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

Reason, June, 2004 by Bryan Alexander

But perhaps network command shouldn't be left to the Pentagon. For network defense reasons, Berkowitz attacks the Defense Department's current mix of state control and federal purchasing cycles, arguing that the result is a weakly defended Internet. Individuals and companies suspicious of the Big Brother approach seen in the Clipper Chip and Communications Decency Act expend energies in withdrawing or opposing state measures, while fewer enterprises develop products--less powerful than they would have otherwise been--to assist the reds. Berkowitz recommends instead that the government shift more of the onus for command of the nets to companies.

The result, in his view, would be a larger market and better results for net command, and more available to defense. Companies working without strong legislative oversight, he writes, would be more likely to develop better software, and have a more cooperative attitude toward the government, than would firms laboring under bureaucratic scrutiny and control. This position stems not from libertarian economic arguments but from a sense of recent Internet history. During the 1990S the federal government tried to push the Clipper Chip, prosecute Phil Zimmermann for distributing homegrown cryptography, and mandate weaker software security. This caused government influence over increasingly suspicious I.T. companies to wane. Berkowitz also suggests that rather than developing new network warriors, the agency should hire already skilled network analysts part-time, as a sort of distributed resource team.

The New Face of War concludes with a survey of intelligence work, focusing mostly on the CIA. This covers a lot of familiar ground; what makes it refreshing is the context of information warfare (always central to the narrative) and seeing familiar operations through the insights of Boyd, Arquilla, and Ronfeldt.

While The New Face of War keeps its narrative anchored in information warfare's development, The CIA at War is too often unmoored. Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter, focuses primarily on the institutional transformation of the CIA under George Tenet's leadership and its impact on the war on terror. He offers a heroic portrait of a CIA director rebuilding the agency into a more agile, effective organization, partly along network lines. The book's historical model is intriguing, and it offers some new background about the topic, but its approach underestimates the cognitive and organizational shifts that information warfare entails.

The CIA at War offers a historical narrative to explain the present state of the CIA. Kessler shows how the agency's focus on the Soviet Union began and grew, with the CIA developing skills and methods imaginatively and successfully. The CIA's attention shifted to terrorism in the 1980s, starting with the successful campaign against the Abu Nidal organization. (Nidal's group had staged terror acts and won a growing global audience. The CIA fed its leader disinformation to stoke his innate distrust into violent organization-destroying paranoia.)