Cyber operations: the new balance

Joint Force Quarterly, July, 2009 by Stephen W. Korns

This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

A new normalcy is ascendant in cyberspace. What does this mean, and what are the implications for the Department of Defense (DOD) cyber policy? Some characterize cyber new normalcy as hybrid, multimodal Internet conflict, which combines state-level lethality with amorphous cyber formations. (1) Others view cyber new normalcy as a breathtakingly broad and globally inclusive campaign of deliberate cyber penetrations against governments, militaries, and commercial concerns. (2) In a January 2009 Foreign Affairs article, Defense Secretary Robert Gates described today's new normalcy as the search for balance in defense capabilities. (3) A few examples might serve to better illuminate the cyber new normalcy concept.

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During the August 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia, cyber attackers used tools from a Web site hosted by a company in Texas to attack a Georgian government Web site that had been relocated--coincidentally--to a Web hosting company in Atlanta, Georgia. (4) In essence, the United States experienced collateral damage during these cyber attacks. Borderless cyber operations confounding border-based paradigms are not a deviation; it is cyber new normalcy.

During the December 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, the attack teams used cable television, BlackBerry phones, Google Earth imagery, and global positioning system information to form an integrated, low-cost command and control capability that enabled a modicum of information superiority. As Ralph Peters points out, incidents such as Mumbai demonstrate that nonstate actors "do not fear network-centric warfare because they have already mastered it." (5) Mumbai is not an outlier; it is cyber new normalcy.

Finally, in a subtle yet telling sign of cyber new normalcy, hackers in 2008 attacked the Barack Obama and John McCain campaign Web sites, compromised Mr. Obama's personal Twitter account, hacked Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's email, and falsified a Web account attributed to Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers. It leaves us wondering: if hackers have no contrition about sullying national leaders or insulting Internet luminaries, what is next? And thus, we find the essence of cyber new normalcy: what is next in cyberspace? And are we prepared?

The Modern American Experience

New normalcy has become an episodic policy construct in U.S. strategic ideation. National leadership has relied on the new normalcy clarion call to illuminate moments in time when it is understood that the Nation faces not only a severe threat, but also a transcending reorientation. Often invoked in times of national crisis, new normalcy in the American experience signals a cardinal shift in the nature of U.S. security.

For example, in the winter of 1937, the effects of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies took an unexpectedly negative turn--the "recession within a depression"--with employment falling again to near Depression-era levels. In response, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia despondently observed that "instead of considering the situation as an emergency, we accept the inevitable, that we are now in a new normal." (6) Roosevelt's new normalcy became the reality of Federally guaranteed economic security as the new basis for overall national security.

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower viewed the atomic realities of Soviet nuclear weapons as a new and untenable threat. Reflective of this thinking, a White House aide wrote a secret memorandum highlighting the nuclear age of peril as "the new and to all intents permanent normalcy." (7) President Eisenhower believed containment to be inadequate against a nuclear-armed Soviet power; therefore, his new normalcy became the "New Look" defense policy that emphasized mutually assured destruction through massive retaliation using air-atomic power. (8)

On October 25, 2001, echoing a deep national sense of insecurity after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Vice President Richard Cheney lamented, "Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy." (9) The BushCheney new normalcy thus became the "New War," instantiated in a fundamental shift to preclusion, or preemptive self-defense, under a permanent state of national emergency. (10)

New normalcy defines a quintessential dichotomy: the urge to return to the comfort and routine of a normal state, confronted by the realization that the prior condition no longer exists. For example, many in the U.S. foreign policy community viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity for a return to normalcy in American foreign policy, allowing the United States to cash in the peace dividend. Yet even as the Belavezha Accords were being signed, effectively dismantling the Soviet Union, the tectonic undertones of terrorism and global fragmentation were already well in place. The notion of an American post-Cold War return to a neo-isolationist normalcy was but a fading ideal, when in fact that prior normal condition had long since vanished under the "New World Order" of Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush.