Tag Archives: cyberwar

Where has Cyberwar Gone

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As others beside me have noted, one of the most astonishing things about the war in Ukraine is the fact that cyberwarfare does not seem to be playing a major role in it. To be sure, there has been what one source calls “a steady drumbeat of attacks, including disinformation campaigns, distributed denial-of-service attacks that temporarily knock websites offline, and ‘wiper’ attacks, which infect computer networks and render them inoperable by deleting all files. But no question of malware taking the place of bullets, shells, rockets missiles and bombs, small and large. No talk of countrywide water, gas, electricity, communication and transportation systems being knocked out by all kinds of oddly-named devices used by either side. Instead, old-fashioned kinetic warfare seems to be not only alive but kicking out ferociously in every direction at once. Just take a look at images filled with wrecked Russian tanks, or, on the other side, some photographs of what much of Mariupol now looks like.

Why the role of cyberwar seems to be so much smaller than expected I do not know. Judging by some articles on the topic that have surfaced on the Net, neither do others. Based on what decades of study have taught me about the relationship between technology and war, though, personally I think there are several possibilities. First, it may be that the difficulties an attacker faces in effectively penetrating an enemy’s computer network in such a way as to make a difference are greater than many experts had thought. Second, the defenders on both sides may have prepared much more effectively than anyone expected. Third, there is the question of secrecy. Meaning that, if there has ever been a field in which holding one’s cards, whether offensive or defensive, close to one’s chest is vital, this is the one.

Such being the situation, I want to provide a fourth explanation. Many of you will be familiar with the name of Giulio Douhet (1869-30). Douhet was a World-War I Italian general originally commissioned into the artillery. In 1922 he published Il dominio dell’aereo, almost certainly the most famous volume on the topic ever written and a cardinal point of reference for practically everything that has been written on it since. However, it is neither this book nor Douhet’s influence on airpower that I want to discuss here. It is, rather, his theories on the way technology, specifically including technological innovation, and war interact. In 1913 Douhet, while still only a major on the general staff, produced an article on that question. It is that article which I have used as my guide.

So here goes.

Stage A. A new technology is introduced. Normally this is done by the inventors and manufacturers who hope to make a profit and turn to the military as a potentially very large customer; also, perhaps, by all kinds of visionaries out to make their ideas known. The idea meets with skepticism on the part of defense officials and officers who, often not before being repeatedly harassed, are sent to examine it. Having conducted a more or less thorough investigation, they submit their report in which they claim that the new technology is simply a toy and will never amount to much. Good examples of the process are provided by the Zeppelin, heavier than air aircraft, the submarine, the torpedo and the tank, all of which were invented before 1914 and all of which initially met this fate. There is even a story about a British regimental commander who, upon receiving a couple of machine guns, told his men to take the “bloody things” to the wings and hide them.

Stage B. The manufacturers do not give up. Having perhaps enlisted (bribed?) a visionary or two, and directing at least some of their efforts at the public at large, they continue to push. Sometimes by offering their invention to an enemy of the country they first approached. Sir Basil Zaharoff, though not an inventor but a merchant, was the undisputed master in this game, selling warships to both Turkey and Greece. Slowly and gradually, the military undergo a limited shift. They are now ready to find out whether there is any way in which they can incorporate the new weapon or weapon system into the existing organizations without, however, acknowledging the need to change that organization in any fundamental way. At times they even start adopting a new invention in order to prevent change; as the German Luftwaffe did when it developed the V-1 as a counter to the early ballistic missiles favored by the land army and as the US Army did with the Redstone missile during the 1950s. Other good examples of the attempt to pour new weapons into old organizations are, once again, the heavier-than-air aircraft and the submarine. And the aircraft carrier, of course.   

Stage C. Quite suddenly, the wind changes. As older officers die or retire, younger ones—those in charge of the new technologies and in favor of them—start shouting their virtues from the rooftops. The more so if the technologies in question can be shown to have played a key role in some recent war. Military history is making a fresh start! They say. The new technologies are about to take over! Everything else is ripe for the dustbin! And so on and so on. Douhet himself set the example. By the time he wrote his book he had convinced himself that armies and navies were about to disappear and that airpower, like the Jewish God in one of the prayers addressed to him, “all alone would rule in awe.” Similar claims on behalf of aircraft were made in the US by General Billy Mitchel; whereas in Britain another officer, Brigadier general John Fuller, was doing the same on behalf of tanks. Nowadays they are being made on behalf of artificial intelligence and autonomous killing machines among other things,

Stage D. It becomes evident that, useful as the new technologies are, they do not provide answers to all problems. As invention is followed by counter-invention, pilots find that they cannot simply bomb the hell out of whomever they want at any time they want. Submariners discover that, without support from the air (later, satellites), their ability to find their targets is very limited. Tanks are threatened by anti-tank guns and missiles and are, moreover, only useful in certain, well-defined, kinds of terrain. Carriers, even such as rely on nuclear propulsion, have to be escorted by entire fleets of anti- aircraft and anti-missile destroyers, anti-submarine destroyers, and supply ships. And autonomous killing machines have a tendency to break lose and kill indiscriminately. Briefly, the new technologies must be integrated with everything else: strategy, tactics, command and control, logistics, intelligence, doctrine, organization, training and what not.

