From PLATO to NATO. Epistemology, Knowledge and Fantasies of Cyber- and Information War.

From PLATO to NATO.[1]

Epistemology, Knowledge and Fantasies of Cyber- and Information War.

In Search for New Threats, Threads and Cognitive Patterns after the End of the Cold War.

Georg Schöfbänker

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War the Western community fought one ‘real classical’ war with thousands of dead combatants, though it was not a nation-state war. In terms of international law it was a ‘police-action’ of members of the United Nations lead by the US against Iraq which invaded Kuwait, committed several crimes on the civil population and fired missiles against Israel. The air-war campaign started on Jan. 17th 1991 and endured permanently until the ground-offensive, started at Feb. 23rd. All together the air-war against Iraq took some five weeks. The ground-campaign only lasted for four days, until Feb. 27th, when a cease-fire was announced. Kuwait was released from Iraqi troops, Iraq itself remained politically untouched, dictator Saddam Hussein remained in power. Iraqi nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction projects were revealed in full dimensions, projects which were not detected by signals intelligence (SIGINT), e.g. by satellite reconnaissance before.

Briefly before this text was finished, India and Pakistan tested almost simultaneously twelve nuclear warheads at different development stages, including in the case of India a true thermonuclear device. A nuclear arms race in South East Asia is likely to happen, if it will not be contained by détente and preventive diplomacy. India announced to use superfast computing resources for the further simulation of nuclear tests, such as the formerly five declared nuclear powers do.

The case of waging war against Iraq became a paradigm in assessing new conflict scenarios and about how information technology (IT) might shape future battle management. In the meantime, especially in the US governmental and military bodies, different task-force study-groups, policy-advisers in strategic affairs, security advisers to the President, the military-industrial-strategic-complex in Washington DC and related think-tanks are proliferating neologisms and acronyms, such as info(rmation-)(-war)(fare), cyberwar(fare), netwar(fare), intelligence based warfare (IBW), electronic warfare (EW), revolution in military affairs (RMA), revolution in strategic affairs (RSA), C2W (command and control warfare), C3I (command, control, communication and intelligence, C4I (command, control, communication, computation and intelligence), C4I2 (command, control, communication, computation, intelligence and interoperability), HIC (high intensity conflicts), LIC (low intensity conflicts), OOTW (operations other than war) and so forth.

The mere fact that the discussion of these topics left the expert-circles of the Pentagon and her related organizations and found a broader audience in the main US foreign-policy journals (e.g. Foreign Affairs) is a reliable indicator that the debate is already or will become a strategic foreign policy issue of the US and in addition, that it will come to Europe.

It is certainly not only a debate within the military elites of the US. The Swedish defense community also established a kind of task-fore on information-war, RMA is a main driving force in reshaping NATO’s military out-of-area capabilities and firepower and Russia is concerned by a perhaps not identifiable border-line between an infowar-attack and a permanent cultural penetration of what are believed to be high assets in cultural, psychological and national identities and cognitive patterns.

Also, in the same time-period since the end of the Gulf war, the half-life-time of foreign policy theories, hypothesis and explanations for the permanently on a higher scale and speed interacting post-Cold-War-world, for the system of international relations, for the interacting patterns between and state and non-state actors, for new conflict modes and ways for resolving them, for a theory of the nature of supremacy and power in a postmodern international environment, for the nature of state-behavior in the international system, for the future of war-like conflicts, for ethnicity, identity and it’s impact on conflict-development decreased dramatically.

A lot of trendy theories emerged at the end of the 80s to explain the likely future of the international system, of supremacy and power: ‘Imperial overstretch’ was an attempt to describe the assumed loss of US influence in world affairs. In 1990 President George Bush announced a „new world order“, based upon the system of the United Nations, the rule of international law and global democratization of authoritarian regimes. At the final diplomatic act settling the Cold-War in Europe, the Paris CSCE-Conference, 19th-21st Nov. 1990, the security of all participating nation-states in CSCE-Europe was described as ‘indivisible’ and „...the security of each of our countries will inseparably be interconnected with the Confernce of Security and Cooperation in Europe.“

Briefly later, theories about ‘end of history’ in international relations were announced, to be replaced by Huntington in his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, claiming Kulturkampf (clash of civilizations) to be the most likely pattern of interstate and intrastate conflicts of the future and the need for US leadership and supremacy. The concept of a Kulturkampf between fundamentalist oriented rouge-states, the most hated enemy-images of US foreign policy, fits very well into postmodern subconventional terrorist threat-perceptions, using WMD.

In the mid 90s the emerging theories and concepts of cyber- and infowar started influencing the US foreign policy mainstream. From a point of a serious independent analysis it is not as much important to investigate in detail, how cyber- and infowar became a strategic issue, it is much more meaningfull investigating how it might become a self-fulfilling-prophecy in US terms. The question is, how to hype a hype? How to be a step beyond, by using the rules of the game? The first hype might be the construction of information warfare as the central security thread & threat of the 21st century. The second hype might be using the US supremacy in worldwide information distribution presence to proliferate that hype and make it self-fulfilling and plausible.

But info-, and cyberwar are just at the brink of becoming Realpolitik. The most influential shift in political and military terms in the 1990s on the Northern hemisphere is the collapse of the bi-polar Cold-War and the eXlargement of NATO eastwards. Johan Galtung has called this project a type of megalomaniac ‘Realpolitik’. NATO will certainly expand eastwards, will expand it’s territory of potential interventions, peace-keeping, peace-making, peace-enforcement and ‘out-of-area-missions’ and will be the Euro-Atlantic thread of the 21st century. The Euro- and North-Atlantic nations community will play the most decisive role in terms of military, technological and economic power on the geostrategic and geopolitical stage at the beginning of the 21st century. This seems to for sure. An assessment of the impacts of cyber-, info- and netwar as (geo-)political or military concepts should be undertaken against this background. The most central questions concerning theses issues are:

· How will the future of the international system look like?

· How will the future of war look like? Will it be a conflict between nation-states in the ‘Clausewitz style’ of the ‘continuation of politics by other means’?

· How will the future nature of conflict reasons look like? Will there be conflicts about ethnicity and in search of national identity, might there be some clashes along the conflict lines of Kulturkampf between the Western Christian, the orthodox Christian, and the Islamic world?

· Will future violent conflicts mainly be of a intra-state nature, such as the recent examples of the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia, or the current Kosovo problem?

· Who will act in these types of violent future conflicts? The only remaining super power, the US, medium powers, or subnational groups following national-ethnic patterns, clans, warlord regimes or criminal and violent gangs, armed with light and medium weapons, sufficient to evoke a genocide of a Bosnia- or Rwanda-type? Or assemblies of ad-hoc and case by case coalitions of international organizations, such as the UN, the OSCE or military alliances, such as NATO?

To put it frankly: There are no easy or likely answers to these questions. And if so, they risk to have a very short theoretical prognostic range. In addition we have to ask, if the concepts of cyber-, info- and netwars are bottom-up or topside-down approaches.

A Confusing Set of Definitions - Or What We are Talking About

In the leading US literature about political or military affairs cyberwar, infowar or netwar are used as overlapping synonyms. (Arquilla/Ronfeldt 1997b, 30):

Cyberwar

„Cyberwar refers to conducting, and preparing to conduct, military operations according to information-related principles. It means disrupting if not destroying information and communications systems, broadly defined to include even military culture, on which an adversary relies in ordet to ‘know’ itself. /.../ It means trying to know everything about an adversary while keeping the adversary from knowing much about oneself. It means turning the ‘balance of information and knowledge’ in one's favor, especially if the balance of forces is not.

This form of warfare may involve diverse technologies - notably for C3I; for intelligence collection, processing and distribution; for tactical communications, positioning, identifying friend-or-foe (IFF); and for ‘smart’ weapons systems, to give but a few examples. It may also involve electronically blinding, jamming, deceiving, overloading and intruding into an adversary's information and communications circuits.“

„As an innovation in warfare, we anticipate that cyberwar may be to the 21st century what blitzkrieg was to the 20th century. /.../ In a deeper sense, cyberwar signifies a tranformation in the nature of war.“ (Ibid, 1997b, 31)

Netwar

„Netwar refers to information-related conflict at a grand level between nations or societies. It means trying to disrupt or damage what a target population ‘knows’ or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it. A netwar may focus on public or elite opinion, or both. It may involve diplomacy, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media, infiltration of computer networks and databases, and efforts to promote dissident or opposition movements across computer networks.

In other words, netwar represents a new entry on the spectrum of conflict that spans economic, political, and social, as well as military forms of ‘war.’ In contrast to economic wars that target the production and distribution of goods, and political wars that aim at the leadership and institutions of a government, netwars would be distinguished by their targeting of information and communications.

Like other forms on this spectrum, netwars would be largely non-military, but they could have dimensions that overlap into military war. /.../ In like manner, a netwar that leads to targeting a an enemys military C3I capabilities turns at least in part, into what we mean by cyberwar.

Netwars will take various forms. Some may occur between the governments of rival nation-states. /.../ Other kinds of netwar may arise between governments and nonstate actors. (Ibid, 28)

Or to the contrary they may be waged against the policies of specific governments by advocacy groups and movements - e.g. regarding environmental, human-rights or religious issues. /.../

Most netwars will probably be non-violent /.../

Some netwars will involve military issues. Candidate issue areas include nuclear proliferation, drug smuggling and antiterrorism /.../ (Ibid, 29)

Netwars are not real wars, traditionally defined. But netwar might be developed into an instrument for trying, early on, to prevent a real war from arising.“ (Ibid, 30)

In the same book under the title „The Advent of Netwar“ Arquilla/Ronfeldt (1997f) give another definition of what the relationship between cyberwar and netwar may look like: „What we term ‘cyberwar’ will be an ever more important entry at the military end /.../ ‘Netwar’ will figure increasingly at the societal end /.../“ (Ibid, 275) Briefly later: „The term ‘netwar’ denotes an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) /.../ short of war, in which the protagonists use - indeed, depend on using - network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and communication. (Ibid, 277).

