Information Attack:
Information Warfare In 2025
A Research Paper
Presented To
Air Force 2025
by
Professor George J. Stein
Air War College
August 1996
2025 is a study designed to comply with a directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force to examine the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future. Presented on 17 June 1996, this report was produced in the Department of Defense school environment of academic freedom and in the interest of advancing concepts related to national defense. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the United States government.
This report contains fictional representations of future situations/scenarios. Any similarities to real people or events, other than those specifically cited, are unintentional and are for purposes of illustration only.
This publication has been reviewed by security and policy review authorities,
is unclassified, and is cleared for public release.
Chapter
Information Attack is defined by the USAF as either "directly corrupting adversary information without changing visibly the physical entity in which it resides." or "activities taken to manipulate or destroy an adversary's information without visibly changing the physical entity within which it resides."
This essay argues that the proper understanding and future development of information attack, based on USAF information warfare competencies and systems, is the key to information dominance. It is likewise argued that a central obstacle to a future information warfare capability is that the words and definitions currently used among the Joint Staff and the armed forces to guide future development in IW are unclear, confused, and often contradictory as they fail to distinguish IW from Command and Control Warfare (C2W) and fail completely to incorporate USAF views on information attack.
The future potential in information warfare to substitute precise and discriminate credible information- whether by the methods of C2W (deception, PSYOP, or other means) or information attack- to a precise and discriminate target decision maker is the essence of decisive maneuver as it may position the adversary in space and time, by his own decision, in a fatally disadvantageous strategic situation. Information attack is not so much perception management as orientation management. Information is both the target and the weapon: the weapon effect is predictable error.
In future operating environments marked by ambiguity, speed, and precision effect, it will be the relative or differential advantage in information, information processing, and communication and information security that will provide the narrow margin for victory. Future USAF mastery of information attack, through air and space power unconstrained by artificial notions of battlefield-only command and control warfare, will provide the capability for asymmetric strategic response based on decisive and differential information advantage.
The strategic problems faced by the United States in the five 2025 alternate futures and the strategic problem faced in the intermediate world of 2015 identified in the Air Force 2025 Study are identical. The strategic problem faced by the armed forces in any of these futures is the same. "The true aim," as B. H. Liddell Hart observed, "is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous so that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this."1 The question is whether information warfare and information attack can create this strategic situation in 2025 or even as early as 2015.
For the purposes of this essay, and for reasons which will hopefully become clear as the argument is developed, information warfare is defined as "actions taken to achieve relatively greater understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, and centers of gravity of an adversary's military, political, social, and economic infrastructure in order to deny, exploit, influence, corrupt, or destroy those adversary information-based activities thorough command and control warfare and information attack."
Information warfare is normally understood, following the Joint Publication (Pub) 3-13, Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare (C2W) definition, as "actions taken to achieve information superiority in support of national military strategy by affecting adversary information and information systems while defending our own information and information systems."2
Information warfare is currently defined by the USAF as "Any action within the information environment taken to deny, exploit, corrupt, or destroy an adversary's information, information systems, and information operations, while protecting friendly forces against similar actions."3 For the USAF, then, bombing an enemy telephone exchange with iron bombs or corrupting the adversary's telephone switching system through electronic warfare or a computer attack are all, equally, information warfare. It is the targets, not the method of combat, which define information warfare for the USAF.
Command and control warfare is defined, following Joint Pub 3-13, "Joint Doctrine for Command and Control Warfare (C2W)," as "a war fighting application of IW in military operations {that} employs various techniques and technologies to attack or protect a specific target set - command and control."4
Joint Pub 3-13 further defines C2W as the "integrated use of psychological operations, military deception, operations security, electronic warfare, and physical destruction, mutually supported by intelligence, to deny information to, influence, degrade, or destroy adversary C2 capabilities while protecting friendly C2 capabilities against such actions."5
For the USAF, C2W is simply "the effort to disrupt and destroy an adversary's command and control."6
Information attack is defined by the USAF as either "directly corrupting adversary information without changing visibly the physical entity in which it resides."7 or "activities taken to manipulate or destroy an adversary's information without visibly changing the physical entity within which it resides."8
The thesis of this essay is that the proper understanding and future development of information attack within the context of the USAF core competency of Information Dominance is the key to information warfare in the future.9 It is likewise argued that a central obstacle to a future information warfare capability is that the words and definitions currently used among the Joint Staff and the armed forces to guide future development in IW are unclear, confused, and often contradictory.
The USAF strategy for information warfare should be well advanced by 2015 and fulfilled by 2025 through its incorporation within the central USAF mission of the employment of air and space power. Air and space power will, as today, be conceived as global awareness, global reach, and global power. Information warfare, especially information attack, will be employed as an expression of global power made possible through global awareness and global reach. It will provide an essential component of the global presence through which national security objectives will be met and will meet the national military strategy of deterrence, promoting stability, thwarting aggression, and containing conflict, and, ultimately, projecting power to fight and win.
