[iwar] Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram on cyberterror

From: China Military Monitor <defense_watch@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun Jun 15 2003 - 14:19:25 PDT

In response to Madhu Menon's post on India GII about
Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram on cyberterror (I am a
long-time subscriber to Bruce's newsletter)

That is why these are called WMA - Weapons of Mass
Annoyance or Weapons of Mass Disruption, not as
terrorism.

Weapons of Mass Annoyance is part of the doctrine of
war without spilling a drop of blood -- economic
warfare, psychological warfare, media manipulation,
ruining reputations of political leaders, disrupting
the social and economic systems of your rivals,
wasting their time and money, causing strikes and
bandhs, etc. without actually spilling a drop of
blood.

China is specializing in warfare without spilling
blood, drawing lessons from Sun Tzu's advice that the
best general is the one who avoid war at all costs,
but induces the enemy to accept your goals and beliefs
as his goals and beliefs.

Think of how China would dominate Asia if it reduced
the whole of India to the level of Bihar, by entirely
"non-violent" means of social and economic disruption.
Refer you all to last year's Cariappa Memorial
lecture.

On the other hand, Middle East terrorists, Kashmiri
and Khalistani groups, LTTE, IRA etc want to kill 100
people with 10,000 watching to achieve their publicity
goals of drawing attention to their cause. Long drawn
out bloodless warfare is not for them since it does
not satisfy their immediate objectives of territorial
control.

As per the "War of a Thousand Slices" doctrine of
"Asymmetric Warfare" so brilliantly conceived and
executed by Generals Mirza Aslam Beg and Javed Nasir
in the 1980s, and capably implemented by Generals
Jehangir Karamat, Durrani and Musharraf, Pakistan has
always very carefully calibrated its real-world
terrorist (blood-spilling) activtities in Kashmir and
Punjab to be below the critical threshold where they
would invite retaliation by India. Their attacks are
well spaced out over time several weeks apart and are
enough to tie up a million Indian forces, but are not
considered provocative enough for India's armed forces
to justify crossing the LoC.

Hacking of websites by script kiddies (Indian Snakes
from India, dozens of Pakistani groups, etc) is a mere
annoyance and mere loss of face / loss of credibility
only rather than a real threat.

What India has to really worry about are espionage by
penetration of its telecom networks and computer
systems, C4I of military systems, electronic warfare &
electronic counter warfare, etc. Several major Indian
systems have already been penetrated and compromised
and sensitive data stolen for several years.

The second threat to India is compromising / sabotage
of the electronic and infosystems and real time
control systems of its defence equipment, avionics,
radars, air control, etc.

Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad
Advisor, Information Warfare & Revolution in Military
Affairs
Center for Monitoring Chinese Military Activities

=====
Centre for Monitoring Chinese Military Activities

Ambassador Preet Mohan Singh Malik, IFS, Chief Executive, preetmalik@vsnl.net
Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad, Advisor (Revolution in Military Affairs, C4ISRT), rvp@50g.com, rvp@r67.net

http://www.china-india.org, http://www.sino-indo.org
Mailing lists at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/china-strategy, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/china-india

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Received on Sun Jun 15 14:20:09 2003

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