of digital data that flowed incessantly.34
In the wake of my work on Desert Storm, I brought insights from this experience to my colleague David Ronfeldt, appearing at his office door one afternoon to say, “I have one word for you, David: ‘Cyberwar.’” And so we were off to the races, striving to make the case for truly revolutionary change in military affairs.
We found a few defense intellectuals who accepted our logic about the concrete value of having an information edge. A useful analogy was the thought experiment I suggested about a chess game between two players of equal strength, but with one side limited in vision to seeing only his or her own pieces. An opposing piece would reveal itself only in making a capture or when a friendly piece stumbled upon it. In such a situation, could the side with the information edge win with fewer pieces? If so, how many fewer? Invariably, the answers were that the fully sighted side could do without much of the traditional full complement of pieces. Thus, the issue of assessing the material value of an information edge began to come into focus as a matter of serious enquiry.
The most influential defense official who appreciated this point was the Director of Net Assessment, the legendary Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall. He and others in his orbit soon began to champion the notion of a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) – in part based on the informational dimension, in part on other emerging technologies and their implications for organizational redesign and doctrinal innovation. But most individuals in the military establishment recoiled from the word “revolution,” making pursuit of a true RMA difficult. Cyberwar languished. Then, as evolution of the Net and the Web quickened, the cyberwar concept itself was narrowed just to operations in and from the virtual domain – neglecting its physical warfighting dimension. The narrowing had great appeal.
The most important early advocates of this way of thinking about cyberwar came from the communities of experts in nuclear strategy and air power; naturally, their habits of mind led them to conceive of cyberspace-based operations as a form of strategic attack on a nation’s cities and critical infrastructures. Much as they had played a significant role in parsing the complexities of nuclear strategy and air power for generations, RAND experts now came to the fore in developing these much more limited views of cyber strategy as well – most notably in the team led by Roger Molander, whose study Strategic Information Warfare and the table-top wargame exercises developed therefrom proved highly influential.35
Needless to say, this approach ignored the notion of Bitskrieg as a possible next face of battle. What followed were several years of technical speculations about how to take down power grids, seize control of SCADA systems, and create widespread psychological effects akin to those sought by Klaatu, the cool alien emissary, when he shut down virtually all the world’s power systems for half an hour in the original film version (1951) of The Day the Earth Stood Still.36
Klaatu aside – in the original film, it’s not clear that his demonstration of disruptive power would work to gain humanity’s compliance with his demand that Earthmen not bring their violent ways into space – Ronfeldt and I have always bristled at the evolving emphasis on cyberwar as simply a strategic “weapon of mass disruption.” This manifestation of cyberwar has none of the horror that attends nuclear conflict – a threatened holocaust that has led to deterrence stability under the rubric of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD). And to the extent to which this “strategic” view of cyberwar is associated with the notion of victory through conventional aerial bombing, it only needs to be noted that very few air campaigns – if any – have ever achieved their aims politically, militarily, or psychologically.37 Instead, as Ronfeldt and I have argued for decades, the notion that cyberwar is key to a new “strategic attack paradigm” – the term introduced by James Adams38 – will ultimately prove to be a grave error, engendering ruinous costs for little results. We strove to make an alternate case, favoring far more tactical-level uses of information systems to empower forces in the field, at sea, and in the aerospace environment, to enable them to make the shift to Bitskrieg.
The first significant opportunity to wage this sort of cyberwar came in Kosovo in 1999, when NATO sought to end a predatory campaign conducted by the Serbs against the Kosovars. I served on a team advising the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry “Hugh” Shelton. We proposed a plan of campaign that focused on inserting key elements of our Special Forces into the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The idea being that elite US Army Green Berets, working closely on the ground with the Kosovars, and linked to the ISR network – as well as to air and missile strike forces – could find and target Serb forces swiftly, reliably, lethally. Shelton embraced the idea of having the Special Forces fight alongside the KLA. However, the opportunity was forgone, for the most part, because of sharp criticism of and concern about the risks entailed in this approach. Instead, NATO leaders argued that the air-only operation was “making real progress,” that guerrilla-style operations would not work, and stuck to their stated preference for a far larger force to be deployed if there were to be any boots on the ground.39 President Clinton sided with the NATO position. The air-only campaign proceeded for 78 days, during which Serb field forces suffered very little damage, and the bombing caused serious civilian casualties – sparking widespread international criticism. But Belgrade did finally agree to withdraw from Kosovo.
Kosovo was a case, as Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon labeled it, of “winning ugly.”40 It was also a missed opportunity to wage the first full-blown Bitskrieg using our vision. To some degree, the KLA formations did force the Serbs to move about, and enabled attack aircraft to detect, track, and strike at them. But not nearly often enough – a broader presence of Green Berets with them was needed to give the insurgents the kind of strong connectivity with NATO that would have allowed for swifter and far more accurate close air support. Ronfeldt and I were disappointed; but soon after the Kosovo War’s end we were allowed to share our thoughts publicly about the path that we believed should be followed in future military campaigns.41 And we didn’t have to wait too long to see a much more fully realized version of our concept put into practice. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on America, it was quickly determined that al Qaeda had perpetrated them, and that the Taliban government of Afghanistan was providing that terrorist group with a physical haven. There was no time to muster a large ground force; and arranging to send big units to that land-locked country swiftly, then supplying them, would have been nightmarish. So, instead, only 11 “A-teams” of Green Berets went to Afghanistan in late 2001 – just under 200 soldiers.
They soon linked up with friendly Afghans of the Northern Alliance, a group that had been previously beaten quite soundly by the Taliban, losing roughly 95 percent of the country to those fundamentalist zealots. But with the leavening of those few Americans, who were highly networked with air assets, they managed to defeat al Qaeda and drive the Taliban from power in very short order.42 This, Ronfeldt and I believed, was a true demonstration of the power of being able to employ a major information advantage that would allow far smaller forces to defeat much greater enemy armies. And to win even when indigenous allies’ forces are of a far lesser quality, man for man, than the enemy they face. Thus, the defeated, demoralized fighters of the Northern Alliance reemerged victorious – because the handful of American specialists who fought alongside them on horseback were uplinked to ISR and attack aircraft that allowed them to monitor enemy movements in real time and to call in strikes from the air, in minutes, from the steady and unending stream of fighter-bomber pilots who maintained constant coverage above the battlespace. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had unleashed the Green Berets over the objections of many senior generals, saw in this campaign the singular opportunity to catalyze what he came to call “military transformation.”43
It turned out that Pentagon leaders disliked the word “transformation” as much as they hated the notion of a “revolution” in military affairs. And in the debate over the looming invasion of Iraq in 2003, they prevailed against Donald Rumsfeld’s preferred idea of using the “Afghan model” – a few highly networked troops inserted into indigenous rebel groups (Kurds in the north and Shiites
