Warfare all over

[arch3angel at gmail.com (Arch Angel)]

I am on the fence with this one, I don't agree with the phrase "warfare" as
a general term for what any of us do.  However, like Mike mentioned most of
us have served in the armed forces at some point and I can visualize why a
person may pull from their background for a term or phrase that would better
engulf what they do.  While at the same time people in techie positions, in
general, have had to defend and fight to prove what they do for a company is
important.

An example of this would be an IT Manager who is also the Sys/Net Admin
working for a widget company that does not take credit card orders and has
always been cash and carry.  The IT Manager walks into the office of the
owner and says "Hey Bob, we really need to protect the network from people
on the outside trying to break in and loosing all of our information." Bob
then replies "Well that's not a big deal we are out of the city and nobody
wants our widget crap, we just can't justify all the stuff you want.  By the
way, that request for a second person you asked for to help you, there is no
real need for more people to fix our broken desktops your doing a great job
and everything is fine."

This is a text book example of an uneducated business owner and an IT
Manager who has good intentions, he/she wants to protect the business and
the employees but fails to convey the message clearly so that the owner, who
by the way, may have a total of 20 people or so and only knows that
computers cause all sorts of problems.  One who feels a pen and paper inside
a file cabinet is the only safe way.

The IT Manager tries to think of a way to express the importance to the
owner as well as educate them so they are better prepared for any additional
requests.  Now this is an example of a small business but in corporation the
mindset is often the same, as the upper management are people who have
crawled up through the ranks when computers and networking were not so wide
spread.  Looking back through history the one thing that always caught
headlines in papers and magazines has been war and all the vocabulary
surrounding war.  This same tactic of grabbing the readers attention has
migrated not only to IT but into a great many other fields.  IT, for a great
deal of it's life so far has always been looked upon as an expense not an
asset.  it has just recently, within the last 5 - 10 years or so, became so
mainstream to were people have had to understand it's importance to an
organization and the people of that organization.  Keep in mind the Internet
was spawned from the need for a government to transfer information safely in
a time of war.

My career in the military allowed me to get a broad overview of a great many
things, and for that I am grateful, but most of all it has given me the
greater understanding as to why the mainstream world has combined the
military world with the IT world.  While I don't feel they are equal when
comparing a person behind a keyboard pecking away at some Linux box trying
to stop or prevent an on going DDoS to that of an infantry soldier humping
through the desert shooting bullets back and forth with some person they can
see the face of, but I do feel the over all concept of IT and war are very
close in relationship.  If you have ever served and had the opportunity to
work within a Tactical Operations Center (TOC) you will see multiple groups
trying to function independently while still working as a single unit
overall.  The idea that these people are many miles away from the infantry
solder mentioned above but still planning not only an attack but a defense
for the overall unit.  This is not unlike that of IT.  We are a smaller
unit, working in close proximity to many other smaller units, such as Human
Resources, Accounting, Procurement, Finance, and in some places even the
cafeteria, to name just a few.  Whether these smaller units are all done by
the wife of the owner or headed up by multi-billion dollar companies it's
still the same.  IT has to find a way to make all these units work together
and at the same time be secure, just like the people in the TOC.

Take for example your area of responsibility is to make sure the network is
up and operational so that accounting receive the records from procurement
in order to make the end of month timeline for the accounting books.  You as
the IT subject matter expert notice one of your routers has began to take
excessive traffic, what do we call this?  This is am example of an "attack",
you area of responsibility has just come under attack, just as the
commander's infantry soldiers have come under attack while on patrol.
Neither the commander of the solder nor the IT expert are in direct fire,
however their area of responsibility is, either way it is an "attack" which
is a military term.  What does the IT expert do when this happens?  The
expert begins to gather "intelligence" on the "attacker" in order to begin
"defensive" measures to stop the "attack" and to try and prevent further
"attacks".  Still neither party is on the front lines so to speak but make
split second decisions to keep whatever their responsibility is safe.

The phrase "warfare" was brought in because what you have is an "attacker"
and a "defender" just as in a conventional war.  It can not, and should not,
ever be compare to those who have bullets being shoot at them.  Those
individuals could, and have lost lives because of their situations, while as
far as I know there has never been an IT employee was killed by a DDoS
attack.

While I believe in this day and age the battles we fight in the IT field is
a modern warfare, or at least a form of warfare, and the common use of
military terms is cross platform, so to speak, I would not agree we are in
the "trenches".  We, the IT experts of the world, are the command and
control element of the warfare of today, as well as being the command and
control of the warfare of tomorrow.  I also believe the use of the verbiage
that is cross platform has benefited the IT community, I feel it has meaning
and has its place.  I think that without the connection between the IT job
and the words used to describe ware we would still be in Bob's office trying
to express the importance of protecting his companies widgets along with the
importance of protecting any and all information.  People relate to those
words, and by using them they relate to the IT industry.

I also feel that a person can gain from the knowledge of history, the
history of war, the war inside the IT world.  take into account the vectors
and methods used over the years and build a mental image, find the flaws
that allowed for these attacks to be successful, and prevent those flaws
from happening again.  This too is a take on military warfare, learn from
history so as not to repeat the same fatal errors in the future...

Ok...  Sorry for the novel, I am considering a sequel, which I will title
"Airborne Packets - The Art of Silent Insertion"

:-)

Robert
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