A Comment on Cyberwar From a Review

What people who should know better still keep forgetting is that cyberspace, however you define it, is bigger than the Internet. It’s much, much bigger than the World Wide Web, which is just the sexiest part of the Internet: Software from Microsoft Outlook email to SCADA controllers for the electric grid use the Internet but not the Web. And the most crucial networks are not connected to the Internet at all: Matthew Broderick in Wargames aside, you can’t take over a missile launcher from your home computer.

Yet most discussion about cyber threats boil down to stopping bad people from doing bad things online. That’s adequate for most private sector organizations and even government agencies – but it’s just the tip of the ship-killing iceberg for the military and intelligence world.

An iceberg is a particularly appropriate analogy because one crucial insight comes from the concept called “Air-Sea Battle,” a brainchild of the Navy and the Air Force. Militaries have been messing with each other’s radios and radars for generations, transmitting deceptive signals to spoof and jam them. But if the enemy’s radios and radars are run by computers – and most now are – you can also transmit signals to hack them. Then, if the enemy’s computers are linked together – and America’s certainly are – your virus can spread throughout their network.

You don’t need the enemy to connect his network to the Internet. You don’t even need a spy or patsy to download a virus off the Internet onto a thumb drive and then stick the thumb drive into the secure network, as almost certainly happened with the Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear program. You just need the enemy’s radios and radar to receive incoming signals – which they have to do in order to function.

That’s why the US Navy is working hard to figure out exactly what every system on its ships is transmitting and receiving. That’s why the most in-the-know advocates for the contentious F-35 – the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps Joint Strike Fighter – talk about it launching not just missiles and bombs but viruses.

The second crucial insight comes from the Army-led “Strategic Landpower” initiative, although the idea is so nascent it hasn’t got a name. Cyberspace may seem ethereal and intangible, but every 1 and 0 comes from some physical object – a computer, a wireless transmitter, a cable – and the vast majority of those objects are on land. So do the vast majority of the users: Social media aside, you can’t literally live on the Internet, you live on the ground. So ground troops can still kill or capture you. Soldiers can take over your Internet Service Provider, not by hacking it, but by marching into its offices and pointing guns at people’s heads until they do as they’re told.. Even in an age of global electronic networks, it still matters who has local, physical control.

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