Cyber War Will Not Take Place

by Thomas Rid on 6 October 2011 · 2 comments

Oh no!

Yesterday, 5 October 2011, is likely to be remembered as a historic day of the information age: Steve Jobs died. Barack Obama put it well in a tweet: “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.” Indeed the man’s accomplishments are awe-inspiring. Even if you learned of Mr Jobs’s passing on an Android-powered device, that is only possible because Apple woke up the sleeping market of tablets. And smartphones before that. And portable audio devices before that. And personal computers before that. Jobs has indeed redefined the digital age, as the New York Times put it.

The more and more global ubiquity of all these iSomething devices and their many competitors also means something else: almost everybody intuitively understands the risk associated with gadgets hooked up to the cloud. Everybody intuitively understands the risk of having sensitive data stolen and one’s life or corporation disrupted — through cyber attack. What intuitively makes sense on an individual and corporate level must also apply on a state level: the advent of cyber war is just a matter of time, even experts say.

But is it?

In a forthcoming article now available online, “Cyber War Will Not Take Place,” I argue that the answer is actually not so easy. That title of course is a provocation, infused with a bit of Giraudouxian irony (Jean Giraudoux, a French playwright, also inspired Jean Baudrillard’s confused book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place). Yet this provocation is meant literally here – as a statement about the past, the present, and the likely future. If we take the notion of war seriously, not as a metaphor, then cyber war has never happened in the past — it does not take place in the present — and it is highly unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future. Instead, all past and present political cyber attacks are merely sophisticated versions of three activities that are as old as warfare itself: subversion, espionage, and sabotage. That is improbable to change in the years ahead.

We at War Studies at King’s are currently teaming up with the Department of Informatics, just down the hall on the sixth floor of our Strand campus. By bringing together computer scientist and political scientists, we hope to open some new perspectives on an extraordinarily complex subject that is also sizzling hot — sometimes so hot that a cool, sober, and nuanced debate may be impeded. This debate has to be informed by at least two disciplines that usually don’t talk to each other very much. That makes the task considerably more difficult. So read “Cyber War Will Not Take Place” as a first cut.

The text is also, if I’m not mistaken, the first-ever article that the Journal of Strategic Studies published under Taylor & Francis’s iFirst scheme — you may treat the program’s Apple-inspired name as another tribute to Mr Jobs.

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MGEN Jonathan Shaw on ‘The Once and Future War’

by David Betz on 29 September 2011 · 4 comments

I’ve been busy lately trying to finish off a number of papers and reviews before graduate teaching gets started next week, hence the light posting on KOW. However, a friend sent me a link to this interview in World Policy Journal with British general Jonathan Shaw about future war. I suggest that you read all of it. He’s got some very sensible things to say, particularly about ‘cyberwar’. I’ll come back to that in a sec, though. He starts off with some good common sense:

  1. Asked about whether we’re on the cusp of some major technologically-driven change in warfare he rightly advises that we not get hung up on technology. Hear, hear!
  2. ‘…what we’re seeing now is the return of asymmetry, and I think it’s a huge idea.’ I wish we could ditch the term ‘asymmetry’ but his basic point–major war, if not obsolete (never say never), ceased to be the dominant paradigm a while ago. We should catch up with this trend.
  3. He name checks the Chinese future war text Unrestricted Warfare which I also think is highly worthwhile.
  4. And he talks of ‘…the major innovations of the next 20 years, the most profound is going to be organization. And the organizational focus needs to shift to adaptability.’ This is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser really, when you think that ‘adaptability’ (and agility, flexibility, etc.) have been the buzzwords of the defence community for…ever, practically. Why do we need to ‘shift to’ an adaptable organisational form? Why don’t we have one already?

But it’s where he talks about ‘cyberwar’ that I think he has the most useful things to say. Pitched a question about cyberwar’s ‘enormous power’ and potential as the ‘clean war of the future’ he belts back:

I would start by rejecting the language of “cyberwar,” because it is actually war pursued in cyberspace. I recognize that’s the way it is often phrased. Certainly, if you own Richard’s [Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism adviser under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush] book, Cyber War, it is a much sexier, eye-catching way of grabbing politicians’ attention. I define cyber as having to do with networked computers, and cyberspace as an information-space created by networked computers. “Cyberspace” is a manmade construct, which itself sits within the environment of the electromagnetic spectrum.

This environment is just another medium of delivery. It is similar in some ways to the land, air, and sea environments. The major difference is that cyberspace is not bounded by geography. So cyberwar, cybercrime, cyberterrorism, and cyberespionage are new—but only new insofar as they are new ways of waging war, crime, terrorism, or espionage. And so, it goes back to cyber just being part of a broader concept of warfare—the Chinese idea of unrestricted warfare. It’s just another tool for governments to use. What I see is a blurring of the distinctions between war and peace and what is civilian and what is military. I don’t really like this idea of cyberwar as a phraseology. It puts the emphasis too much on making the operations separate from mainstream activities, whereas we feel it is just another tool in our golf bag of capabilities.