And finally: „The netwar spectrum may increasingly include a new generation of revolutionaries and activists who espouse postindustrial, information-age ideologies that are just now taking shape. In some cases, identities and loyalities may shift from the nation-state to the transnational level of a ‘global cicil society’“ (emphasis added) (Ibid, 278)

Further on, Arquilla/Ronfeldt (Ibid 285) discuss ‘network principles’ as a pure form of societal organization beside all technical aspects and conclude „/.../ netwar is not just about new technologies.“

Infowar

Arquilla/Ronfeldt refuse to use the term ‘infowar’ (Ibid 279) as being „too broad and too narrow to be appropriate“. In contrast to this position the top US military authorities use a different language on explaining the concept of infowar. Both the ‘Joint Vision 2010’, and the ‘Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare’ (1996), unclassified doctrinal documents released by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, define information war(fare) explicitly and implicitly. Whereas , ‘Joint Vision 2010’ doesn’t mention a definition of IW and points mainly on the military implications of the information age,

„We must have information superiority: the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary’s ability to do the same.

Information superiority will require both offensive and defensive information warfare (IW). Offensive information warfare will degrade or exploit an adversary’s collection or use of information. It will include both traditional methods, such as a precision attack to destroy an adversary’s command and control capability, as well as nontraditional methods such as electronic intrusion into an information and control network to convince, confuse, or deceive enemy military decision makers.

There should be no misunderstanding that our effort to achieve and maintain information superiority will also invite resourceful enemy attacks on our information systems. Defensive information warfare to protect our ability to conduct information operations will be one of our biggest challenges in the period ahead. Traditional defensive IW operations include physical security measures and encryption. Nontraditional actions will range from antivirus protection to innovative methods of secure data transmission. In addition, increased strategic level programs will be required in this critical area.“ (emphasis added) (Joint Vision 2010, 16).

the ‘Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare’ gives an explicit definition of IW:

„Actions taken to achieve information superiority by affecting adversary information, information-based processes, information systems, and computer-based networks while defending one’s own information, information-based processes, information systems, and computer-based networks.“ (Joint Pub 3-13.1, GL-8)

In a broader sense Joint Pub 3-13.1 includes within the concept of IW also psychological operations (PSYOP), and the use of the global information infrastructure (GII). In this document, IW is more comprehensively defined, also by non-technical, non-military means. The following tables may provide some semantic templates for discussing the US concepts:

Arquilla/Ronfeldt	Cyberwar	Netwar	Infowar
conflict level	high	medium - high	---
conflict reasons	not discussed	not discussed	---
actors	nation-state; military	nation-state; societies; rouge-states; military, paramilitary; ‘terrorist’; NGOs; ‘global civil society’	---
threat-perception	alarmist	alarmist	---
sub-concepts	battlefield, encreased lethality, RMA;	propaganda, psychological warfare, media control, ‘reflexive control’	---
deep impacts	transformation in the nature of war	‘Kulturkampf’; transformation in the nature of propaganda and psychological warfare	---
channels / means	military and civil command and communication systems	computer-networks; internet; all media channels	---

Joint Pub 3-13.1[2] Joint Vision 2010	Infowar. Almost no discriminations to applications others than military are made.
conflict level	high; hot and cold wars
conflict reasons	not discussed
actors	nation-state; military
foreign policy design	„Power projection, enabled by overseas presence, will likely remain the fundamental strategic concept of our future force“ (Joint Vison 2010, 4)
threat-perception	alarmist
sub-concepts	‘dominant battlespace awareness’; increased capability to kill; RMA; directed energy weapons (lasers); C2 warfare: „C2W is an application of IW in military operations and is a subset of IW.“ (Joint Vison 2010, I-4)
deep impacts	complete transformation in waging conventional military operations
channels / means	RMA

Libicki (1995) has given a very comprehensive set of definitions including the techno-military-battlefield aspects, as well as the cultural aspects. We want to quote these definitions here completely, in order to be able, discussing the full range of impacts:[3]

