This paper was the subject of a lecture by Charles F. Hawkins to a group of Chinese defense researchers and analysts in March 1997.

It seems as if we have always been engaged in some form of Information Warfare (IW), regardless of what terms may have been applied at the time. For some, Information Warfare means high-tech devices for sensing, computing and communicating digital information, and converting it to targeting data for use by artillery, missiles or other weapon systems, or to improve command and control of battlefield operations. To others, Information Warfare is more traditional, more "low-tech," involving propaganda, psychological and deception operations to deter, confuse, delay or surprise an enemy.

Information Warfare is a complex aspect of modern war, but it is not a new feature. It has been called by various names in the past—intelligence and electronic warfare, to name two—and will likely be called by different names in the future. Right now, in Western militaries as well as Eastern ones, the term is in vogue; it has become a commonplace. Yet for all its use in contemporary literature, it seems incompletely understood.(1) Few authors attempt a definition of Information Warfare. One military scholar stated that "official" definitions simply don’t exist.(2)(3)

It seems that we need to come to grips with Information Warfare, to understand it better, why it is important, what its applications are and how IW is related to the past, present and future. That’s generally what this paper is about.

The first answer to this question must be: Because people—knowledgeable military officers, DoD officials and military strategists—believe it is important. Whether it’s really important or not is beside the point. Philosophically, it’s sort of an "I think, therefore I am" kind of importance.

But IW really is important, and has been an important element of warfare in various forms for a long, long time. On occasion, Information Warfare has been decisive in battle or conflict, and it has almost always been at least somewhat influential. The thing that makes Information Warfare even more important today is that people believe it will become increasingly influential, even dominant, in the very near future.

There’s another reason IW is important. Many defense analysts in the United States, China and elsewhere, are concerned about what is called a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).(4) Although RMA is focused on equal parts of doctrine¾ or military thought¾ and on organization, technology and operations, most of the attention seems to be paid to the technology aspect. There are a number of new or important technologies. The U.S. Army’s topology of technologies lists eight technology areas that are important to its interests and future requirements.(5) Professor Walt Rostow says that there are four technologies that are potentially revolutionary: microelectronics (including robotics), optics (including lasers), microbiotics, and advanced materials. Each of these has direct applicability to military functions and operations (e.g., in order, UAVs and guidance systems, target detection and acquisition, battlefield medicine, stealth machines). Two of these technology areas, microelectronics and optics, relate directly to information in terms of its generation, transmission, computation, organization, analysis and dissemination. So, if there’s a revolution going on in military affairs, then information is certainly a part of it. Some people even refer to the current era as the Information Age, as distinct from, say, the Industrial Revolution or the Nuclear Age.

In any event, Information Warfare has become a part of the modern military fabric, and it important for us to try to understand it better.

A definition of IW is not necessary for a discussion of Information Warfare. A typology used to divide a large field into smaller, more meaningful parts will do.(6) But I find definitions useful to begin, so I offer the following:

Martin Libicki, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, says that Information Warfare is not "a separate technique of waging war." Rather, there are seven distinct forms of IW, each involving the protection, manipulation, degradation and denial of information. These forms are:

• Command and control warfare, which is to separate the enemy’s head from the body of his forces.
• Intelligence-based warfare, which consists of measures and countermeasures that seek knowledge to dominate opponents combat power in the battlespace, and combat power potential outside the battlespace.
• Electronic warfare, such as radio-electronic or cryptographic means.
• Psychological warfare, used to influence the minds of friends, neutrals and foes.
• "Hacker" warfare, in which computer systems are attacked.
• Economic information warfare, blocking or channelling information to pursue economic dominance.
• Cyberwarfare, a futuristic collection of ideas that range from clever to absurd.

These forms are weakly related, Libicki states, and the overall concept of IW is not very coherent. Although I think some of the IW forms Libicki lists are more closely related than others, I agree that IW concepts are amorphous and "squishy" at best. Perhaps we can make better sense of them here.

To clarify our thinking and help organize the elements of IW, there are at least two other ways to consider Information Warfare from a conceptual perspective. The first of these borrows from Libicki’s seven forms idea, and the second separates IW into complimentary camps of technology and human behavior.

