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 7
DEFENDING CYBERSPACE AND OTHER METAPHORS MARTIN LIBICKI
Metaphor
Because we live in an information age, information warfare, it would seem, must also rise to ascendancy. Information warfare may have old components, but, as an aggregate, it is new and thus without precedent. Metaphor, in turn, is how new things are framed so that they can be discussed in terms of the familiar.
Metaphors, like loaded weapons, should be used cautiously. As the first two essays suggest, the notion of defending a nation's cyberspace begs the question of whether cyberspace is a defensible space per se. Such poor ascription may come to distort government's proper role in promoting security. The third essay sketched the potential chasm between the reality and perception of information warfare, derived, as it is, from the wizardry of computation. The fourth essay examines how information warfare may revive metaphors that supposedly fell with the Berlin Wall. The fifth essay asked whether the immune system is a good metaphor for defenses against information warfare (e.g., organic viruses as analogs to computer viruses) and found that the question is complex, because the boundary between self and nonself, while in theory sharp, is fuzzy in practice. The sixth essay tried out a few metaphors from topology and found them worth playing with.
Ultimately, one hopes, information warfare will be understood for what it is, rather than for what it resembles. Defensive information warfare, in particular, needs to evolve from a strategy to a profession. If information warfare is not to be driven into some third-wave cul-de-sac, it must shed its overwrought metaphor of twenty-first century strategic warfare and acquire instead the pedestrian status of safety engineering.[111] The art of working with dangerous machines and chemicals without taking casualties has long been studied in militaries. Operators are inculcated with its dicta and forced to relearn them continually. Safety officers have enormous influence over day-to-day operations. Entire Services have stood down when an accident level is found unacceptable. Defensive information warfare must similarly be taken seriously when institutions rely on information systems.
Information warriors may see this new identity as a comedown in much the same way that economists used to bridle at the suggestion of John Maynard Keynes that, "If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid."[112]
If understood correctly, information warfare would loses its sex appeal or media attention; and it would disappear from Presidential Decision Documents and grand national strategy. But it would grow up and go to work.
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