FORM	SUBTYPE	IS IT NEW?	EFFECTIVENESS
C2W	Antihead	Command systems, rather than commanders, are the target	New technologies of dispersion and replication suggest that tomorrow's command centers can be protected.
	Antineck	Hard wired communication links matter	New techniques (e.g., redundancy, efficient error encoding) permit operations under reduced bit flows.
IBW		The cheaper the more can be thrown into a system that looks for targets	The United States will build the first system of seeking systems, but, stealth aside, pays too little attention to hiding.
EW	Antiradar	Around since WW II.	Dispersed generators and collectors will survive attack better than monolithic systems.
	Anticomms	Around since WW II.	Spread spectrum, frequency hopping, and directional antennas all suggest communications will get through.
	Crypto graphy	Digital code making is now easy.	New codemaking technologies (DES, PKE) favor code makers over code breakers.
Psycho logical Warfare	Antiwill	No.	Propoganda must adapt first to CNN, then to Me-TV.
	Antitroop	No.	Propaganda techniques must adapt to DBS and Me-TV.
	Anti commander	No.	The basic calculus of deception will still be difficult.
	Kultur kampf	Old history.	Clash of civilizations?
Hacker Warfare	Yes.		All societies are becoming potentially more vulnerable but good house keeping can secure systems.
Economic Information Warfare	Economic	Yes.	Very few countries are yet that dependent on high bandwidth-information flows.
	Techno-Imperialism	Since the 1970s.	Trade and war involve competition, but trade is not war.
Cyber- Warfare	Info- Terrorism	Dirty linen is dirty linen whether paper or computer files.	The threat may be a good reason for tough privacy laws.
	Semantic	Yes.	Too soon to tell.
	Simula- warfare	Approaching virtual reality.	If both sides are civilized enough to simulate warfare, why would they fight at all?
	Gibson- warfare	Yes.	The stuff of science fiction.

From software to ‘soft power’ - Or in search for new threats?

„I’m running out of demons. I’m down to Kim Il Sung and Castro.“

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Collin Powell, 1991 (after the Gulf war), before the US Congress[4]

Yet, it is not clear what was the hen, and what the egg. Did the lack of real threats after the end of the Cold War lead to that kind of cyber-, and infowar enthusiasm, we now envisage as the driving force in Pentagon circles? Or was it the other way round, as Friedrich Kittler has put it, that perhaps the computer industry as a belligrent gang and camarilla is preparing it’s last and final (un-?)friendly take over, the Pentagon itself? Compared to the sales for military hardware (1 aircraft carrier 100 billion US-$, 1 hunting submarine 10 billion US-$, 1 B2 stealth strategic bomber 1 billion US-$) software and communication infrastructure are relatively cheap. But the rapid and aggressive digitalization of the armed forces of the US

„The transformation of U.S. military forces goes well beyond gaining information superiority and developing new technologies. Through a wide variety of analyses, wargames, studies, experiments, and exercises, the Department is systematically and aggressively investigating new operational concepts, doctrines, and organizational approaches that will enable U.S. forces to maintain full spectrum dominance of the battlespace well into the 21st century“ (emphasis added).

From an April 1998 report of the US Department of Defense to the US Congress. Cohen, William S. (1998), chapter 15

and the preparation for all likely and unlikely cyber-, and infowar scenarios give a tremendous boost for the whole communication and computer-business. Not to forget the strategic computing initiatives with the goal to build under DoE contracts the fastest super computers until 2004 in the 30-100 teraflop range.[5]

Theories about arms races discriminate between two fundamental explanations or a combination of them. Simplifying, one theory explains arms races with an action-reaction pattern in regard to potential adversaries. This action-reaction-system finds it’s prerequisites and it’s final explanation and justification in the system-inherent production of mutual threat perceptions. The theoretical answer in the Cold War was the mutually assured destruction (MAD) by nuclear weapons. In a strict epistemological interpretation of the theorem ‘states arm because other states arm as well and may pose a threat to national security’ (neo-realistic approach), this theorem may not proven to be false, instead, it is tautological. It was not the military, but politics which cut off this pathological cycle of each others misperceptions by confidence building measures.

An other approach tries to explain armament efforts by lobby-interests, by the inertia of bureaucracy and the dynamics of the scientific-industrial-military complex, a danger to a democratic nation, as former US. President Eisenhower has warned about in his final speech before retirement in 1961.

However, a third and new set of explanations seems necessary to explain how and why an information-war arms race might be going to take off, and it has to return to Clausewitz.

Most scholars, engaged in the theory of international relations and in peace research agree, that a nations-state war between democracies in the sense of a bloody fighting about territory, resources and other assets is very much unlikely. These findings are shared also by ‘cyber-theorists’, e.g. the Tofflers stated:

„The world, thus, is entering into a global order - or disorder, as the case may be - that is post-Westphalian, and post-Clausewitzian. It is something new. In a dialectical sense, it bears some resemblance to the pre-Westphalian order of diverse kinds of polities, but it involves a much higher order of complexity among actors, and, above all, it changes at hyper-speed.“ (Toffler & Toffler 1997, xx).

Three assumptions make it plausible that western-style democracies won’t fight wars against each other:

a)They are able to settle their conflicts by other, than military means.

b)Globalization leads to an irreversible dense interdependence to avoid any ‘real’ military conflict.

c)The ‘third wave’ or the third ‘industrial revolution’ is taking place right now and transforming the industrial nation-state into a global information-age society, where more and more goods and services are traded and sold within the global information infrastructure. (Although emerging technologies are seen as a prime force of change, there is an alternative point of view provided by the Schumpeterian tradition in economics. According to this view, technology, institutions, and culture, values and perceptions interact in more complex, unpredictable ways.)

So, Clausewitz will perhaps come back, not through the ‘industrial age front door’, but through the ‘information age, infowar back door’, even among western-style democracies as infowar is being defined by elites as ‘the continuation of politics by other means’.

