From: iw@all.net Subject: IW Mailing List iw/960111
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From: "Marcus J. Ranum" 
Subject: Re: IW Mailing List iw/960110
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 20:02:47 -0500 (EST)

>>mjr said:
>>	The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not "Information
>>Warfare," it was "Warfare Warfare."  Real people got killed by a
>>couple of Real Bombs dropped on a Real City by Real Aircraft for
>>Real Strategic purposes.
>
>[Moderator's note: The reason one might claim this was IW is that the
>dropping of the atomic bombs was designed to have a psychological impact
>on the Japanese.  They were dropped on civilian targets. ...

For lack of a better term this was known as "strategic" bombing during
WWII.  Presumably that's because "tactical" bombing actually helped in
some measurable way towards some measurable military objective.  If the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a psychological objective, it was
aimed at the Russians, not the Japanese.  And it clearly succeeded. 

But that's a digression.  The question is: "is strategic bombing
Information Warfare" and my response was no... 

If the civilian target aspect of the first test of nukes against cities
needs to be brought into the equation, then we need to levy a pure and
simple charge of terrorism against the allies.  The bombings of Dresden,
Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, as "strategic" targets (counter-strike against
civilians) were terror-war.  If terror-war is what the exponents of
Information Warfare are preaching, then once again, Information Warfare
is Old Hat.  Terror-war is nothing new.  Even the bible is full of
documented incidents. 

What I'm asking is for one of the proponents of "Information Warfare" to
make a coherent argument that it is something new rather than something
very old applied to new technology.  My argument is that if it is,
indeed, something old, then we should retain the name and shut down the
hype.  And that if it is something new, there should be elements of
ground-breaking military thinking that have not appeared elsewhere. 

>Is mjr asking us to define IW as war that doesn't
>use real hardware, kill real people, involve real places, or have
>strategic value?]

No, I am asking you to make a case that IW is actually something new, or
substatively different, from tactical intelligence and
counter-intelligence operations. 

Another way of putting my query would be that the proponents of IW seem
to be claiming that IW subsumes the entire Art Of War as we know it as a
subset.  I'm asking for a justification and elucidation of what [seems
to me an] absurd claim. 
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