by points, blots as counterpoints, and gated fences as counter-counterpoints. A point represents precision warfare; precision allows advanced militaries such as the United States's to attack and destroy only the few targets critical to an enemy's center of gravity, saving time and material as well as minimizing unnecessary damage. A blot represents pollution warfare, which entails inhibiting or preventing the use of media common to enemy populations, causing them various levels of pain. It is becoming the weapon of choice for those too poor, weak, or small to attack militaries directly. Modern societies can respond to blots with gated fences, which are enclosures around (with gates or other tightly monitored openings for pass-through control). This is partition warfare, often used to restrain and enclose (perhaps isolate, prefatory to the later destruction of) foes.
The shift from the one-dimensional line to a collection of points, blots, and gated fences is a feature of a period uniquely lacking serious tensions between major powers. Today's security nightmares feature malevolent individuals and groups (some with tacit state support), many armed with weapons of mass destruction. Such warfare is highly asymmetric.
Conflict in the Physical Realm
How might point, blot, and gated fence be applied to physical conflict?
Precision Warfare: Until roughly the 1960s, the goal of weapons development was to achieve the most bang for the buck. Since then, refining weapons to hit their target but leave as much of everything else intact as possible has become more important. Nuclear weapons development, for instance, has featured methods to select the explosive yield in the field. The development of low- radioactivity weapons has enabled specifically military targets to be taken out with less collateral damage than its predecessors offered. Both kill fewer people, and each could reduce the risk of uncontrollable escalation driven by revenge.
For conventional weapons, the need to hit a specific point in order to kill a target has become mantra, partly because of expensive and vulnerable logistics arrangements associated with heavy ordnance use. As earlier noted, in World War II, bombers required several thousand bombs to take out a point target; in Vietnam, F-4 Phantoms still needed more than a hundred. In 1972, one Walleye bomb took out the Ganh Hoa bridge in North Vietnam, which had withstood larger raids with dumb bombs. Twenty years later, during the Gulf War, the U.S. Air Force proved it could pick and choose exactly in which building -- even in which window -- it wanted laser-guided bombs to land. Both Russian theorists of war and the authors of Discriminate Deterrence[109] have argued that in some instances precision weapons can substitute for nuclear weapons, offering power without the obloquy.
The point destroyed and the neighborhood left intact are the dream of the modern military. The extent to which that dream can be realized is debatable. Technology makes things more visible and promotes the efficiency of their destruction, but the ability to collect and sort through intelligence to identify the correct point may be elusive.
Pollution Warfare: As precision was being developed by the United States, those left behind seem to be moving in the opposite direction, toward warfare as pollution: nuclear effects, poisoned air and water or direct environmental damage, land mines, space dust, and terrorism.
The purpose of polluting a medium -- in the military sense: ground, sea, air, space, the infosphere or the biosphere -- is to make its use more difficult and hazardous, even impossible. Such warfare is attractive to the weak because of its low cost and the probability that the poor and weak are less likely than the rich to care about the airlines, space, biosphere (agricultural uses aside), and the electromagnetic spectrum.
Is pollution a form of warfare in the Clausewitzian sense? No, insofar as a nation polluted is not a nation disarmed. Yes, if a nation's internal security is its center of gravity and thus a fulcrum of its policies.
Among potential examples of pollution warfare, consider nuclear pollution. To construct a usable nuclear device requires considerable nuclear material as well as clever engineering. Far less plutonium and sophistication are needed to scatter radioactive poison over a business district and render it unusable for years. Chemical weapons delivered directly (by artillery shell) have a local impact, while chemicals placed in reservoirs can mortally pollute the drinking supply of an entire metropolitan area. Agricultural pests introduced where they had been tightly controlled can do terrible, long-lasting damage to a local agricultural economy. Airborne biological agents offer a deadly form of air pollution.
Widespread random and pointless crime can be considered a way to pollute public spaces and can inhibit their use. Bombs in jets can, in effect, pollute a nation's airways, rendering them unusable except by those with a high tolerance for risk.
In the Third World, cheap land mines have become an insidious blot on the landscape, one that persists even after fighting ends. Roughly a hundred million land mines have been sown, with Kampuchea and Bosnia two now familiar sites. Land thus riddled is unusable except at risk to life and limb; mines account for a disproportionate percentage of all civilians killed indirectly from war. As of November 1996, land mines accounted for most of the (few) fatalities suffered by NATO peace forces in Bosnia after the Dayton accords. International calls for assistance in clearing these mines offer many parallels to calls to clean up superfund sites.
Even conventional air and water pollution have become part of conflict. Toward the end of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein opened up oil pipeline valves to create a giant oil slick floating toward Saudi Arabia. On retreating from Kuwait, Iraqi troops set oil fields on fire, blackening the skies for months afterward. Had it been possible, Saddam Hussein might have used pollution to interfere with the United States's space capability. Pellets scattered in low-earth orbit can dramatically shorten the lives of satellites that perform military and commercial surveillance.[110] Similarly, a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) explosion in a carefully chosen stratospheric point can create enough electronic flux (or scintillation) to disable electronics.
Partition Warfare: With or without state support, a few determined people can do enormous damage by polluting shared media. Given the difficulty of maintaining media unpolluted in the face of a determined adversary, an alternative strategy is to control access to such media. Partition, aimed at separating clean worlds from potential polluters, may be a way to avoid violence while also protecting common media.