If one looks at the above templates, psychological warfare, Kulturkampf, techno-imperialism and info-terrorism may be the most probable candidates on the non-bloody battlespace of infowar,[6] or - as the Russians call it: ‘information psychological struggle’, or the Chinese: ‘peoples information warfare’.

Joseph Nye & William Owen have from an US American point of view described this approach in an 1996 article in Foreign Affairs, the Zeitgeist-Zentralorgan of US foreign policy thinking, as a geopolitical tool and not only as a military asset,

„Knowledge, more than ever before, is power. The one country that can best lead the information revolution will be more powerfull than any other. /.../ The information edge is equally important as force multiplier of American diplomacy, including ‘soft power’ - the attraction of American democracy and free markets“ (Nye & Owens 1996, 20),

whereas ‘soft power’ is defined as

„the ability to achieve desired outcomes in international affairs through attraction rather than coercion. It works by convincing others to follow, or getting them to agree to, norms and institutions that produce the desired behavior.“ (Ibid, 21)[7]

After mentioning all ‘advantages’ of American popular culture[8] and world wide information dominance, Nye & Owen conclude: (Ibid, 35)

„In truth, the 21st century, not the twenthies, will turn out to be the period of America’s greatest preeminence. Information is the new coin of the international realm, and the United States is better positioned than any other country to multiply the potency of its hard and soft power resources through information.“

This view is widely shared. The Tofflers speak from ‘media howitzers’ of the US (Hollywood, CNN) that nobody else has (Toffler & Toffler, 1997, xvi). Panarin, a Russian Academician and governmental expert on info-war (in this AEC volume) dates back the concept of info-war as an US foreign policy strategy in the era of the ‘Hollywood-presidentship’ of Ronald Reagan and the SDI-project. He argues, having identified four components of US national security and national interests strategy: diplomatic, economic, military and information.

What has been distinguished and nobel formulated in diplomatic languague (information superiority, ‘soft power’) is coming along bluntly and brutally during the last two years in the main US military and political doctrine papers,[9] dealing with the structure, the shape and the mission of the US armed forces in the 21st century: The unconditional will for political and military world-supremacy, -hegemony, -dominance and -domination (e.g., the metaphor ‘full spectrum dominance’ is used in a twofold way: as the domination of the full electromagnetic spectrum for reconnaissance, surveillance, blinding, jamming and intercepting and as a full dominance for ‘power projection’ in the ‘national interest’) by (not only, but increasingly important) cyberwar means, sure in a defensive, but also in an offensive way. Just to give some examples, along and beside the ‘cyber-debate’:

· The quadrennial defense review of May 1997 to the US congress[10] (QDR 1997), as well as Joint Vision 2010, still demand the capability to „fight and win“ two large conventional simultaniousely waged wars in (e.g.) Persian Gulf and Asian theaters.

· The QDR instists in operating 12 aircraft carrier battle groups operational, whereas the IISS’s ‘Military Balance 1997/98’ (1998) counts one (not operational) Russian, two French, three British and one Indian in the rest of the world.

· The US is the only country still having deployed about 150 nuclear weapons - free falling bombs of the type B-61 -, outside its territory in seven European Nato countries, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom, to be operated by US and NATO forces. NATO countries - including the US - recently condemmed India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear tests, but insist, at least in June 1998 „that NATO's nuclear forces /.../ continue to play a unique and essential role in Alliance strategy.“ (emphasis added).[11]

· The US nuclear arsenal is within a multi million US $ upgrade which will enable it immediately to shift between a high number of contingencies all over the world. Two days after the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staffs have released their ‘Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare (C2W)’ (Joint Pub 3-13.1), the ‘Doctrine for Joint Theater Nuclear Operations’ (Joint Pub 3-12.1) was put into force on 9th Feb 1996. Later on, in November 1997, President Clinton issued a highly classified Presidential Decision Directive (PDD-60) with new guidlelines about the targeting of nuclear weapons. Information from this classified directive (Kristensen 1998) and from the unclassified ‘Joint-Pub 3-12.1’ paints a dramatically new and unique picture of further nuclear targeting of the US. As the only country, which ever used two types of weapons of mass destruction in war (nuclear and chemical weapons),[12] a new type of earth penetrating nuclear weapon in the sub-kilton range may be used against ‘rouge-states’ or even on the battlefield.
In detail the obectives are: ‘belligerent response’, (nuclear reprisals against non-nuclear states who use weapons of mass destruction), ‘agent defeat’ (the incineration of chemical and biological agents on the ground and in flight), the destruction of facilities and operation centers in the hands of ‘non-state actors’ and last, but not least, preemptive strikes against nuclear, chemical, and biological installations and command and control centers. These concepts go far beyond of what has been ‘deterrence’ in the Cold War or what was intended to counter attacks of perceived superior conventional forces in an over-all block confrontation or on the battlefield. Under the title: ‘Desired Results from the Use of Nuclear Weapons’ (Joint Pub 3-12.1, p. I-2,) the following objectives are pointed out:

· „Decisively change the perception of enemy leaders about their ability to win.