…

The wider point I’m trying to make is that the problems within the cyber realm are not primarily military. They are hugely economic—industrial espionage, intellectual property, welfare rip-offs, crime—all are major threats to our economies. As Admiral [Mike] Mullen [chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff] and General [Sir David] Richards [Chief of the British Defense Staff] would say, the economy is a major security threat to our military capability.

And he does a good job of setting out the UK’s ‘stall’ in the new environment which I think is, typically, modest but less modest than our size might suggest. UK has some unique attributes and global connections which are still very relevant (though why no love for Canada?).

With regards to cyber, the reason for the U.K. getting involved is primarily for our own national interests in shoring up our cyber security. Of course, we recognize that cyber is not amenable to purely national solutions. Cyber is not bounded by space. So if we’re going to shore up our cyber security, then we need to head into bed with yourselves, the Australians, and others. I sense just in sheer resource terms we’ll always be the smaller brother. Whether we’re little or not I don’t know. We have certain advantages. We’ve got a historical legacy, which means we have interesting footholds in certain parts of the world which I think are very useful in trade and the global network. And through a quirk of genealogy, the U.K. has something in our gene pool which makes us the best code breakers in the world per capita. So we may be smaller, but I think we have certain qualities which makes the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. extremely close. I would describe it as little brother and big brother. It’s certainly a relationship of respect.

Actually, the little brother, big brother thing is a little cringe-making but what can you do. I also agree very much with his views on what cyberspace changes and how much–a lot but not as much as has been made out and in ways that are noteworthy for not having received as much attention as they should:

I don’t see cyberwar or cyber capabilities replacing your more conventional capabilities. There may over time be an alteration as to investment, but I see cyber as complementary to the other talents. Still, cyber operations have a low technology entry level, which puts anonymous hackers on par with terrorists. It’s another manifestation of the democratization of violence in the 21st century.

And finally it relieves me to hear generals saying things like the following about the securitisation of cyberspace.

I think there is real danger of over-militarizing cyberspace. Clearly the military have a place in cyberspace. But I wouldn’t like to see cyberspace defined primarily by militarization. I am nervous of an increasing militarization of the whole cyber content, really for two reasons. First, I don’t see this primarily as a military sphere. Cyber is an area that has huge commercial, civil, and government dimensions to it.

The second reason I don’t like this is the response aspect. It seems to me that if we’re going to tackle cyber as an issue, we can’t afford the people to assume that certain individuals have a monopoly on expertise—that someone else will be able to handle it. It would be a huge mistake if we led people to believe that they don’t need to do anything about cyber issues, because the big brother military will sort it all out. We need to make sure that everybody responds appropriately, which is why I don’t even like the word cyber anymore. I prefer to be talking about how to live in a digital age. That is the challenge facing us all.

I’d draw a parallel with civil defense—the education campaign that took place in Britain in the 1950s when the nation faced the threat of nuclear war. This was how to prepare people for an attack, and again, that’s the kind of pan-national response we need to teach people if we’re going to respond appropriately to the potential of a cyber attack.

It seems to me that in an era of stringent budget cuts it would be tempting to talk up the cyber threat–to make it bigger than it really is and to paint one’s own institution as the vital shield against the burgeoning danger. Does anyone doubt the cyber prefix’s ability to scare open the public purse? The general doesn’t do that; even more to his credit he locates the effect of cyber on conflict in a historical continuum and a social context which seem to me highly sensible

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The thing about intelligence…

by Rob Dover on 26 September 2011 · 13 comments

Pre-amble

I convene a final year module at my university called ‘intelligence and national security’, which is a curiously popular module, for which I’m always grateful. The module is my baby. Every year I try new ways of trying to engage my students with the one intellectual thing in life for which I have a real passion for, and this year I’m majoring on electronic media (in the organisation and group work bits). There will of course be a ‘regular’ reading list, but I also want to put on a weekly blog piece that will hopefully be one the things they definitely read every week, and more importantly (because this is one of the things I’m very keen on) via the comments section, they’ll get your views and get to engage with you too. University seminars are fine for debate,  but they are of course time-limited, the benefit of a blogging environment is that it can be done over a longer-time with varying intensity and can spur off into non-blogging contact etc. I want to give it a go, and if KoW people get tired of it, I’ll switch it over to my microsite.

Defining the oldest social practice

If prostitution is the oldest trade, then spying must surely be a very close second place. For as long as there have been things to protect, or advantages to be sought then there have been people engaged in activities geared at discovery or disruption.

