Happy New Year!
What does SWC's man in Estonia care to share about the Total Defense League?
Kaitseliit
Happy New Year!
What does SWC's man in Estonia care to share about the Total Defense League?
Kaitseliit
Last edited by Cannoneer No. 4; 01-04-2011 at 08:30 PM.
Happy New Year to you too !Originally Posted by Cannoneer No. 4
There are actually two SWC men in Estonia (Kaur is lurking about or back to his real job east of here)
That's a difficult question. My previous experience with the Defense League in 95 was mixed. Kind of reminded me of an extremely under-financed militia (some Estonians reminisced of the 1940s and called them the Forest Brothers). Back in 95 (similar to 1940) they were poorly equipped and disorganized as the country was trying hard to concentrate on active duty forces, leaving their national guardsmen to hover for funding. But that didn't stop the League from training and maneuvers where possible. I would later learn that many of my friends and associates were reserve members and were quite active within their assigned units.
In the 1940s the so-called Forest Brothers were responsible for more Russian officer (single shot) kills than any other military unit to include SS death squads. They couldn't afford to squander ammo nor spend too much time in the AO. They adapted well to both the terrain and their own shortcomings (Estonian's rarely whine when the chips are down).
Although they financially fair much better today, most of the older folks tend to hang onto their tried-and-true traditions.
I can't comment much on the Cyber Defense League - just not my background nor interest.
If you want to blend in, take the bus
Estonian Exceptionalists
The Forest Brothers and the Selbschutz, Schuma Battalions, and the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division der SS (Estnische Nr. 1) whacked a lot of Sovs during the Great Patriotic War. Great Irregular Warfare stuff for a different thread.
Estonian Exceptionalists have forgiven themselves for their Nazi past and convinced their countrymen that Estonia is a force for good in the world and deserves to survive.
Hey Cannoneer !
Hmm, just so some folks don’t get the wrong idea thinking the Forest Brothers were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, I need to clear this one up a smiggin.
Generally speaking the Forest Brothers limited their activities to supporting Estonian and Finnish soldiers and were at one time something of a myth or legend when soldiers returning from the front recanted stories of “Forest Brothers” disrupting flanking enemy fire and saving their butts. They however were not an elite SS unit hangin’ out in the trees and Bogs. One very old dude told me “how easy it was to pick off Russian officers” as they always paraded around in class A’s with all the glittering accoutrements glaring you in the face.
Most Estonians agree that Estonia was occupied both by the Germans and Russians (they were in fact occupied not less than 15 times, but we’ll stick with the 1900s for now). What one doesn’t hear too often when speaking to people over 50 are bad stories about the Germans raping and pillaging. The Russian-related stories run the gamut between freedom fighters and nearly “African Style” animals (unless of course you’re speaking to an ethnic Russian).
I know of only one or two ethnic Russians in the Defense League today and they were born to either an Estonian father or mother (which statistically speaking doesn’t count as a Russian). So, IMO, the Defense League will continue its tradition and the Cyber Defense Unit is simply reflective of the League’s newest and youngest patriotic members. I’m reminded that the next war will not include firearms, and keyboards will soon be a thing of the past (jeez, why did I ever learn to type in the first place ?).
Regards, Stan
If you want to blend in, take the bus
No hijack
I absolutely do not want to hijack this thread because the concept of a cyber militia is intriguing in many aspects.
Piggybacking on what Stan wrote, however --
One of the most fascinating evenings I spent in Tallinn was with two WWII vets. During the German occupation, draft age males were swooped up into the Wehrmacht. During the Soviet occupation, they were spirited away into the Red Army. These two ancients lived only a couple of blocks apart and were close to the same age. One had been forced into the Red Army and the other into the Luftwaffe two years later. The Soviet had become an officer and rode with the armored columns that "liberated" his homeland. He eventually rose to the rank of LTG. Just listening to them talk about their experiences hour upon hour made the headache the next morning worth it.
Kaitseliit -- in the early days of post-Soviet independence, they were absolutely scary. Like 14 - 80 yr old Boy Scouts with guns (and booze).
The US has a need for people but isn't in a position to do a draft, even for this. The idea has been raised, but I don't think it is being looked at as seriously as it should be. In lieu of that, there is a lot of effort being put in to developing those skills from the private sector as well as internally in the services.
People making the observations that this is a hard area to bridge are really making better observations than it might seem. While it's sometimes hard to articulate what is an attack and what's a protest at a very basic level, it's even more difficult to deal with some of the strategic field as it exists. You can for instance harm a country, and potentially kill people in active attacks, while completely ignoring their military assets. If enough disruption is created for a long enough time, commerce & services get hurt. That's operations that are only taking place inside a civilian realm too. When you start chucking operations against military assets into the mix, well things get a lot more wicked, a lot quicker.
There are a lot of instances of cross-domain activity between technical means and more purely kinetic means of disrupting enemy activity. Those types, the use of tech in insurgencies, rebellions, & by state sponsored types are probably one of the hardest to cope with. When I first started trying to learn more & get current with COIN concepts to work with them as they related to technical domain problems, I really questioned myself a hell of a lot. It took me a long time to really understand how hard dealing with those issues really is, and that absent any wirehead geekery at all.
Somewhere between turning off all the lights in a city, and helping the strategic captain figure out how to make stuff happen in IO with the strategic printer lies a huge variety of problems.