· Demonstrate to enemy leaders that, should the conflict continue or escalate, the certain loss outweighs the potential gain.

· Promptly resolve the conflict on terms favorable to the United States and our allies.

· Preclude the enemy from achieving its objectives.

· Ensure the success of the effort by US and/or multinational forces.“

Inventing the new military and non-military threats

A military threat to the American homeland is not sight. ICBM capabilities to strategically threaten US territory have only Russia, China, France and the UK. Maybe India will come up with own ICBMs, but the ‘rouge-states’ Iraq, Iran, Libya, North-Korea, Syria and who else might be a new member in this club, are far, far away from that competence. But, following the ‘Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997’ (QDR 1997) „new threats and dangers - harder to define and more difficult to track - have gathered on the horizon.“ These threats range from the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by terrorists, a scenario Hollywood was massively hyping the last years,[13] psychological warfare and info-terrorism (the latest ‘James Bond’-movie), cyber-terror attacks on the US national information infrastructure; merely the latest Hollywood hype (‘deep impact’), an asterioide incident with the earth in about 2010 is right now not included in QDR.

One may expect this to be implemented soon, because it was the most loved hobby of Edward Teller, to deploy nuclear weapons in outer space orbits after the initial SDI project did not take off. But the succsessing project, „the National Missile Defense (NMD) remains a high priority. The Administration and Congress have agreed to keep this program on an accelerated research and development path aimed at creating the option to make a decision on deployment possible as early as fiscal year 2000, if the threat warrants.“ (QDR 1997). The best convincing combination for Pentagon’s plans would surely be an attack from ‘communists from outerspace’. When the first Hollywood movie about this will come out, you can be sure that Pentagon has set up a task-force on this issue. (NASA had already such a task force for asteroide watching, before ‘deep impact’ came out.)

To be seriously again, the QDR seeks to lead the US into 21st century with a defense budget, only 23 percent lower than the average for the Cold War period of 1976-1990 (Conetta & Knight, 1998, 32). Latest official NATO data on the declared overall US and NATO defense budgets, give the following numbers for the US defense budget (in current prices and exchange rates, rounded in billion US-$):[14]

1975	1980	1985	1990	1993	1994	1995	1996	1997
88	138	258	306	298	288	278	271	273

So, the declared overall US defense budget is in 1997 15 billion US $ higer than 1985 and only 33 billion lower than 1990, at the ‘official end’ of the Cold War.

There is no transparancy right now, how much of these expenditures go directly or indirectly into cyber-, and infowar projects, if one includes e.g. the Visions 2010 camgaign for joint real time warfighting on a global scale, the space based projects for C2W (satellite surveillance and reconnaissance), the space and land based projects for theater and strategic missile defense, or the RMA initiatives.[15] Beside this, the strategic computing initiatives[16] for computer nuclear weapons test simulations under the ‘Stewardship Stockpile Program’ are not listed in the DoD budget, but in DoE’s. The 26.7 billion US $ budget for the fiscal year 1997 for secrect service activities including CIA, NSA and other services is also not inculded in the official defense figures.[17]

As the ‘real threats’, possibly deterred by military means, more and more disappeared at the end of the Cold War, ‘wild card’ scenarios for miltary threats and legitimation threads emerged. „The agnosticism of the uncertainty hawks extends not only to the specifics of discrete future events /.../ but also to the general character and magnitude of possible threats.“ (Conetta & Knight, 1998, 34). The US staggers in the twilight of uncertainty, and this predominating mantra proliferated quickly to the NATO bureaucracy. The answers are not preventive (e.g. by technology control export regimes, preventive diplomacy), but counter measures, counter-proliferation, counter WMD, including strikes out of area, but within the national interest. It demonstrates that the US national interest is now global, not only including the ‘old oil supplies’ in the Persian Gulf, but perhaps soon the ‘new oil supplies’ in the Caspian Sea basin (one of the hottest regions between Russia, Kasachstan, Aserbaidschan, Iran and Turkmenistan, place of Kulturkampf between Russia, the US and the Islamic world). Not surprising, the main, straight and clear answers for geoeconomic- and geopolitical challanges for US foreign policy is technology based.

To enable Joint Vison 2010 which is politically intended to „respond to the full spectrum of crises that threaten US interests“ (Cohen 1998) a new acronym-monster was created recently in Pentagon’s brains and confirmed in April 1998 by Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen. Not cyberwar, not infowar, not C2W, not C3I, not C4I, no. C4ISR is the latest level of discussion and Pentagon demands: command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

Pentagon set up recently the „most important C4ISR architecture initiative“, the ‘Joint Technical Architecture’ (Cohen 1998, chapter 8), which shall provide a ‘backbone of the revolution in military affairs’. The six principal components of the evolving C4ISR architecture for 2010 and beyond are:

· „A robust multisensor information grid providing dominant awareness of the battlespace to U.S. commanders and forces.

· Advanced battle-management capabilities that allow employment of globally deployed forces faster and more flexibly than those of potential adversaries.

