I've often wondered
If it wouldn't be more beneficial and effective to use the terms Lethal and Non-Lethal when discussing "cyber". It seems like too often the conversation turns to comparing apples and carrots.
Perhaps when you begin thinking of all the applications computers are a part of and simply remind yourself what happens if they stop working or even work incorrectly the possibilities for nonlethal to become very lethal are much more apparent.
Last edited by Ron Humphrey; 04-23-2009 at 02:09 AM.
Any man can destroy that which is around him, The rare man is he who can find beauty even in the darkest hours
Cogitationis poenam nemo patitur
So 4GW is like every other war. It's always been about political will. Nothing new here.Originally Posted by ridek
5GW is as much rubbish as 4GW, both of which are invented problems looking for a unnecessary solution. So...
"Defined by kinetic (conventional and unconventional warfare) and non-kinetic attacks on political, economic, social, and military networks in order to make strategic objectives unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit."
- What does that mean? Can you give me specific example of each type of action and how it would gain the outcome you suggest, in a way that has not been seen before?
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
Sounds a bit like the descent into a perpetual state of war. Or maybe just a side effect of the global reach of certain tools. I would call what is described in the article about the F-35 spy incident "strategic warfare", or simply an intelligence operation.
Seeing either of the current colonial uprisings as "4th generation" warfare is questionable. It's just asymmetric and in that as old as mankind, or like Mao with a different ideological goal.
Cyberwarfare Called Fifth Domain of Battle by Pentagon
http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/cyb...pentagon-0531/
Killing people and breaking things in cyberspace is not possible. Living, breathing humans do not exist in cyberspace, nor do tangible things. Technologies for terminating humans in meatspace and breaking their stuff involving cyberspace as a transport medium for various payloads is going on now."Our military must be as capable in this new domain as it is in more traditional domains,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III, referring to military theory that divides warfare into the domains of land, sea, air and space.
Technologies for influencing potential adversaries not to act in ways that might get their meatspace existence ended also transit cyberspace.
This is a technological fallacy that most people don't understand until they've been exposed to a few others. Examine the common phrase "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Though concretely incorrect (the person is a secondary actor to the technology) the same exact linkages can be made for cyber.
If, as an example I remotely turn off your pacemaker via wireless signals, does the end result not count because it wasn't a bullet? If I use a high bandwidth command and control system to run a predator drone that rains missiles down that isn't cyber, but if I hack back on that predator drone and turn it on it's owners is that cyber?
The error though common can be found in the last statement you made. Information operations are at one layer of a technological stack. Information sits upon a logical layer, and that logical layer sits upon a physical layer. At each layer a significant set of vectors of attack are possible. Each layer can also be peeled back to expose more layers. These layers can also be called surfaces and each surface is a target to attack.
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.
Guns don't usually kill people
Guns, howitzers, mortars, and small arms usually only kill people by accident. It's projectiles launched from these pieces and the damage they inflict upon human bodies that kills. The ballistic trajectory of these projectiles runs through the domain of the air, but that does not make them aircraft.
Nope, doesn't count as a kinetic kill, or even as a homocide unless somebody investigates my death and can prove you turned off my pacemaker. I'll still be dead, but my death won't be counted as a cyberwar KIA if you cover your tracks right.
Your Predator's C2 is a computer network subject to attack that requires defense. If you successfully attack the Predator's C2 network and cause it to fire upon friendlies, you can call that cyber if you want. Others might call it CNA or even EW
Might as well the Unknown Soldiers don't count either because the cause of death isn't clear...there are many ways, legal and otherwise of killing people in war, declared or otherwise, that are difficult to determine...the fact is that you are still dead and if done well, that creates an effect desired by your (collective) killers...Nope, doesn't count as a kinetic kill, or even as a homocide unless somebody investigates my death and can prove you turned off my pacemaker. I'll still be dead, but my death won't be counted as a cyberwar KIA if you cover your tracks right.
From your statements, I'm not sure you have a good grasp of cyberspace yet and your arguments are really just hair-splitting...sorry...
Oh and BTW, I just cancelled all your bank accounts and all traces of you as you...I couldn't do it in the physical world because they wouldn't let me in the gate but in cyberspace, a piece of jolly...
So don't care...
I don't care so much about the semantics of it. I just want to turn off the pacemaker, make your phone catch fire or explode, run down the batteries on your bombs before you go to drop them etc. In short, I only care about what mayhem and damage I can cause, and I don't care about all that semantic stuff.
I have a very good reason for taking that approach too. It's because you're busy constructing boxes to think inside of, and I don't want to do that. I want to remain focused on creatively doing as ugly things as I possibly can. If you haven't thought of them because you're too busy worrying about semantic boxes, well hey for me that's even better.
Smile when you say things like that, pilgrim, lest you be taken seriously.
Towards a Theory on Cyber-War: Dave Aitel meditates on the "Three Cyber-War fallacies
Those of you following issues of cyberwar likely subscribe to the Dailydave Newsletter, and Dave Aitel--a veteran of the NSA and CEO of Immunity, Inc.--recently posted a link to a work-in-progress presentation entitled "The Three Cyber-War Fallacies." In it, Aitel seeks to debunk the following three claims:
These are all provocative claims worth examining, so I wanted to see if anyone here wanted to debate one or more of these. At any rate, read through the presentation. It makes for interesting reading even in its unfinished form.1. Cyberwar is asymmetric.
2. Cyberwar is non-kinetic.
3. Cyberwar is not attributable.
Erich G. Simmers
www.weaponizedculture.org
I don't subscribe to "Daily Dave" I've got enough to chew on already. I looked at the presentation, but I don't know much about cyber warfare but for grins and giggles.
