[iwar] [fc:Information.as.a.Weapon]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-11-04 20:45:15
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2001 20:45:15 -0800 (PST)
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Information as a Weapon

Darwin Magazine, 11/2/2001
<a href="http://www.darwinmag.com/read/110101/weapon_content.html">http://www.darwinmag.com/read/110101/weapon_content.html>

Whether Armed Conflicts occur in a once-bucolic countryside, mountainous
terrain or urban cityscape, battlefields are confusing places filled
with noise, uncertainty and never enough reliable information. 
From the rear command positions to the forwardmost points of engagement,
decision support suffers from data corruption, knowledge gaps and a
crippling lack of timeliness under dangerous, rapidly changing
circumstances. 
What a modern military wants and needs is dependable real-time
intelligence, shared among networked devices that can help dispel the
fog that warfare's inevitable chaos generates. To that end, the U.S.
armed forces are now jointly developing a battlefield strategy, and sets
of systems and mobile equipment that will turn every soldier into both a
gatherer and a consumer of up-to-the-instant information about the
developing environment. 
Welcome to the new world of network-centric warfare, where technology
pushes power up to the command level, and information that would
normally be received via a radio and plotted on a map can be readily
seen with the click of a mouse. This same technology also pushes power
down to the battlefield, to the young Marine who can let slip the dogs
of war with the tap of a stylus. 
In the not-too-distant future, soldiers in combat will use handhelds and
minicomputers to connect to a wireless communications network that
tracks other units on the ground, and military assets in the air and at
sea. 
This real-time tracking capability will not only replace the repetitive
and sometimes frantic radio calls to establish a soldier's location but
could also turn infantry soldiers into military strategists. 
With so much information at their fingertips, soldiers in combat will be
able to make field-level decisions about how, where and when to move
their troops. For the commander sitting miles away in the high-tech war
room of a naval vessel offshore, the wall-size, broad-scale version of a
soldier's handheld map will provide a complete tactical picture of the
military operation. This eagle-eyed view of the battlefield will give
operation commanders highly detailed, real-time situational information
to make decisions faster and target their troops and firepower with
greater accuracy. 
Of course, such a new approach to technology raises a number of
technical and cultural questions for the military. What happens when the
network that supports these technologies goes down or is hacked? What
happens if the technology falls into enemy hands? Given the power that
information has to break down hierarchies, how will the notoriously
tradition-bound ranks of the military adapt? Will the brass jealously
guard information and the status it provides, or radically change their
training methods to build a different kind of soldier? What happens when
every squad leader in the field has the same information in front of him
that his commander has? Will squad leaders continue to follow orders
without question or will they demand more input in the decision-making
process? 
As corporations have discovered, engaging technology to empower
employees, disperse control of information and flatten the hierarchy can
often bring unexpected-sometimes even unwelcome-ripples of change. In
testing out these new technologies, the Marines and other armed services
are focusing pragmatically on the technology's usability and the
challenges of building a strong, secure network. But to their credit,
they are also starting to explore the domino effect that these
technologies may have on long-standing roles, the new kinds of training
that may be required and how the technology will fit into-and perhaps
disrupt-military culture. 

IF THE FERVOR OF Navy and Marine honchos is any indication, the
military's approach to technology is about to change dramatically. In
June, 5,000 military personnel from the Army, Navy and Marine Corps
converged on Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base near San Diego, for
Kernel Blitz-two weeks of high-tech war games. The purpose of the
exercise was to demonstrate that America's armed forces are on the verge
of taking a quantum leap in their use of technology and to explore its
impact on military missions. 
Technologies (such as those described in "Ready, Aim, Wired," right)
give ground troops not only a better sense of where they are but also a
highly accurate perspective of the entire battle landscape-something
that until now even their commanders have been without. Military leaders
think the technology will make the U.S. forces faster, fiercer, safer
and more responsive to the enemy's movements. However, insiders predict
that the technology will also transform the military in other
ways-making it more democratic and entrepreneurial, and less chained to
the command and control ethos that has historically governed every
aspect of military life. 
One of the central goals of network-centric warfare is to extend the
reach of military forces inland, while keeping warships-such as the USS
Coronado used in the recent Kernel Blitz exercises-well off the coast
and out of harm's way. The Navy's wide-area-relay network (WARnet) is
just one of the ways the military plans to expand its reach. 
WARnet is a wireless digital communications network that provides
ship-to-shore and unit-to-unit connectivity in a 100-by-200-mile area of
operations. The WARnet connections are made through a series of sea- and
land-based mobile nodes and airborne radio relays. These links allow the
same operational picture to be displayed in command centers aboard the
Coronado offshore, in mobile command centers onshore and on computers
carried by Marines engaged in combat. 
Unlike an office network where a user has to plug a laptop in to a
network connection, WARnet is a wireless network, transparent to its
users, that dynamically reconfigures itself as the nodes-think miniature
cell phone towers-move around the battle area. Airplanes, helicopters,
ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carry the nodes, or
packages in military jargon. The Dragon Eye, a UAV that was tested at
Kernel Blitz, is a 4.5-pound aircraft with a 4-foot wingspan that can be
dispatched to provide real-time pictures and data on enemy movement and
targets in over-the-hill areas that a Marine ground unit can't see. 
Information flows into the WARnet from a variety of sources: from a unit
commander calling for fire on a handheld, to a battalion commander
sending intelligence information via an instant message on his
minicomputer, to enemy location information transmitted by a UAV. The
epicenter of that data flow is an offshore headquarters (referred to as
the ECOC: experimental combat operations center) aboard the Coronado.
Here in a dimly lit, high-tech work center in the belly of the ship, the
combat commander can gather information from across the battle
space-air, land and sea-and make decisions based on the constantly
changing elements of the operation. 
During Kernel Blitz the GPS receivers carried by each Marine allowed Lt.
Gen. Michael Hagee, the commanding general of the I Marine Expeditionary
Force, to watch a simulated attack from the ECOC in incredible detail.
"We could see the helicopters move and folks coming out of them and
moving on to the objective," he says. "Based on enemy intelligence,
reporting and UAVs, we could see where the bad guys were as we watched
the whole thing unfolding on the ground." 
While Marines on land have to make on-the-fly decisions about how to
move and where to fire, the officers in the ECOC will often be able to
see the enemy approaching before the ground unit does. Not only will
they be able to share that information with them by entering it into the
WARnet, they can anticipate the unit's needs by sending backup or aerial
firepower even before it is requested. 