After some contemplation, aided by 24 years experience as an Army infantry officer, it seems pretty clear that four of Libicki’s forms of IW are actually closely related, and that a fifth form may soon be. The four closely related forms are: command and control, intelligence, electronic warfare and psychological operations; and it seems that "hacker" warfare will soon join this quartet to make it a quintet.

These five forms also have a clear military applicability (although they may also be applied in business and civil endeavors as well). I think that economic warfare (or economic competition) is it’s own domain, larger than military conflict. The lines between what is military, political, economic, and so forth, begin to blur when economic warfare becomes part of the military’s Information Warfare model. That doesn’t mean that economic warfare, or conflict, isn’t important, but it’s of secondary importance to our discussion here.

Some of the cyberwarfare notions are absurd, such as bringing a society to its knees through an exotic electronic disruption to banking systems or air traffic control networks.(8) Other futuristic ideas, such as holographic projection of news images, will require greater computing power and transmission capacity before they can realistically be addressed. When ideas from cyber futurists show viability, they, too, will be incorporated into the milieu of IW.

Is Information Warfare art or science? Is it technology-driven, i.e., more hard-science than art? Or is it oriented toward human behavior—the value-set of commanders, the beliefs of troops—making it more art than science? These are two somewhat contrasting views that repeatedly emerge from contemporary writings on the subject of Information Warfare.

The human behavior dimension is distinctly related to the psychological operations aspect of IW, and so is command and control, at least in its human element. The technology aspect—communication systems, computers, electronic devices and counter-devices—appeal more to the hacker and electronic warfare forms, and also somewhat to intelligence (depending on whether it’s HUMINT or SIGINT or ELINT)(9) and command and control warfare practitioners.

In fact, Information Warfare combines both art and science, much the same as warfare itself is both art and science. The following tables are illustrative.

Table 1. Comparing Two Views of Information Warfare

Table 2. Is IW Art or Science?

Earlier I said that Information Warfare was important because it has occasionally been decisive in battle and that it may become the dominant sphere of warfare in the future. We know that IW has always been an important element of military conflict. History and common sense tell us that deception and intelligence gathering, which are basic IW features, have been around a long time. History gives many examples of passive observation of enemy preparations and capabilities, and active reconnaissance to determine enemy intent. The same is true of the use of psychological operations against a foe. But history reveals a bit more.

Briefly, Information Warfare (in some form) has figured decisively at every level of military conflict—strategic, operational and tactical¾ at one time or another. The American Revolutionary War battle of Cowpens is an example of IW’s decisiveness at the tactical level. Gen. Morgan had nearly perfect knowledge of his troops, enemy capabilities and intent, and the terrain he chose to fight on. These may have been simply the result of good leadership and canny intellect on Morgan’s part, but it’s information nonetheless. Morgan converted this information into a sure knowledge of the situation and how the battle would, indeed, unfold. Morgan’s victory over British forces at Cowpens has been called an American Cannae and one of history’s "perfect" battles. Information was a decisive, if not the decisive, element of that battle.

At the national strategic level, the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis offers an example of the decisiveness of IW technology. Photographic reconnaissance information, and the knowledge it revealed upon close analysis by photo-interpretation experts, gave President John F. Kennedy the edge he needed to call Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to task for having an offensive missile capability just 90 miles from U.S. soil. Of course, IW didn’t carry the day by itself. It took Kennedy’s resolve and a Navy "quarantine" to force the Soviets to back down. Information, however, was the key element to U.S. success in the confrontation.

At the operational level of war we also see the decisiveness of information. The air war over Europe and in the Pacific during World War II offers numerous examples. Navy codebreakers got enough of the key to Japanese radio traffic that they enabled Adm. Nimitz to set a trap for a Japanese carrier task force at Midway. Some say this was the turning point in the Pacific theater of war. Electronic warfare was touch-and-go in the skies over Europe, as radar and electronics specialists on both sides competed for optimal use of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Eventually, the Allies outclassed the Germans. Without electronic-generated information to guide bomber formations, the strategic air campaign would have been a lot less effective. Without radar warning systems, fewer bombers would have made it to their targets or brought their valuable crews home for another run.