To think about a draft, you have to think about what for. There's also a lot of distance between growing in house information warfare skills inside a service (something I firmly believe in), and being able to expect to buy them like a COTS purchase of MS Word. Dealing in the private sector, and this is I think broadly true of more than the US, one encounters capacity issues no matter where you turn. Often enough it's the private sector that's in need of either protection or attack depending on ones goals. The issues they face are different than some of the boots on the ground issues that come up. The two intersect however, and that's the part that gets rough on everyone...
If instead of blowing up a radio tower to shut off the radio station, I'm turning the thing off, & subverting the cellphone base station that's using the same mast, and keeping the ability to reuse both for my own ends, well that's more useful than making craters in a lot of instances. In many however, that's not going to be an option. Do you want your forces to be able to finesse those situations? Hell yes whenever possible. That's a capacity built with some bricks of knowledge though. Training people to know what to look for, know how to cope with tech they find, not to freak out at piles of wires in some cases, and in others to run the hell away, well every service is dealing with those sorts of issues today.
So, I don't think it's enough to talk about a draft. The idea of a national guard, or some sort of technical reserve probably has a lot of merit in many instances. In smaller countries I think such a thing may become essential. In larger ones, assuming a larger capacity, logistics will probably end up creating situations where capacities are concentrated, but there are limits to scale there too.
I do think in the US at an industrial level mere voluntarism is not enough. That's been tried, and it doesn't work nearly as well as anyone wants. I'm not sure what's in between a draft and some ridiculous notion of buying talent & services like it's some standard purchase, this is not stuff that comes off the shelf, as has been amply demonstrated.
I'm fairly good at protecting computers & capable of no end of nasty in adversarial situations, but that feeping geekery is completely useless without understanding domain issues. Warfare has entirely different problems than making sure a web coupon application creates a proper expiry date for example, or any of the 'how do I make this work' tasks that go with information system creation & modification.
This is a difficult problem, and I think it's a set of issues that have moved beyond trendyness to being real problems that forces have to cope with. There is a lot of that reflected in the infrastructure related aspects of various COIN doctrine. What's changed is that technology of all sorts has become far more ubiquitous than anyone foresaw.
There are numerous other issues as you stumbled across a few times in your previous post. The mixture of IO with cyber warfare. Information operations assists the "strategic captain" but are by definition not kinetic operations. Whereas, cyber warfare most assuredly can be a kinetic operation.
Part of the issue is that there are different technocracies that are involved and they each have specific view points, expectations, and valuations of capabilities.
The technical network sophisticate will use specific language to express capabilities to inflict damage on the adversary. The social network sophisticate will likely use similar language to express inflicting damage on an adversary. Yet they will be talking about two dissimilar goals and assumptions of ability.
When we talk about technical sophistication across the broader domain of cyber warfare it is important to understand that all capabilities found in other domains of warfare must be found in cyber warfare. There must also be some special operational characteristic. Land, sea and air all have specific properties that are inherent in all of the domains as regards conflict. And, each also has a specific attribute.
As we see in land warfare the armor officer is going to see specific attributes of his weapons platform as requirements for land offense. The artillery officer will also see specific missions and roles for his offensive weaponry. There will always be the infantry who will say that wars are won by them and others are merely supporting roles.
It is imperative that the roles of cyber warfare specialists be addressed from a holistic view point showing what the specific platforms, weapons, roles, and tactics are before engaging in strategic discussions. Who would you draft may be an easier question to answer than what would you have them do.
Having technical sophistication in moving from analysis through vulnerability to exploitation may seem necessary but it a small part of the cyber warfare strategic landscape. Supply chain hacking, exploitation of the design and prototyping process, reverse engineering, post retirement exploitation, and many other venues of intelligence gathering and attack are also available.
The current information technology sophisticate is going to look at the network as the domain and be horribly misguided. The air-gap will stymie them, but when looked at in a broader context be negligible. There is a myopia found in most discussions of network exploitation that simply has to be addressed. There is a small group of authors who have looked at this topic and come up with some answers.
The small wars community and specifically counter insurgency community have documented many lessons that can be transferred to the cyber realm. Remember from earlier we should find this as a possibility if the domain actually exists. Using the tools and weapons of an adversary against them, using their infrastructure as a weapon, finding safe havens within the adversary population, interdicting the supply chain, and much more all possible within cyber warfare.
There is a lot more to cyber warfare than the global information grid, and there is much more than the limitations of information operations doctrine. The key is that all domains and militaries operate on information. A scholar of cyber warfare has to be able to point at ancient wars and find the patterns of cyber warfare inherent in the previous conflicts. Cyber as a word to often to too many people is synonymous with Internet. This is similar to the problem of information technology meaning computers. Neither is true, but both are neither false. A pencil is a piece of information technology the same as the filing cabinet. Finding those patterns in cyber warfare is important.
Why are the patterns so important? Because, they inform you on the why you need cyber experts and who you need.
Sam Liles
Selil Blog
Don't forget to duck Secret Squirrel
The scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives.
All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.
davidbfpo has thoughtfully started a new thread, Small, Forgotten Small Wars, where Estonian Operations Other Than Information are being discussed.
Discussion of Estonian IO, CND, CNA, PSYOP, MILDEC, OPSEC & EW is what I had in mind for this thread.
Last edited by Cannoneer No. 4; 01-10-2011 at 06:35 AM.
I talked to them about their training. While I was there they were getting top notch training from SANS and others. They are also tied in with NSA, DOD directly, NATO, and a few other organizations around Europe. They have CCD COE there that is a government group, and several of their members are highly regarded here in the United States.
To quote the famous M1, Estonia is a small country with hot chicks. No wonder Stan and Kaur live there.
Sam Liles
Selil Blog
Don't forget to duck Secret Squirrel
The scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives.
All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.
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