Out of the Info Loop

Why information networks are crucial to modern warfare.

Bryan Alexander from the June 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Other American military thinkers worked out implications of the attack. RAND's David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla attributed the Allied success to the preservation of their own networks coupled with the disruption of the enemy's. From cases like this, Ronfeldt and Arquilla conceived a network-centric military paradigm, which they dubbed "netwar" (or sometimes "cyberwar"). Large armed forces operating in centralized command structures would not be suited for such fighting, they argued, and in fact would be vulnerable. Instead, small, heterogeneous units operating within a network would be the most effective agents. Digital networks, such as the Internet or a group's intranet, would become important battlefields.

With this, The New Face of War completes its picture of I.O.'s lineage: asymmetrical threat analysis, OODA loops, and finally netwar. The past established, Berkowitz proceeds to patterns emerging in the present, describing information warfare's new concepts in terms of zapping, swarming, and network defense.

Zapping, more formally known as "precision destruction," occurs when the combination of networks and successful information looping allows one side to pinpoint specific targets, both human and inanimate. A case in point is the aforementioned prewarned destruction of selected Serbian buildings during the Kosovo war, where carpet bombing became a thing of the past. Precision munitions -- "smart weapons" equipped with advanced sensing and guidance technologies, such as laser tracking and thermal sensors -- are an essential component of zapping, but they work well only within a secure and correct information network. Recall the inadvertent bombing of China's Belgrade embassy, which was purportedly caused by out-of-date maps.

Assassination, incidentally, falls into the zapping category. "The problem today," Berkowitz writes, "is that modern weapons are so accurate and modern intelligence and communications systems are so sophisticated that it often seems impossible not to target a particular person."

Swarming is a form of netwar in which multiple units suddenly converge on a surprised target. They sneak beneath enemy notice during the preparation for attack, then pounce. Berkowitz uses the example of Al Qaeda's 2000 attack on the USS Cole, in which a local cell was able to coordinate intelligence on American movements and their own small ships, agents, and explosives. Another example involves American operations in Afghanistan, where ad hoc teams of CIA agents, Air Force bombers, satellites, and ground units would combine to swarm Taliban or Al Qaeda units.

Like zapping, swarming is available to any force with the network components. In their 2000 book Swarming and the Future of Conflict, Arquilla and Ronfeldt point to Mafia operations, globalization protesters, and historical examples from Napoleon to the Viet Cong and from "swarming Soviet anti-tank networks that played such a brilliant role in defeating the German blitzkrieg in the Battle of Kursk" to "fast-moving Zulu impi, capable of marching over 40 miles per day, [that] would break into small units as they went into the attack, surrounding their opponents and swiftly destroying their cohesion."

Network defense is exactly what it sounds like. In netwar situations, the security of networks becomes central. A truly devastating attack through network superiority alone is unlikely, Berkowitz argues, as the incomplete information assault in Kosovo demonstrates. An electronic Pearl Harbor would be too hard to control, too difficult to keep from blowing back on the operator, and too easily fixed. Instead, network command should supplement other forces. "Information warfare is rarely an end in itself," Berkowitz writes. "It is always a means to get ahead of your opponent so that you can destroy him, or leave him so cornered he will give up."

But perhaps network command shouldn't be left to the Pentagon. For network defense reasons, Berkowitz attacks the Defense Department's current mix of state control and federal purchasing cycles, arguing that the result is a weakly defended Internet. Individuals and companies suspicious of the Big Brother approach seen in the Clipper Chip and Communications Decency Act expend energies in withdrawing or opposing state measures, while fewer enterprises develop products -- less powerful than they would have otherwise been -- to assist the feds. Berko-witz recommends instead that the government shift more of the onus for command of the nets to companies.

The result, in his view, would be a larger market and better results for net command, and more available to defense. Companies working without strong legislative oversight, he writes, would be more likely to develop better software, and have a more cooperative attitude toward the government, than would firms laboring under bureaucratic scrutiny and control.

This position stems not from libertarian economic arguments but from a sense of recent Internet history. During the 1990s the federal government tried to push the Clipper Chip, prosecute Phil Zimmermann for distributing homegrown cryptography, and mandate weaker software security. This caused government influence over increasingly suspicious I.T. companies to wane. Berkowitz also suggests that rather than developing new network warriors, the agency should hire already skilled network analysts part-time, as a sort of distributed resource team.

The New Face of War concludes with a survey of intelligence work, focusing mostly on the CIA. This covers a lot of familiar ground; what makes it refreshing is the context of information warfare (always central to the narrative) and seeing familiar operations through the insights of Boyd, Arquilla, and Ronfeldt.

While The New Face of War keeps its narrative anchored in information warfare's development, The CIA at War is too often unmoored. Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter, focuses primarily on the institutional transformation of the CIA under George Tenet's leadership and its impact on the war on terror. He offers a heroic portrait of a CIA director rebuilding the agency into a more agile, effective organization, partly along network lines. The book's historical model is intriguing, and it offers some new background about the topic, but its approach underestimates the cognitive and organizational shifts that information warfare entails.

The CIA at War offers a historical narrative to explain the present state of the CIA. Kessler shows how the agency's focus on the Soviet Union began and grew, with the CIA developing skills and methods imaginatively and successfully. The CIA's attention shifted to terrorism in the 1980s, starting with the successful campaign against the Abu Nidal organization. (Nidal's group had staged terror acts and won a growing global audience. The CIA fed its leader disinformation to stoke his innate distrust into violent, organization-destroying paranoia.)

The transition to fighting terrorism was difficult, marked by competing internal cultures, as cowboys (action-prone activists) and professionals (procedure-focused managers) struggled for institutional power. In addition, the Aldrich Ames affair proved destructive of agency trust and morale, as the high-profile mole's long-unchecked career cast doubt on the CIA's ability to police itself. Moreover, the absence of a mission as clearly defined as the Cold War left the agency somewhat adrift. Kessler criticizes two directors of central intelligence, James Woolsey and John Deutsch, for their inability to reform the CIA, arguing that they fostered managerial problems, failed to turn around morale losses, and lost bureaucratic turf to the Pentagon.

There is some useful information in Kessler's description of how the CIA developed structures for fighting terrorism and improved operational efficacy. Kessler points to a post-9/11 emphasis on low-level initiative and increased information sharing as ways of better "connecting the dots." Kessler's defense of the CIA's approach to Islamist groups -- the agency penetrates Al Qaeda and allies using local agents, not case officers -- indicates that Tenet continues to stress human intelligence gathering. Intriguingly, Kessler mentions in passing the CIA's recruitment of Muslim academics and mullahs to speak out in favor of the United States. "We are creating moderate Muslims," one source says. Kessler takes this at face value, though many readers will suspect that the real purpose in recruiting influential Muslims is to use them to spread disinformation.