A simple version is to isolate an entire country or area. Terrorist incidents by Hamas invariably lead Israel to shut off access to Gaza and the West Bank. Their bombings in March 1996 led Israel to use high-technology devices designed to look for illicit border crossings and individuals carrying explosives. Well before entering World War II, President Roosevelt appropriated the medical term for separation, quarantine, to characterize the posture of the United States toward the Axis powers.
Economic embargo is a form of putting up fences and has been used against the white regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa as well as against Iraq and Serbia. Does it succeed? Given correlated factors, such as internal political trends or military defeat, an economic embargo probably could have some effect, but only slowly and rarely by itself.
The U.S. court system can be considered a partitioning element, separating criminals from the population after due process has identified them as guilty. Immigration control, notwithstanding economic rationalizations, contains elements of partition. One response to violence by immigrants -- whether by supposed anarchists of the early twentieth century or today's terrorists -- has been to limit immigration from certain regions. U.S. law can deny entry to specific individuals with criminal records or unwanted characteristics (e.g., diseases). In theory, barring specific individuals would be easier when personal files become globalized and easily forwarded across borders, but not everyone to be kept out has a well-documented past.
At a military level, partition warfare was carried out by the British in suppressing the Boer rebellion. The British used a dense network of barbed wire and armed watchtowers which sharply reduced the mobility of the Boers and allowed them to be checked by conventional army forces. In the Gulf War, General Colin Powell predicted that U.S. forces would first cut the Iraqi army off (from Iraq), then kill it.
As Applied to Information Warfare
How might these topological constructs apply to information warfare?
Precision Warfare: The promise of information warfare is that it will carry precision further than even one target, one shot, one hit. During Operation Desert Storm, the coalition's destruction of key Iraqi communications and headquarters facilities essentially blinded Iraq's military, reducing their capability substantially, perhaps even determining the outcome before too many shots were fired. In Desert Storm the Sequel, soft-kill mechanisms -- perhaps electromagnetic pulses or malevolent computer code inserted over the wire -- might achieve the same effect without violence, hence without collateral damage.
The reduction from 2,500 bombs to one could be reduced further by a form of command-and-control warfare. Knowing in which of fifty tanks a commander sits could mean that destroying the one tank may be sufficient, because it would leave an enemy leaderless, thus easy prey. But finding one tank in fifty is more easily said than done. If signal intelligence becomes more difficult to acquire (e.g., thanks to encryption and fiber optics) and human intelligence gets no better, the ability to determine which tank has the commander may not improve. Nor may a determined enemy be stopped when its commanders or computers are disabled.
Pollution Warfare: The Internet is becoming the commons of cyberspace, but its usefulness depends on its users observing rules of decorum. Spamming (widespread electronic junk mail) makes the Internet less usable. Hacker activity can complicate the blithe downloading of unsigned computer files (even e-mail cannot be read without risk, because it may contain viruses built into macros), discourage the use of software agents and Java-like active code, and force users to implement security measures, raising costs and inhibiting casual, free use of cyberspace. Hacker attacks are like crime waves, which force people to lock their doors at night.
Electronic media can be polluted. Dropping an enormous number of cheap jammers into congested areas, such as large cities, can interfere with communications but are extremely difficult to disable fully or quickly.
Psychological uses of information warfare can be regarded as pollution. People watch TV, listen to radio, or read newspapers in the expectation that most of what they hear is accurate (if often biased). Technology can now be used to make images look real and construct artificial sentences using a speaker's recorded voice. Lies or, worse, the clandestine replacement of real with false messages, pollute trusted media just as chemicals pollute waterways.
Partition Warfare: Information warfare can involve partition techniques. One aim of command-and-control warfare, for example, is to divide an army's body from its head without immediately disabling either. Air defense systems are disabled by disconnecting radars from one another and depriving them of air tracks that cue each radar for air threats. Air control along with continuous observation -- intelligence-based warfare -- may permit tomorrow's version of the McNamara line proposed across Vietnam's Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to work better than it would have in the 1960s. Armies are particularly vulnerable to attempts to cross imposed or natural barriers (e.g., ridges or rivers). When armies concentrate to cross at an obvious gating point (passes, bridges), they can be surveilled intensely, and if they cross at a less advantageous place, their passage may be slowed or they may stick out from surrounding terrain (e.g., by crossing a ridgeline).
Partition is also a way of responding to information warfare. A nation whose citizens, with state complicity, have abused connections to the Internet or the international telephone system to damage the infrastructures of other nations may find as a result that their own external connections are constrained.
In cyberspace, both the use of firewalls and the formation of trusted networks among cooperating institutions follow the strategy of warding off the evil outside by ensuring that one's own systems are effectively and cleanly fenced in and communications must pass through increasingly sophisticated gates.
In the realm of cultural warfare partition can be seen in the growing number of Western electorates that have adopted anti- immigrant themes, who fear their own culture being swamped by "others." Many Third World nations fear cultural pollution (e.g., free speech, pornography) from the West, just as some Western nations disdain cultural pollution (e.g., fast food) from the United States.
The trio of precision, pollution, and partition warfare will probably continue in restless coevolution, growing increasingly sophisticated and information-hungry as they compete with one another. These constructs, as the above examples suggest, seem to have especial relevance for the contemplation of information warfare -- but they also illustrate the traps to which metaphor is heir. Precision, after all, is often oversold, pollution is often used as an ascription of the "other" and too easily suggests "ethnic cleansing," and partition has formed the core of some very ugly deeds (e.g., Jim Crow, and concentration camps). Topological metaphors, like any other, must be used with care.
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