This tells us that IW is important throughout the hierarchy of military and national involvement. It’s as important to presidents as it is to privates. IW affects all nations and cultures, although it might affect different ones in different ways (the human behavior element). And, history shows that IW is effective as an integrated part of the whole cloth. It’s not a stand-alone means of fighting wars, and probably will never be. But, wise people caution, "Never say never."

Still, I think it is fair to say that combining and integrating weapons and other systems across the spectrum of conflict generally tends to produce a better, more optimal result than if the components are applied separately. This is the old "combined arms" argument. Clearly, IW can be considered one of the supporting "arms" of warfare.

This leaves us with the question: "Can Information Warfare become dominant in the future?" It’s a good question. There are three possible answers:

• "Don’t know, nobody can predict the future," is one possible answer. True, but that doesn’t keep people from trying. And, in any event, there are techniques that can be used to look at future possibilities. This helps to narrow the range of expected values and the choices a nation or military has to make about what to do next. Two common analytical practices to looking at the future are: alternative futures analysis and trend forecasting.
• Another answer is, "Yes, future wars will be won by IW alone." Although this assertion may sound preposterous at first, give it some thought. And, while you’re thinking, remember that there was a time when thoughtful military officers did not believe that gunpowder firing weapons would ever amount to much, or that they would only ever be good for the reduction of fortresses, but never for soldier-to-soldier combat. On the eve of World War I, French Marshal Ferdinand Foch disdained the use of the airplane in combat.
• A third answer seeks the middle ground: "Yes, IW can become dominant in warfare, but not in isolation." That is, it will be necessary to fully integrate IW within the scope of military operations. Even so, for some it is difficult to imagine that Information Warfare could actually dominate a battle or a war, as part of a combined arms team or not.

With these ideas in mind, let’s see what history can tell us about what may lie ahead.

Alternative futures analysis generates scenarios of possible futures based on what’s real and in-hand today and what is likely to be available in the immediate future. It takes advantage of planned procurements, procurement cycles, programmed life cycles for equipment, and policies for hiring and training troops and for projecting the force against different types of threat capabilities. It’s a good way to do forecasting analysis, and can be complimented by trends analysis.

Trend analysis, on the surface, looks like simple extrapolation, and many believe that it is just that¾ extrapolation. But the real key to analyzing historical trends (and patterns) is not extrapolation, but knowledge of how historical events influenced changes in past trends, and the intellect to make educated guesses about current trends and what influences may cause them to change and in what way. We take our guidance not from a military general, but from American management scientist and author Peter Drucker, who said that, "It’s not the trends that are important, but the reasons for the changes in the trends."

To get to the nub of Information Warfare, I think it important to look at some historical military trends and the reasons why those trends changed, some quite radically at times. If we are indeed in the midst of a Revolution in Military Affairs and have embarked upon the Information Age, then knowing what caused upheavals in military thought, organization, technology and operations in the past can help present-day understanding.

The figures in this section show trends in four areas: weapon lethality, personnel casualty rates, battlefield dispersion, and battlefield intensity. I selected these measures to evaluate for several important reasons.

• Weapons are a common factor of war and combat. From pre-antiquity to the present their principle purpose has been to kill human combatants. Weapon lethality, the ability to cause death, is a measure derived from several elements: rate of fire, reliability, accuracy, number of targets affected by strike, and range. The product of these elements is expressed in casualties per hour.
• Personnel casualties are a common denominator of combat, if not the common denominator. Data on battlefield losses began to be recorded about 1600, and has improved greatly during the 20^th century. Trends and patterns of personnel casualties, and changes in these trends and patterns, when analyzed, yield a great deal of information about the nature of war and combat. Casualty "rates" were selected rather than absolute figures, because rates give integral information, which is more meaningful than ordinal information. Casualty rates are expressed as a percent of the total number of combatants in a force lost per day.
• Battlefield dispersion is an important measure because it is one of a few ways that combatants have used to avoid the lethal effect of weapons. Dispersion is measured as the area (in square kilometers) occupied by a force of 100,000 men (typically a corps-sized organization).

