Out of the info loop: why information networks are crucial to modern warfare

Reason, June, 2004 by Bryan Alexander

The New Face of War: How War will Be Fought in the 21st Century, by Bruce D. Berkowitz, New York: Free Press, 272 pages, $26

The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror, by Ronald Kessler, New York: St. Martin's Press, 496 pages, $27.95

DURING THE 1999 Kosovo war, American forces pounded Serbian ground targets from the skies. Less famously, they also attacked with what Pentagon strategists call information operations, or I.O. The goal was to cause economic and political panic in the Serbian leadership. The methods ranged from cutting electrical power to hacking bank accounts to spamming e-mail boxes and Web servers. Important buildings were destroyed by cruise missiles and pinpoint munitions after a series of fax and phone messages appeared, delivering clear warnings of the attack and fomenting fear in the classic psychological operations mode.

By most assessments, this campaign had little effect. It did not fatally weaken the Serbian infrastructure. Coordination was ill-defined, legal problems persisted (is an electronic attack an attack on civilians?), and the effort was beset by such unforeseen problems as foreign ownership of some targeted media enterprises. Despite American advantages in Internet experience and programming power, no virus shut down Belgrade; the city did not endure the "digital Pearl Harbor" of so many I.O.-fueled speculations. Indeed, Serbs also took to the Net, fighting for media dominance internally and abroad and perhaps hacking in return.

Such results disappointed those with high hopes for information warfare. But the approach has remained part of the American arsenal, and it has expanded vigorously since 9/11, albeit with unclear results. Two new books, Bruce Berkowitz's The New Face of War and Ronald Kessler's The CIA at War, attempt to describe and assess I.O. in the context of the war on terror.

Each author argues that information operations have transformed American forces: That they've led to smaller, more flexible units--and more flexible doctrine. Kessler's account ascribes the changes to the last phase of the Cold War, the rise of anti-terror operations, and personnel changes within the CIA. Berkowitz prefers a larger scope: He argues that the development of I.O. goes back decades, culminating in the first stage of a global shift to information warfare.

Berkowitz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, begins in the 1950S, as a series of thinkers recognized that the Cold War was linking vast military machines, nations, and globe-spanning alliances into new information networks. One function of those networks was the systematic, in-depth assessment of the other side's capabilities, in comparison with one's own, combining intelligence operations abroad and analysis at home. By the early '70s, the RAND Corporation's Andrew Marshall and Albert Wohlstetter offered an innovative analytical method which looked for imbalances between two forces.

At that time, the Pentagon was working from a parity model, trying to balance Soviet forces with its own at every register. In contrast, some threats were not so balanced. Shorthand medium-range missiles, ineffective against the American homeland when based in the USSR, became dire threats when relocated to Cuba; submarines stationed offshore offered the capability not to counter American subs, but to decapitate the United States' command and control apparatus.

While concerns about these asymmetric threats prompted a series of American responses to perceived Soviet imbalances, asymmetry also became applicable to other forces without the size and resources of the USSR, such as the Vietnamese National Liberation Front or the Somali urban war clans. An American military built to fight the Warsaw Pact in a conventional war on the German plains had to rethink its approach when confronted by the drastically underresourced Viet Cong.

Asymmetry combined with networks in 1976, when Boeing published engineer Thomas Rona's Weapons Systems and Information War. This monograph argued that communications and information support networks were sufficiently linked and cross-dependent to be inviting targets. In Berkowitz's words, "this meant that the best way to defeat your enemy was to attack the components of its information systems, and Rona was broad-minded in defining 'component.' It included the hardware, of course, but it could just as easily be software, the people operating the system, or the data that traveled through it."

A World War II example shows the implications of this in sight. When the British cracked the German ENIGMA cryptography scheme, they had several options: They could use information gleaned from German messages to strike military targets pre-emptively, maintain the illusion that they had not broken the code so they could continue to decrypt German messages, or use the code to feed the Germans misinformation.

The New Face of War calls this "the Perennial Question of Information warfare," arguing that it recurs to the present day: "Deny, deceive, destroy, or exploit? Do you transmit your own smoke signals to interfere with his? Do you send bogus signals to confuse your adversary so that he is easier to kill? Do you find the enemy sending the message and kill him? Or do you quietly watch the signals so you know where your adversary plans to be, head him off, and kill him then?"