The key strategic issue will remain "not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous so that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this." Information warfare, especially information attack, will provide the differential advantage, especially through air and space power, to permit the United States to develop and employ asymmetric modes of operation at what are called currently the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of conflict. Asymmetric and differential strategy is the key to breaking the platform-to-platform thinking (tank-counter-tank, ship-antiship, etc.) that continues to dominate long-range strategic thinking inherited from the successful experience in industrial-age warfare. Information warfare is the key to asymmetric and differential strategy and, in the context of this essay, information attack as new forms of air and space power are the key to information warfare.
The development of asymmetric and differential strategy is required by the change in the range of potential military operations facing the armed forces in the emerging international security environment and the constraints consequent of both downsizing and the ever-increasing costs of traditional platforms.10 While there may not be a settled consensus on the precise outlines of the emerging security environment, virtually all studies recognize that an unusually high plurality of diverse and untraditional tasks will challenge America's armed forces. The contemporary security environment is viewed as a generic regional contingency (or two nearly simultaneous major regional contingencies such as North Korea and Iraq), a generic niche competitor such as transnational criminal syndicates or ideological terrorists, or a generic, and yet to emerge, peer competitor.11 The security environment can be seen as the Air Force 2025 Study's five alternate futures "Gulliver's Travails," "Zaibatsu," "Digital Cacophony," "King Khan," and "Halfs and Half-Naughts" and the 2015 "Crossroads" intermediate future. The security environment can be described more expansively as a range of high or low end global competitors, high or low end regional competitors,12 counter-insurgency, peace or humanitarian operations, dangerous industrial activities, weapons of mass destruction proliferation, collapsing or disintegrating states, and nonstate terrorism.13
The point is not that the armed forces will have to address all these challenges but that, despite downsizing and increasing platform costs, the military could be required to address any of these challenges. Absent the sudden emergence of a genuine competitor seen by the United States as having the capability to threaten American vital national security interests on a global basis, the armed forces, quite simply, must be able to do more with less or, perhaps as argued in this essay, must be able to do more by doing it differently. Information warfare through air and space power may provide the capability for asymmetric response through the differential advantage of information attack in most future security challenges.14
In the emerging information age and the operational environments postulated in almost all the alternate futures surveyed, military operations will reflect the characteristics of the larger societies.15 As most armed forces and many military operations become increasingly dependent on information,16 military winners will, like economic winners in the information-based economies, need to have that core competency identified by the USAF as information dominance whereby the United States has "greater understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, and centers of gravity of an adversary's military, political, social, and economic infrastructure" than any adversary has about the United States.17 Information independence and information security, whereby American military power projection and even mobilization are not vulnerably dependent on the global information infrastructure, will likewise emerge as central national security issues.18 Any discussion of information warfare, including information attack, must be understood to include equal or greater attention to defense.
The goal of information dominance, note well, is greater understanding, not total understanding. As in the emerging information economies - sometimes called winner take all economies - "victory" is often based on a very small margin or differential of talent, information, performance, or luck. It is the relative performance in those markets or activities in which having or being second-best is inadequate, even at lower cost, which brings disproportionate rewards.19 The Olympic gold medalist who is only two seconds faster than her silver second gets the running shoe endorsement contract. The F-16 pilot who locks on only two seconds faster gets the kill. By 2025, or surely by 2050, only will be nanoseconds.
Another novel characteristic of differential performance in information-based activities is the ability to duplicate and distribute the output of the differential activity more widely, more rapidly and at relatively lower cost. Once a recording company suspects it has a platinum compact disc among its releases, millions of additional copies can be quickly manufactured, distributed, advertised, and sold planetwide.20 Once one component of the distributed reconnaissance and surveillance satellite system locks on the target, the coordinates are duplicated and distributed by an information and communications meta-system to its customers planetwide.
The ability to conduct information-age warfare through the relatively better use of information-in-war and the ability to duplicate and distribute information warfare itself through information attack may provide the relative or differential "strategic situation so advantageous" of which Liddell Hart spoke that Sun Tzu's pinnacle of excellence could be achieved wherein the enemy is subdued by asymmetric response without battle.
Information warfare, information-age warfare, information-in-war, information, and information attack are intimately related, but they are not identical. Clarification is needed and some consensus must be reached without, however, prematurely establishing authoritative doctrine that could prevent the creative developments required to realize the future potential of information warfare. The Joint Staff was correct when it noted in Joint Pub 3-13 that the use of the term warfare in information warfare "should not be construed as limiting IW to a military conflict, declared or otherwise."21