Stage E. Following the usual logistic curve, shown above, the process of reorganization has been driven as far as it will ever be and is now flattening out. Advanced, even revolutionary, weapons and weapon systems have become an integral part of the forces. Perhaps, as in the case of carriers from 1941 on, their lynchpin. By this time most of those who initially opposed the changes are gone. A new generation of officers has risen and takes things as they now are for granted.

Judging by what little is known of the role cyberwarfare is playing in Ukraine, we seem to be taking leave of stage C. Could it be that we are now entering stage D? And if so, what new gizmos will the future bring?

On War

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Clauzewitz in cyber

Some time ago, a Polish TV station asked me for an interview. I found the questions they asked to be quite interesting; so much so that I decided to put them to my readers and answer them in a slightly more organized way.

Here they are.

  1. Modern public opinion is convinced that globalization rules out wars. What can wars look like in times when everyone knows everything about each other and often everyone cooperates?

 

  1. I am not so sure about global public opinion. I am, however, convinced that, if that is indeed what people believe, they could not be more wrong. Just look at the history of the twentieth century. From 1900 to the present there has been hardly a single day in which peace reigned all over the world; including not one but two of the largest and most deadly armed conflicts ever fought. The number of wars that took place since 1945 alone has been estimated at 200 or so. Of those 200, a few are ongoing even now. Perhaps more seriously still, not one of the causes of war been eliminated. Not one! Not human nature. Not fear of an increasing powerful enemy, as Thucydides and Thomas Hobbes thought. Not economic competition, as Marx and Lenin believed. Not religion. Not nationalism. Not the sheer ruthless ambition of certain leaders who, like Louis XIV, believed that going to war was the suitable thing for a prince to do. And not the absence of a powerful and widely recognized judiciary capable of deciding conflicts and have its decisions implemented.

As to knowing everything—that is simply not true. Surprise attacks have always been possible and remain so today. Why? Because, while many of the facts concerning each country’s intentions and capabilities are often known, interpreting them—deciding how they are linked, what they mean, and where they are leading–is often very difficult. Example: they say that, in 1973, Israeli intelligence knew that a quarter of a million Egyptian soldiers were massed on the Suez Canal. Rumor has it that they even knew the name of every Egyptian pilot’s girlfriend. The only thing they did not know was that those 250,000 were going to attack within 24 hours.

Concerning interstate cooperation, do you really believe it is greater (or smaller) today than it was, say, back in 1795 when Prussia, Russia and Austria divided Poland among themselves?

  1. Do the thoughts of old theorists of war like Clausewitz remain valid for the 21st century?

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  1. Many years ago I wrote an article about exactly this question. I called it, “The Eternal Clausewitz,” and you can still find it on the Internet. The argument was that plenty of military theorists, seeking to be of practical use to commanders, have focused on the question, how to successfully wage war. Now this is a question the answer to which depends on circumstances, specifically including rapidly changing technology. As a result, in the great majority of cases hardly had their work been published than it became out of date.

Clausewtiz, ”the philosopher in uniform” [philosoph im Waffenrock] as he has been called, took a different approach. He did not try to teach commanders how to wage war. Instead he focused on the following two questions: what war is, and what it is waged for. The first question enabled him to identify the most important characteristics of war: such as its strategic nature—the fact that it is a duel between two sides, each of whom is free to do as he pleases—its tendency towards escalation, the role of emotional factors as opposed to merely intellectual ones, the fact that the defense and not the offense is the stronger form of war, the role played by uncertainty and chance, and so on. The second pushed him towards the most famous sentence he ever wrote, namely that war is the continuation of politics (here understood in the broadest sense possible) with an admixture of other means.

So, yes. Much of Clausewitz’s famous book, On War, still retains much of its relevance right down to the present day.

  1. How have the Internet and digitization changed war? Isn’t it true that on-line operations, being as difficult to detect as they are, hold the advantage over physical ones?

 

  1. The Net and digitization have changed war in the following ways. First, they enable war to be waged from any telephone link to any other. In other words, from any point against any point on earth; and this, regardless of distance, intervening geographical features (mountains, deserts, oceans) or movement. Second, not being waged with the aid of physical movement but at the speed of light, they can make their effects felt instantaneously. Third, as you say, it is often very difficult to determine who is responsible for what move.