Of course cyber war is asymmetric. If you put "cyber" and "war" together than cyber is the modifier of war. War is inherently asymmetric otherwise it is a stalemate. That is as Clausewitz, Sun Tzu as you can get. Why would you engage in conflict it it was symmetric? That is why peer competitors rarely are aggressors towards each other.1. Cyberwar is asymmetric.
2. Cyberwar is non-kinetic.
3. Cyberwar is not attributable.
The technical dimension or "cyber" expertise adds another dimension to the conflict spectrum of cyber. This technical dimension is also an element in the semantic layer of the cyber warfare domain. Of course that is if you take a multidimensional approach to cyber and don't try and smash it in with big war analogies and such. This also requires a spectrum approach rather than "silo" approach to cyber.
Cyber is kinetic. Stuxnet isn't only the proof, but dozens and dozens of other examples exist in the SCADA realm. Stuxnet is actually proof that "all ur air gaps belong to us". That is what is cool about Stuxnet.
As to attribution? Yes another fallacy. The best logic breaker on this one though is from other areas of forensics. How long does a full DNA screen take in a competent forensically sound manner? Weeks? At least days? How long does it take to do computer forensics on an attack? Weeks? At least day? But, the Internet is anonymous? <bs> It is only that way to a very few people, and you can detect those kinds of attacks too.
So. Three myths? I don't know if they are myths or just simple misunderstood. They may have had a bad childhood.
The point about the "OODA" loop is kind of out of left field. The OODA loop is nothing more than another explanatory model for the decision cycle. Decision sciences is filled with them, (SPA- search predict act; IPDE - identify, predict, decide, execute). The 1950s were rife with them as ways of managing risk or industrializing management processes. OODA isn't really anything special just something most military folks understand. So seeing "This isn't an OODA loop" has me fussy.
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.
Again, without a cogent definition of "cyber" this is a moot exercise.
I know...broken record....but just putting a word in front of another doesn't not necessarily modify.
As a non-expert who can barely handle basic HTML I understand cyberwarfare to entail attacks upon networked resources via the use of networked resources (which is to say that blowing up a server room would not count as cyberwarfare).
Last edited by ganulv; 06-01-2011 at 05:37 AM. Reason: typo fix
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
Aitel's project here is getting towards that definition.
Erich G. Simmers
www.weaponizedculture.org
What's the differance, if any, between "cyber"-warfare and old fashiooned Electronic Warfare? Isn't "cyber" warfare merely an extension of electronic warfare using an examded medium/technological base?
Sorry, don't really go in for neologisms unless they're absolutley necessary.
Until it's in JP 1-02 and explained via a stand alone Joint Pub (e.g. JP 3-12), it would be just another opinion, however well researched.
Right now, JP 1-02 does not even fully recognize cyberspace as a warfighting domain. I just looked at the just released JP 1-02..it ain't in there. However there is a term called "full spectrum superiority" that makes a pretty interesting distinction (emphasis added):
full-spectrum superiority — The cumulative effect of dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains and information environment that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.
Last edited by Brett Patron; 06-02-2011 at 12:16 PM. Reason: 2nd citation in quotes, PM to author
Still processing the other bits of your post, but from what I gathered, Aitel is arguing that attacking or gaining access to computers is wrongly considered to be "asymmetric" in the same way, say, a ASBM being launched against a carrier is--that is, a "cheap" system of tactics/weapons used against an "expensive" system. Instead, there are these massively expensive parts of the cyberwar picture that are getting overlooked in "maintenance" and "analysis."
Erich G. Simmers
www.weaponizedculture.org
You're taking it a little too broadly. Yes, any conflict can, in some form, be described as "asymmetric", but given that, it's a simple matter and common practice to select for conflicts which are more extreme in their asymmetry. Your statement is comparable to saying that it's pointless to describe any person as "tall", because all people are taller than ants. Within the range of asymmetry that can be seen in warfare, some types of warfare are more asymmetric than others, and those are the ones we call "asymmetric warfare".
I'm not the one to ask for a precise definition, but I'd say blowing up a server room could count as cyberwarfare. It depends on why you did it. If you blow up the room to kill the guy in it, maybe it's not really cyberwarfare; if you did it to take down the network the room serves, maybe it is. If you blow up the room to kill the IT techs who are preventing you from infiltrating your target network... maybe that counts too. I'm not sure it's actually all that necessary to strictly define what cyberwarfare means; as the practice grows, it will be integrated more completely into other forms of warfare (and other forms of warfare will be integrated into it).
Last edited by motorfirebox; 06-01-2011 at 06:43 PM.
I was thinking about the concept of aerial warfare as an analogy.
Is a commando sent to raid an airfield sent to do aerial warfare? Does it matter if a jump and/or forward air control is involved? However someone might answer those questions—and it would not surprise me if a body of literature debating such questions exists as I have seen much critical ink spilled in academia over less interesting questions—the fact would remain that without a thing called aerial warfare there would be no such thing as a raid on an airfield.
If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain (attributed)
Lets bear in mind...although there is an "air domain" both the maritime and land domains do claim a portion of the air above them for their operations as well. Further, there is almost always "inter-domain" operations, especially once you are considering actions beyond the most tactical level. So the example above does not really track with the question at hand.
(On a humorous side note: an AF Space officer, when asked where the air domain ends and space domain begins, replied, "when your air-breathing engine stops working, you're in space".
Last edited by Brett Patron; 06-02-2011 at 12:14 PM.
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