Modern writing on intelligence has tied itself in artificial knots over whether intelligence is a practice that is ‘government only’, and certainly the literature reflects this, and is exclusively geared around protecting citizens, core infrastructure and securing diplomatic advantage. Any cursory glance at ‘intelligence’ would tell you that it really wasn’t a practice that was exclusively vested in the government realm (e.g. Shorrock, T. (2008). Spies for hire: the secret world of intelligence outsourcing. New York: Simon & Schuster), nor is it always about securing core interests or defending against threats, although some of these cases are highly contested and confused.

Part of this contest rests on where one sits in relation to various government and private agencies. For those environmental protestors in the Midlands who had the surveillance against them so vividly revealed by The Guardian newspaper in mid-2011, intelligence is a tool of repression, squashing their legitimate right to peaceful protest.  For those in the Maghreb and North Africa, who have risen up to overthrow their autocratic governments in early 2011, government security and intelligence services have long been aimed at restricting a plurality of political views and choices and as the recent Radio4 documentary ‘file on four’ asserted, they have done so with the assistance of European companies. But, conversely, for those who are not engaged in interest group activism, for those who work within the targets of the activists, or for those within the mainstream of political thought, government and private intelligence activity is there to ensure the smooth and undisrupted running of society and the economy.

So, we could follow the standard textbook definitions of ‘secret government information’, or ‘information that is analysed and used to inform and direct government action’ but it is clear that such a definition would exclude the private intelligence sphere (where it is not being used to assist government), and it crucially excludes an explicit reference to ‘power’. A private individual could (presumably illegally) collect an enormous amount of information on ‘target a’, but if they collected it and then never found a route to dissemination it is a powerless collection (think wikileaks without a publish button), but it is precisely the next steps that government agencies (and some private intelligencers), and who they feed into, that makes their intelligence effort more important, more worthy of note.

So, we might choose to separate out government intelligence from private intelligence. We might choose to think carefully about whether we want to create a very distinct tranche of activity called ‘analysis’, which is an activity that supports intelligence, rather than being intel itself. And we might want to treat intelligence differently from espionage, which is the form that is most obviously seen in popular culture like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and other literary cultural references.

So, we could think about intelligence very narrowly. And that would be perfectly fine. We’d know our machinery very well, and we might even be able to accurately discuss how one bit feeds into another bit, and what that means. But what concerns me – intellectually – is how the available depth of this narrowness has effectively sheened over the meta-picture of what this set of practices does to society.

So, what does this mean in the real world? Well, I was recently discussing the recent series of short films by Adam Curtis (for an example of his older work see here) with the brightest man I know. And he wasn’t keen on Curtis. Or any of the ideas he had presented. And I reflected on why I like the Curtis films so much, and it’s not because the ideas are overwhelming strong, it’s just that he’s found an overwhelmingly strong way of presenting them. He provides the viewer with a way into massive ideas, which are always grounded in eras when it seems it was possible to have big (and possibly crazy) ideas.

The ‘what this does to society’ question is, I think, really important. I am as sanguine as I think it is prudent to be about what government agencies do, but that is based on my politics being mainstream, my life being that of a dull academic and all the other trappings of being aspiring middle-class in England today. If I had a different set of background indicators, I might feel very differently. But even with my indicators, I feel very much less sanguine about the activities of foreign powers in the UK, and also private companies (see Thomas’ fine article on social networking) hoovering up every trail I generate.

 

So, the sorts of things we might want to observe here are about how we bond as a real society, the people physically near us, and as virtual communities. The fracture of society was most visibly and obviously seen with the recent riots (see posts passim), but it can be seen in a different way with the way we view our home communities (elongated commuting distances and times distance us from our community, for example) and also if we happen to live in Aberystwyth or Cumbria (for instance) we might also feel a very different sense of Britishness , and also a very different understanding of what London (as our main city and the financial and political hub of the country… including Cardiff.. means to them).

 

Such observations might also focus on the temporal dimension. If I happened upon a dozy thought when I was fourteen (and it is possible that it happened occasionally) there was nowhere for me to ‘post’ it. No facebook or twitter to capture it forever. No central sms or email log to enshrine it as part of the Dover intellectual trajectory… but now this lineage can be very easily captured, and very easily analysed and some of the ridiculous notions of youth that people will inevitably reject as they get older and see sense are tagged to them in a super-gluey way. Beware aspiring politicians…  But also be aware for future social interactions. Gone – perhaps – will be the mystery of people’s views and past-lives, and I can think of several friends whose every, er, liaison appears in technicolor surround sound on their facebook page.. some of the mystique around verbal interactions and body-language has been replaced by a keen eye for navigating around computer systems. In an off-the-cuff moment, Naomi Klein was undoubtedly right when she said that this electronic social network vision of the world was one dreamt up by socially awkward 15year old boys, who wanted to observe without interacting.

