an explosion leading to mass casualties and a major environmental hazard. Thankfully, it was detected before this happened; subsequent forensic investigation pointed to Triton having come from Russia. A wider search to detect this Stuxnet variant revealed that it is still spreading around the world.26 Other acts of cybotage using different malware have been alleged as well – as in Venezuelan government charges that the United States attacked its infrastructure as part of a “regime change” effort. While lacking credibility, such charges frame a growing fear of an emerging “cool war.”
What makes these exploits “cool”? There are two things, I believe. First, the actions taken must be clandestine (completely hidden), covert (if detected, deniable as to the real perpetrator), or at least able to be denied for a time and in a manner that forestalls retaliatory action. Second, cool war operations should be largely limited to disruption – even costly disruption – inflicting little, oftentimes no, destruction or loss of life. These two factors characterize actions taken in the fictional conflict Frederik Pohl depicted in his 1981 novel The Cool War. He was quite prescient, a decade before the Internet took off, including such actions by covert operators as causing stock market crashes and big drops in commodity values.27 Non-military forms of cyberwar considered thus far fit the category of “cool.” From strategic crime to spying, and on to cybotage, perpetrators are often able to protect their anonymity for long periods – some without ever being reliably identified or counterattacked. As Joseph Nye has observed, “retaliatory threats of punishment are less likely to be effective in cyberspace, where the identity of the attacker is uncertain; there are many unknown adversaries.”28 And the fact that, to be “cool,” attacks have to disrupt much but destroy little, means the likelihood of escalation to wider war is minimized. Even so, as Pohl foresaw in his novel, a lot of small-scale disruption can lead to a virtually unlivable world.
More war, less violence?
There is yet another aspect of “cool” that applies to cyberwar: the portion of that word’s meaning that can be used to describe something subtly attractive, insightful, or innovative. This is the kind of cool that speaks to cyberwar as David Ronfeldt and I first envisioned it at RAND back in the early 1990s. For us, “cyber” meant more than just cyberspace. We drew from the Greek root kybernan, “to steer,” and aligned ourselves with Norbert Wiener’s notion of cybernetics as the process of control through feedback.29 Our view was that, in military affairs, technological advances in information systems – communications, sensing, weapons guidance, and automation – implied the possibility of catalyzing transformational changes in warfare, particularly in battle doctrine. We saw in having an “information edge” the chance to defeat larger forces with smaller, nimbler, more networked units – on land, at sea, and in the air. Oddly enough, our views were shaped quite a bit by the example of the thirteenth-century Mongol campaigns of conquest. Genghis Khan’s “hordes” – often smaller than the armies they faced – benefited immeasurably from what we today call near-real-time reporting on the disposition, composition, and movements of the enemy by their corps of “Arrow Riders,” a Pony-Express-like communication system that gave the Khan a consistent winning advantage.
To be sure, Ronfeldt and I also perceived, back then, the tremendous broad potential of “information-related conflict at a grand level,” which would include new manifestations of “propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion . . . interference with local media [and covert] infiltration of computer networks and databases.” Clearly, in the more than quarter-century since we wrote those words, our predictions about the rise of political warfare and cyberspace-based disruption have been borne out. But we had an even deeper concern, driven by the fast-growing dependence of advanced militaries on information systems of all sorts. Our belief was that these technological advances were going to usher in an era of armed conflict in which the side with better information – that could be refined into knowledge to guide tactical and strategic decision making – was going to be able to win remarkable, lop-sided victories with fewer, but far better guided, forces. We saw it as a world in which, for the side with the edge in the information domain, “[s]mall numbers of light, highly mobile forces defeat and compel the surrender of large masses of heavily armed, dug-in enemy forces, with little loss of life on either side.”30 This possibility of less bloody, yet more decisive, operations lies at the heart of the more purely military aspect of cyberwar: Bitskrieg.
The new mode of warfare, in this respect, echoes the decisiveness of early Blitzkrieg campaigns in World War II that were energized by tank-and-plane operations, closely coordinated by radio – the key information technology of the time. For example, the German invaders of France in the spring of 1940 won, in just several weeks, an amazing victory at relatively low cost in killed and wounded – on both sides. As John Keegan described the rapid German breakthrough and swift conclusion of the campaign, it “had been, in its last weeks, almost a war of flowers.”31 In Yugoslavia, during the spring of the following year, the Germans defeated the million-man defending army in 10 days, suffering only 151 battle deaths. The advance on Belgrade had been led by the 41st Panzer Corps, which lost only 1 soldier killed in action.32 Similar successes accompanied operations in Russia and North Africa, until the Germans became bogged down in set-piece battles at Stalingrad and El Alamein – both of which they lost. Thereafter, Allied field commanders such as Russia’s Marshal Zhukov and the American General Patton showed how they, too, could operate in swift, decisive Blitzkrieg-like fashion. In later iterations of this mode of conflict, the Israelis won a lightning war against an Arab coalition in 6 days in 1967, then the Indians achieved a decisive victory over Pakistan in 1971 in 13 days – Field-Marshal Lord Carver called the latter campaign “a true Blitzkrieg.” The same can be said of the Six-Day War.33
Yet, when Desert Storm came along in 1991, something very different emerged in the campaign to liberate Kuwait from the large, modern Iraqi Army – so recently battle-tested in eight, ultimately successful, years of bloody fighting against Iran. The Iraqis were also abundantly equipped with Russian artillery that outranged American guns, and well trained in both Soviet and Western theories of modern maneuver warfare. In fact, the very area in which General Schwarzkopf’s famous armored “left hook” was launched had served as Iraq’s principal training ground for tank commanders. Despite all this, the Allied ground offensive defeated an Iraqi field army of over 50 divisions in just four days, the victors suffering the loss of only 148 killed in action. Over 70,000 Iraqi soldiers were taken prisoner. The reason for this result: the Iraqis had to “fight blind,” while Allied forces knew where virtually all enemy units were positioned, where there were gaps in their artillery coverage, and where and when they tried to move. It was an information edge that made an enormous difference. Despite this, in the planning of Desert Storm, it was not fully appreciated early on. At the time (August 1990 – February 1991), I was a member of the small RAND strategic analysis team working for General Schwarzkopf, and had become completely convinced that the huge Allied advantage in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) meant that the boldest maneuvers could be executed – in this instance, a flanking movement around the entire Iraqi position in Kuwait – with little risk and even less bloodshed.
But many senior officers advocated for a more direct approach, and strongly opposed the case for the wide “left hook,” which they thought too risky. A heated debate ensued that went on for weeks. Ultimately, General Schwarzkopf chose to believe in the power of the Allied information edge and sided with those who favored a major flanking movement; the results bore out his judgment. And the Allied edge was not only in sensing and communications; it also extended to the increased “information content” of weapons as well, whose guidance systems made them far more lethal than in any previous conflict. Colonel Kenneth Allard summed up the reasons for this “turning point” victory in military affairs:
Computer-assisted weapons intended to kill at great ranges with a single shot were now the stock-in-trade of the frontline soldier. He was supported by commanders and staffs who used “battle management” systems to monitor the status of enemy forces, friendly forces, and the all-important movement
