Re: Quick Review: Cyberwar as a Confidence Game by Martin C. Libicki

[Ben Hawkes <hawkes () sota gen nz>]

I've been cornering anyone who will listen recently about another one 
of the SSQ papers, "Rise of a Cybered Westphalian Age". The basic 
premise is that an open internet is doomed, and that the centuries old
notion of Westphalian sovereignty should be applied to the Internet, 
i.e. segregation and control of the Internet along territorial lines. 
They use Stuxnet as a justification. It's really fascinating read - in 
terms of insight into old school strategic thought and how poorly it 
has adapted to the modern era.

Here are some quotes:

"Being able to establish sovereign control is one hallmark of a 
functioning state. This need is true whether the border is enforced by 
passports for people, customs inspections for goods, or two-way filters
for meta-tagged electronic bits."

"From water holes in the desert to river passages in the forest to 
mountain passes to central controlling nodes in the global web, 
conflict parties inevitably seek the critical gateways of the 
opposition to obtain advantage."

"All states, in one way or another, will reach out to control what they
fear from the Internet - the lack of sovereign control over what comes 
through their borders."

They end up basically praising the Chinese model, its really quite 
bizzare. The only saving grace for the entire SSQ so far (for me at 
least) was the introduction by Hayden, which I think excellently 
captures the state of confusion and misinformation surrounding "cyber" 
in government/military circles.

Ben


On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 06:01:42AM -0400, Dave Aitel wrote:
> Paper Review
> Cyberwar as a Confidence Game
> Martin C. Libicki
> http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2011/spring/libicki.pdf
>
> Here's the last line, which sums it up nicely:
> """
> Building up our offensive
> capabilities is a confidence game. It says to those who would compete in
> our league: are you confident enough in your cyberwar skills that you can
> build your military to rely on information systems and the machines that
> take their orders?
> """
>
> One thing missing from this paper is any evidence that this kind of
> logic (aka, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt in military information systems
> as applied to network centric warfare) has any real-world effect.
> Militaries (including our own) simply don't take these things into
> account when deploying new systems.
>
> But the main anomaly in the paper is simple: He treats Stuxnet as an
> aberration, rather than the tip of the iceberg that finally made the
> newspapers. And this leads him (and most other strategic analysts) to
> conclude that hacking does not have real world effects. I have to
> assume this is the WWII legacy of Enigma - where in order to take
> advantage of intelligence you had to go out and order your sub killers
> to go sink a boat. But just because hacking is tied to intelligence
> bodies in most countries, and staffed with people who look and act a
> lot like intelligence officers, does not make it the same thing.
> Hacking is as kinetic as a cruise missile when you do it right.
>
> -dave
> (This is a first in a series of posts where-in we all get to review
> the Strategic Studies Quarterly's Spring Cyber-War papers -
> http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/ ).
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