 

Nonsense aside, such technologies have altered the way we interact with each other, the way we manage self-identity and the way our personal trajectories can be observed and analysed. That classic politics debate about ‘public and private spheres’ has been conflated, and conflated very rapidly. I have yet to hit mid-30s and I can still remember the pre-technological revolution. .. So, when we think of intelligence, I think we have to also think about ‘surveillance’ be it passive or active, and societal relations. What is the surveillance for, and what are we gaining or losing because of it?

A final thought though:

 

Is it all about narrative?

 

One way of thinking about intelligence might be to think of it in terms of competing narratives. And I don’t necessarily mean this in serious IR theory terms, but more in an everyday understanding of the term.

The efforts against terrorism have been mainly about preventing atrocities, but they’ve also been (some connected and some disconnected) about shaping the political landscape, acceptable narratives, dominant discourses. During the Cold War the intelligence fight was partly about preventing military dominance or a decisive swing in the bipolar balance, but it was also about which particular world view was going to prevail – again, connected and disconnected – and one can see this far earlier than the Cold War, in the 1920s, in British universities  where Russian communists set about very successfully to mould the trajectory of British intellectual thought. Such contests are just as present today in our universities, from a plurality of sources.

The path to our modern day variant of globalisation (and its maintenance) has been done as Richard Aldrich wisely attests to, with intelligence agencies as the toilet cleaners of globalisation, ensuring the pipes remain free from blockages. So, our democracy and our economic system are protected by intelligence agencies and the work they do. I would venture that intelligence is the single most important political phenomenon that we need to understand, but it’s also the most niche and critically unloved of academic disciplines.

 

So, I will end my stream of consciousness there.

I would be grateful to hear what the KoW masses think!

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Altruism and strategy

by Kenneth Payne 15 September 2011

Hi gang. I’m currently doing some thinking about the psychology of altruism in strategic affairs, and am in the hunt for good examples. There are heaps of examples of altruism at the tactical level – laying down of lives for comrades, or even for complete strangers on the battlefield.   All sorts of group processes [...]

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Kabuli Theatre

by David Betz 14 September 2011

My friend and student Frank Ledwidge has a piece in today’s Guardian reflecting on the latest attacks on ISAF HQ and USA Embassy in Kabul ‘The Taliban are Winning Afghanistan’s Information War‘. Before you read, watch the video of the ISAF HQ guards firing back at the Taliban. WZtYM7ZRIE0 Ledwidge starts off with some harsh [...]

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Not Bowling Alone: Terrorism and Terrorism Studies since 9/11

by David Betz 13 September 2011

Three decades ago Professor Michael Howard waspishly described terrorism studies as having ‘been responsible for more incompetent and unnecessary books than any other [discipline] outside… of sociology… It attracts phoneys and amateurs as a candle attracts moths.’ Howard, an intellectual hero of mine and founder of the outstanding and world-famous War Studies Department where I find [...]

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Risky Business: A look at ‘The post-9/11 Military’

by The Faceless Bureaucrat 8 September 2011

Frank Kaplan, in his recent Slate article ‘The post-9/11 Military’,  discusses many points about the contemporary US military.  Let me pick up three for further exploration.  Which way do we go? Kaplan notes that there have been many changes in the US military since 9/11, including a (re)new(ed) emphasis on counter-insurgency.  He also points out [...]

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Turkish-Israeli Relations: Stirred, Shaken or On the Rocks?

by David Betz 6 September 2011

The once close relationship between Turkey and Israel is increasingly… ‘strained’ is the descriptor used by the New York Times in ‘Diplomatic Strains Grow Between Turkey and Israel‘… but I feel this is perhaps too great an understatement. It’s worth a pause in your consideration of the otherwise hunky-dory state of the world to consider [...]

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Operation Shady RAT: What does it say about China and the cyber threat?

by David Betz 2 September 2011

Nowadays one frequently comes across prognostications of the West’s decline and Asia’s irresistible rise. Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere is a good example. For shorter version see this Conversation with History with Mahbubani. I’ve not got a strong view one way or the other about the likelihood of either eventuality. For sure, looking around [...]

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Marmarica et Cyrenaica ab ovo usque ad mala: A Friday Libyan Omnibus

by The Faceless Bureaucrat 2 September 2011

We don’ t usually indulge in omnibus type posts here on KOW, but what the heck: it’s Friday. It looks as if the apparent glory of the Libyan mission is going to be spread widely, with all and sundry claiming victory.  Canada’s Stephen Harper and France’s Nicholas Sarkozy are leading the charge, while Britain’s David Cameron is also pleased [...]

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