Whether, in the conduct of cyberwar, the defense still retains is advantage over the offense is uncertain. But cyberwar does share many other characteristics of war on Clausewitz’s list. Including its strategic nature—move, countermove, counter-counter move, and so on—its tendency to escalate, the role played by uncertainty—one never knows what the enemy is going to do next–its role as a servant of politics, and so on.

All in all, I’d argue that it leaves Clausewitz as relevant as he had ever been.

AI

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J. Tangredi and G. Galdorisi, eds., AI at War: How Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning Are Changing Naval Warfare, Annapolis, Md, Naval Institute Press, 2021.

The book, which I got in hard copy from a friend, was written by a team of experts, all of whom have years of experience with computers, cyberwar, AI, the US Navy, or all four of those. Such being the case, I was hardly surprised to find it overflowing with praise (interspersed with a few warnings, what’s true is true) for everything that has to do with computers. What huge memories they have, incomparably larger and more easily accessible than those of the most capable humans. How fast they can process information and, thanks to the data links that connect them, pass it to the ends of the universe (and perhaps beyond, but let’s not enter into that here). How sophisticated their programs, specifically including AI, have become, enabling them to “see” a thousand connections that would probably have escaped humans even if they spent a thousand years looking for them. How modern warfare (and a thousand other things) would be inconceivable without them.

How dangerous it would be to allow America’s rivals to leapfrog it in this critically important field. Above all, what marvelous things computers and AI may still be expected to do in the future. How, though unable to replace humans, they can greatly enhance their capabilities. Provided some remaining fundamental problems (such as the difficulty they have in adapting to change and the vast surplus of information they generate) are solved, of course; and provided the necessary funding is made available. All this, against a background of naval, and by no means only naval, warfare that is becoming steadily faster and more complex.

I would be the last person in the world to even try and dispute all this. After all, who can argue with sentences such as the following? “For this modest shift in force design to yield the most benefit, DoD needs to co-develop C2 processes that can operate a more disaggregated force and to pursue a new innovation strategy that focuses less on gaps in the ability of today’s force to operate as desired and more on how the future could perform better with new capabilities that may create novel ways of operating (Harrison Schramm and Bryan Clark, p. 240).” “An important benefit of using machine control is that it enables C2 architectures to adapt to communications availability, rather than DoD having to invest in robust communication infrastructure to support a ‘one sizer fits all’ C2 hierarchy” (same authors, p. 241). And who cares that “the term ‘all domain’ has started to replace the US Army ‘multiple-domain warfare’ term. First use appears to be Jim Garamose, “US military Must Develop AI-domain Defenses, Mattis, Dunford say,’ US Department of Defense, April 132, 2018, htppsw//www.defense.gov/Newsroom./News/Article/Article1493209-us-military-must-develop all-domain-defenses-mattis-dunford-say” (Adam M. Aycock and William G. Glenney, IV p. 283).
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Not I. Nor, I suspect, anyone who is not a member, bona fide or otherwise, of the community which specializes in such things. All this might have convinced me to snap to attention and salute in face of the avalanche of expertise –the “select bibliography” alone amounts to forty pages—the authors have hurled at me. If I did not do so, though, then that was partly because of the following incident. I got my first inkling that the book, which had been sent to me by snail mail, had arrived here in my neighborhood when I found a computer-printed note in my mailbox saying that I should come and collect it from the nearby post office. However, I knew I could not do so immediately; here in Israel it is customary for the Postal Service to give you your letters and parcels not on the day you are notified but on the next one. However, this was a Thursday. Since the Israeli weekend starts on Friday and lasts through Saturday, doing so had to wait until Sunday. Sunday morning I went to the office, only to learn that, to send a letter or parcel, you now have to make an appointment in advance (by handy and application, of course). As a result a number of people, mostly elderly ones like myself, were milling about looking embarrassed, not knowing what to do and how to do it. A few, asking the overburdened staff for help but not getting it, were close to tears.

Fortunately I was there to receive an item, not to send it. This time there was no need for a handy. I handed in my note, typed my ID number into a little gadget they keep for the purpose, and prepared to sign my name onto the screen when I realized that the attached electronic pencil was missing; perhaps someone, overtaken by computer rage, had deliberately torn it away. So instead I used my finger—not to make a print, which the machine was unable to “understand,” but simply to leave some kind of mark—an X, as it happened. Much like the ones illiterates of all ages have always used and still use.

I suppose I was lucky. They let me have the book, which as is almost always the case with the Naval Institute turned out to be not only crammed with information but well and solidly produced. Not having to go home and visit the post office again—good!

In and out of the Start Up Nation, my experience may be unique. Or is it?