NEW MILITARY TECHNOLOGIES have always outpaced advances in military
tactics. In the Civil War, the interior grooves of the new rifled musket
caused bullets to spiral when they were fired, making them more accurate
at longer ranges. However, soldiers were accustomed to gathering en
masse and charging their opponents, waiting to fire until they were in
close range. Because they were never trained to change their tactics
along with their weaponry, they couldn't take advantage of the new
rifle's capabilities. 
Similarly, technologies such as WARnet and the gadgetry at Kernel Blitz
will be wasted unless the tactics they support are also examined. 
While experiments like Kernel Blitz are helpful, some experts believe
that the armed forces will need more than the occasional large-scale
experiment to fully understand the forces of change at work within this
technology. They will need to fundamentally rethink the structure of
their reporting relationships from command and control to one that is
more flexible and less hierarchical. 
It's a concept that retired Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper of the Marine
Corps refers to as "being in command but out of control." He likens the
military of the future to a society of ants or termites that perform
tasks like gathering food and building structures with no apparent
hierarchy. The key is for the whole organization to understand the
intent of the operation and organize itself to accomplish that task. 
Thus, if you have Marines who understand their mission and purpose, they
will organize themselves to accomplish it, and the commander's role is
to give feedback as to how well they are accomplishing the task rather
than to control every step of the operation. The real fear in employing
network-centric warfare is not that troops will do too much with the
information that is given to them-dropping missiles at a soldier's
whim-but that they might do too little, still waiting for orders rather
than taking the initiative themselves. 
The burden of making this new technology reach its full potential will
not be felt in the labs where next-generation technologies are being
developed every day, but in the classrooms and on the training fields
where an advanced version of the prototypical U.S. soldier will have to
be built. "They're going to have to have longer service [with the
military], and be more professional in terms of their education and
experience," says Van Riper. 
Instead of a young sergeant armed with a handheld, the military may want
a more seasoned military strategist-perhaps even someone with an
advanced degree who can think about what he is seeing in the field
within a larger context and keep the technology in perspective. As Van
Riper, a self-proclaimed technology skeptic, pronounces, "I'd rather
have an expert with a pencil and paper than an idiot with a computer." 
The military's approach to testing offers hope that the armed forces
will bend the technology to their will rather than simply be led by it.
The strength of network-centric warfare, as Adm. Dennis Cutler Blair,
commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith in Hawaii,
conceives it, is that it is driven from the bottom up. The individuals
who have the greatest influence on choosing the most effective
technologies to pursue are not the white-coats in the labs but the
soldiers in the field who give a great deal of feedback about their
needs, how the technology fares and the glitches they encounter. 

WHILE WARNET IS STILL prone to spotty network outages, of greater
concern is the potential for deliberate outages caused by enemy hackers.
Most of the network has been NSA Type 1 certified, which means that it
meets the highest government standard of encryption. However, the Navy
is not taking any chances and has put the network through a series of
penetration tests where internal expert hackers try to bust in. So far
none have been successful. 
Maintaining the security of the handhelds and minicomputers will be more
challenging. In the confusion of combat, they will undoubtedly fall into
enemy hands, and without adequate security, it would be easy to send out
false data or reports. 
The various problems created by technology are going to introduce a new
set of needs and roles within the military. For example, instead of
soldiers with mechanical experience, units will need individuals trained
as electrical engineers who can fix handhelds and computers that have
gone on the fritz. One of the pitfalls of relying too heavily on
technology is that it can give the user a false sense of superiority.
During the conflict in Mogadishu, Somalia, U.S. troops had all the
advantages of technology and weaponry on their side but were still
unprepared for the tactics of the tribespeople because they didn't
understand their culture. "There's a certain arrogance about the
advantages that technology gives you," Van Riper says. What was needed
in that situation was not more advanced technology but fighting forces
that could think like cultural anthropologists. 
The understanding that most senior officers currently have of what this
technology will mean to the armed forces is limited to sound bites and
bumper sticker slogans, according to Van Riper. "[They say], 'If you see
the battlefield, you win the war. That's like me saying, 'If I see the
chessboard, I win the game,' when of course a master would still beat
me." 
While the battle between the technology and the culture of the armed
services is far from over, there is some hope-particularly in the Marine
Corps, where there's a lot of thought being given to technology and the
future of the armed forces. It's a future, says Col. Russell C. Woody,
operations officer for I Marine Expeditionary Force, for which the
Corps' values of honor, courage and commitment has prepared them. "Even
though we live by traditions, the Marine Corps is accustomed to change,"
he says.

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