1. FBI fingers China
Strategic diplomacy & information
warfare
Strategic diplomatic implications
The role of international
organizations
Pavithra M,
Avinashilingam University.
2. FBI fingers China
Many unnamed countries are developing technologies to
complicate what the U.S. military refers to as “Power projection”
and to undermine morale at home.
The interagency, FBI-led National Infrastructure Protection Center,
uses a slide depicting China’s Great Wall in its standard
presentation on cyber threats, along with a quote from Sun Zi,
author of a treatise on war in about 350 B.C.
According to the Department of Defense, is the “art and science of
developing and using political, economic, psychological, and
military forces as necessary during peace and war, to afford the
maximum support to policies, in order to increase the probabilities
and favorable consequences of victory and to lessen the chances
of defeat.”
Strategic Diplomacy and Information Warfare
3. New tools and technologies for communication have created the
potential for a new form of psychological warfare to a degree imagined
only in science fiction.
This new form of warfare has become known as Information warfare
(IW).
In other words, the US armed forces need to develop a systematic,
capstone concept of military knowledge and diplomatic strategy.
Such a strategy would include clear doctrine and a policy for how the
armed forces will acquire process, distribute, and project knowledge.
Fictive or fictional operational environments, then, whether mass-
targeted or niche-targeted, can be generated, transmitted, distributed,
or broadcast by governments or all sorts of other players through
increasingly diversified networks.
4. The niche-manipulation potential available to states or private
interests with access to the universe of internetted
communications, such as the networks over which business,
commercial, and banking information are transmitted could easily
provoke financial confusions.
The target state would not know what had happened until too late.
Direct satellite broadcast to selected cable systems, analogous to
central control of pay-per-view programs, again offers the potential
for people in one province or region of a targeted state to discover
that the highest level of their leadership has decided to purge their
clansmen from the army.
To put it in the jargon of the info warriors, info-niche attack in an
increasingly multisource fictive universe offers unlimited potential
for societal-level net war.
5. The Strategic Diplomatic
Implications
The tools, techniques, and strategy of cyber war will be
developed and, during wartime, should be employed.
In many ways, cyber war is more demanding than net
war, but the resources, organization, and training
needed for cyber war will be provided once it’s war-
winning, and casualty-reducing, potential is grasped by
the national political leadership.
Such a development would certainly be prudent.
On the other hand, many of the tools and techniques of
battlefield cyber war can be applied to net war or
strategic-level IW.
6. This application may not be prudent; however, as there
are serious reasons to doubt the ability of the US to
prosecute information war successfully.
Info sphere dominance (controlling the world of
information exchange) may be as complex and elusive as
escalation dominance appeared to be in nuclear strategy.
It will certainly be expensive: the U.S. business
community and the U.S. armed forces are required to
devote ever more resources and attention to computer,
communications, and database security.
The resources and skills required for battlefield cyber war
are not insignificant, but the resources and skills required
to wage an information war at the national strategic level
would be massive.
7. Information on countries with offensive IW initiatives is less
authoritatively documented, but studies and foreign press
reporting help point to international organizations that probably
have such an initiative under way.
A 1996 U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report on the
threat to Defense D systems (otherwise known as Defense
DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]
systems) stated that the Department of Energy and the National
Security Agency estimated that 120 countries had established
computer Information on countries with attack capabilities.
At the low end, in June 1998, the director of central intelligence
stated that several countries are sponsoring IW programs and
that nations developing these programs recognize the value of
attaching their country’s computer systems—both on the
battlefield and in the civilian arena.
The Role of International Organizations
8. All of these countries publicly acknowledge to pursuing
defensive IW initiatives to protect their military information
capabilities or national information infrastructure:
India established a National Information Infrastructure-
Defensive group several years ago, apparently in
response to China’s growing interest in IW.
As recently as January 2001, the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) acknowledged the existence of an IW defense unit
whose mission is to protect military systems, but noted
that the electric utility had organized its own defense.
Taiwan also recently announced the creation of a task
force to study ways to protect their information
infrastructure from the growing IW threat from China.
9. Creation of a national defensive
information infrastructure program is
a good (and probably necessary)
indicator of an international
offensive IW initiative.
Defensive measures (deterrence,
protection, and restoration) are
difficult to implement without also
developing an understanding of
potential adversaries, investing in
computer and software
development, and creating a major
operational capability— all steps
directly applicable to creating an
offensive IW capability.