· A sensor-to-shooter grid to enable dynamic targeting and cuing of precision-guided weapons, cooperative engagement, integrated air defense, and rapid battle damage assessment and re-strike.

· An information operations capability able to penetrate, manipulate, or deny an adversary’s battlespace awareness or unimpeded use of his own forces.

· A joint communications grid with adequate capacity, resilience, and network management capabilities to support the above capabilities as well as the range of communications requirements among commanders and forces.

· An information defense system to protect globally distributed communications and processing networks from interference or exploitation by an adversary.“ (Ibid, chapter 13)

Conclusion - Cyber and Infowars, Hype or Reality?

Some questions have been asked here: The relationship between the foreign policy design of the US and the boosting of cyber- and information war issues. Is it ‘grand design’, or simply the result of erratic decisions by different bureaucracies and the current administration? It seems to be much less than a conspiracy and much more, than only a new trend in military affairs.

If information warfare is defined as being everything between gossip, C-something-W and supercomputing, there is nothing new on earth, beside the advanced channels of distribution and facilities processing data.

If information and cyberwarfare are concepts to change the mind, the consciousnes, the perceptions of the enemey elites prior to or in combat about their reality and selfunderstanding, it is as old as Sun Tzu’s aphorisms about the ‘art of war’, approximately 2000 years old and heavily quoted in US papers. In the 20th century this approach has been called psychological warfare or reflexive control.

If the debate is about the real battlefiled in the sense of all subtypes of cyberwar, from C2W .. to .. C4ISR and RMA, it is mainly about increased lethality over long distances and in real-time. It is about power-projection without physical presence. These intention is in all its aspects most advanced by the US. And it implies a politcal notion.

Cyber and Netwar in the sense of hacking global or national information infrastructures (no matter if they are civilian or military) by individuals, NGOs or nation states and causing severe damage on lives are not easy to assess. But probably it is an intended alarmist view and perhaps a hype of extraordinary dimension. A discrimination between facts and fiction is urgently necessary. The real armed conflicts of the 1990s in the real world were fought by light and medium fire arms (in some cases by heavy arms as well) and land-mines and really killed about 2 million people, mostly innocent civilians. DARPA’s scenario of the exercise ‘The Day After’, reported by Anderson & Hearn (1997), taking place in May 2000, where hacker attacks effect damages in the US and by allies in Europe and the Gulf region on the financial, ground transport, electric and air traffic system, on oil supplies and CNN broadcasting does not provide any plausiblity by which means and methods or by which technical scenarios these attacks might be based on, or conducted. The only assumption provided is talking about low barriers to enter the networks.

There are mainly four arguments rejecting netwar as life threatening dangers of a larger scale: (a) large scale attacks, as described by ‘the day after’ scenario cannot be conducted by individuals or even large scale NGOs or subnational entities; (b) if such scenarios indeed would become reality, so, most likely in the morning twilight of a large scale war, where the political tensions and the actors would be known; (c) everybody who attacks information systems leaves an electronic trace and may be indentified; (d) to back up widely dispersed IT and communication systems is much easier and cheaper on the carrier level as well as on the software level, as to defend closed systems. Open systems based on universial protocols, such as TCP/IP or derivates, used in internet, intranets and extranets, are from their principle architecture in multiple ways redundant. (Even NATO considers operating ‘hidden’ WEB pages with classified information for the members of the Partnership for Peace Program. Successfully hacking of those pages would cause not more ‘damage’ than revealing classified information.)

To sum it up: In my view WMD, poision gas, biological or radiological weapons or crude nuclear weapons in the hand of terrorists[18] would constitute a much severer threat to security than hacking NII’s or GII. There are only a very few speculative scenarios which all circle around nuclear weapons of the US and Russia that really could cause desaster:

„Fifth, it it is important to recognize that soon both sides (US and Russia) will have the ability to use holograms and other IT manifestations that will offer the opportunity to completely fool one another both on the battlefield and through the airwaves /.../ A hacker simulating an incoming ICBM nuclear attack on the radar screens of the military of eihter Russia or the United States is but one manifestation of this threat“. (Thomas 1998)

Hacking of the launch codes of strategic nuclear weapons which might effect paralysis of either Russia’s or the US ability to launch a counter strike, the attempt to get positive control over each others nuclear arsenals, the attempt to achieve electronic control over early warning satellites, or finally to retaliate a ‘real’ or ‘perceived’ hacker attack on the nuclear command and control chain by nuclear weapons belong to the same category of hyper-alarmist views.

It cannot seriously be answerd if these scenarios pose a real danger to mankind. Only a few is known in the unclassified literature about the real technical nature of the nuclear command and control chains of the US and Russia. The danger is much more about the nature of nuclear weapons themselves.

Coming to final conclusions, Plato said in his ‘Gorge-Allegory’ that cognition and knowledge are always a ‘shadow’ of reality. In this sense he was an early ‘constructivist’ meaning that a discrimination between a ‘real’ reality and a ‘constructed’ reality is very hard to realize, if not even impossible. Psychological and sociological theories in the 20th century go as far as claiming the construction of social ‘reality’ only is a function of perception. Putting Plato on a modern language track in cyber issues would mean to find the border line between hype and reality. Günther Anders, an Austrian philosopher had forecasted in 1960 the principal vulnerability and all related follow-on problems of technical based and interconnected networks in his equation „Apparat=Welt“ (Anders 1986, 111): „Die katastrohische Gefährlichkeit einer solchen Universalmaschine liegt auf der Hand. Würde nämlich - was bei der Degradierung aller Apparate zu Apparatteilen der Fall wäre - die totale Interdependenz zwischen allen ihren Teilen Wirklichkeit werden, dann würde jedes Versagen eines Teiles automatisch den ganzen Apparat in Mitleidenschaft ziehen, also still legen“ (Anders 1986, 114).

There is almost nothing more to add, beside my assumption that more empirical research seems necessary to understand the interaction between the military and the new information technologies. As well it is important to establish an early waring system of ‘watchdogs’ to identify as early as possible a perhaps starting information war arms race.

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[1] Van Creveld (1985), 264, quoted after Arquilla, John; Ronfeldt, David (1997): Cyberwar is Coming!, 58, Footnote 11, has put it that way: „From Plato to NATO, the history of command in war consists essentially of an endless quest for certainty ...“

[2] George J. Stein has argued in his contribution for the AEC-Symposion „Information Warfare: Words Matter“ that both documents are essential in understanding the doctrinal level of IW. In addition he discriminates in the sub-concepts: „There might be other applications of IW in military operations and there might be applications of IW in other than military operations. Likewise, C2W now applies ‘across the range of military operations and at all levels of conflict.’ That is, it is not constrained to a simple battlefield objective of disrupting the enemy commander’s command and control of his troops. The Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare, then, is probably the best window through which to observe the evolution of InfoWar.“

[3] The document can be found on the Web: http://www.ndu.edu/ndu/inss/actpubs/act003/a003ch10.html

[4] Quoted after Conetta; Knight (1998, 32).

[5] In Feb 1998 IBM got from the Department of Energy (DoD) the contract to develop the world fastest super-computer with a 500 million US-$ budget for nuclear weapons-test simulations under the stockpile stewardship program. The computation power is announced to reach 30 teraflops by 2001 and 100 teraflops by 2004.

[6] Which might turn out as a ‘bloody’ later on.

[7] By the way: Russians have called the attempt to influence others in their behavior and against their will in the tradition of Iwan Pawlow ‘reflexive control’.

[8] What one might bring down to a terrible triple M stultification, Mc Donalds, Michael Jackson and Madonna.

[9] Namely: Joint Pup 3-13.1, the Quadrennial Defense Review of 1997, the Joint Vision 2010 concept and the April 1998 report of the DoD to Congress.

[10] http://www.fas.org/man/docs/qdr/index.html, 5.

[11] NATO PRESS COMMMUNIQUE M-DPC/NPG-1(98)72, 11. June 1998.

[12] The nuclear weapons, used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki are well known. In addition US armed forces used ‘agent orange’ a chemical weapon in the Vietnam war and even the posion gas sarin in Laos, as Time Magazin reported on June 15, p 37-39.

[13] Gen. Eugene Habiger, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, toured weapons sites across Russia over the past week to learn more about how the world's other major nuclear power controls its most lethal weapons. `I want to put to bed this concern that there are loose nukes in Russia,' Habiger said in an interview with The Associated Press before flying back to the United States. `My observations are that the Russians are indeed very serious about security.' (Associated Press, 7. June 1998).

[14] NATO Press Communique M-DPC-2(97)147, 2nd Dec. 1997.

[15] These, e.g., are just selected topics of the budget of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) for fiscal year 1998, US-$ millions. Source: http://www.arpa.mil/documents/98_budget.html

Title FY 1996 FY 1997 FY 1998 FY 1999

Defense research sciences 76.459 90.701 76.009 80.936

Next generation internet 0.000 0.000 40.000 40.000

Computing sys & comm technology 361.528 314.969 341.752 371.471

Tactical technology 120.440 121.520 155.329 177.995

Integrated command & control tech 44.395 59.672 37.000 40.000

Advanced electronics technologies 389.610 360.288 277.044 282.668

Command, cont'l & communications sys 0.000 102.996 163.800 172.600

Sensor & guidance technology 0.000 108.360 166.855 200.582

Agency total 2.269.202 2.140.436 2.204.403 2.271.934

[16] For an overview look at: ‘Explosive Alliances. Nuclear Weapons Simulation Research at American Universities, compiled by the Natural Resources Defence Council. http://www.nrdc.org/nrdcpro/expl/eainx.html

[17] As CIA stated, this budget increased in 1997 slightly about 0,2 percent compared with fiscal year 1996. It was the second time since 1945 that these well buried expenditures have been released. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25. March 1998, p 4.

[18] I want to mention that especially in case of scenarios like the theft of nuclear weapons by terrorist of subnational groups, the alarmist position seems also much exagerated.