• Intensity is the result of dividing lethality by dispersion. Think of it as the number of soldiers in a given area that are shot at by a number of weapons of the enemy. The more weapons (lethality) the enemy has, or the more densely a force occupies a battlefield, the more intense the combat.

From Figure 2 it is pretty easy to see that there are two major changes in the downward trend of personnel casualty rates. One upward movement in loss rates occurred during the Napoleonic wars. The other began about the time of the American Civil War, and continued through World War I. The reason for the change in casualty rates in Napoleonic times was due to a combination of mature weapon technology, particularly cannon, a doctrine of massing artillery for greater lethal effect, and organizing attacking formations into tightly packed columns.

The upward bump at the time of the American Civil War owes primarily to the emergence and combination of new technologies. The initial key effect was that rifled muskets and coinoidal bullets gave the infantry a much greater lethal capability than before. There was more than that, however, including advances in metallurgy and chemistry to make percussion caps, metallic cartridges and precisely and uniformly machined breeches possible. Later, smokeless powder enabled a firer to avoid detection in battle, and rapid firing and then automatic firing weapons vastly increased the number of bullets a soldier could fire quickly at an enemy.

Advances in communications, namely the telegraph, began about the same time, but did not become reliable or available at the tactical level until World War I. Telephone and wireless communication systems improved command and control of large formations. Steam and later internal combustion engines made it possible to more rapidly and flexibly serve the vastly increased logistics needs of armies. This gives a brief sketch of what brought us to World War I and its Western Front trench warfare conditions. Now look at the next two figures.

Increases in weapon lethality and soldier dispersion on the battlefield didn’t occur smoothly, but came about in surges, sometimes coincident with one another, but more often happening at different times. When there would be a great surge in lethality, as happened in the mid-19th century, with no immediately compensating increase in dispersion, the result was an increase in personnel casualties and an increase in the intensity of fighting.

Note that intensity (a first derivative of the trends of dispersion and lethality) doubled between the American Civil War and World War I, yet casualty rates declined during the intervening and subsequent periods. Why is this? Clearly dispersion across the battlefield is not the only answer to lowering casualty rates. The answer is that, in World War I, soldiers dispersed underground, in bombproofs, bunkers and trenches. There was neither the technology nor doctrine to enable them to spread out in square area, so they burrowed underneath. During this period, and for the first time since statistical battle records began to be kept (in the West, about 1600), the tactical defensive became superior to the tactical offensive.

This was truly a displacement of the given order—a revolution in military affairs. It lasted until very nearly the end of World War I, when the introduction of new technology, primarily the tank, helped to break the deadlock of the trenches in Flanders and France.

In the 1980s, the intensity trend (sans war, based on analysis of Warsaw Pact and NATO forces) had climbed toward World War I levels. No one on either side in Europe believed a fight with the other side would be easy or short, evidence that the trend was real, if not always understood. But a few years later, after the end of the Cold War confrontation in Europe, a U.S.-led coalition fought to a lopsided victory against Iraqi forces equipped largely with the same Soviet weapons and machines they had feared for so long. What happened in the Persian Gulf in 1990-91?

The short answer is, among other things, Information Warfare happened.

There were a number of military analysts who predicted a tough, bloody fight by Coalition forces to liberate Kuwait before the war began. I include myself in this group. I cautioned about the rising trend in battlefield intensity, and explained the rationale behind my thinking. I, too, warned that fighting in the sands of the Arabian Desert could be a lot tougher than some expected. However, unlike many, I also made some prescriptions for a shorter, less bloody war. These included:

• The Coalition forces must achieve surprise when they attack. They did.
• Coalition forces should fight at night to make best use of their night vision technology, deny the enemy the best chance to "see" them, and to minimize casualties. They did. Casualties tend to be about half as high at night in modern war as they do in day light. I cited Russian nighttime offensives during World War II as examples.
• Air dominance had to be achieved and air power then had to provide plentiful interdiction and close support. Air superiority for the side that has it gives the ground force greater mobility. Greater mobility means fewer casualties.
• And, the Coalition forces had to disperse over a much wider area than in previous wars. How much, I didn’t say, but more than the 5,500 square kilometers per 100,000 troops shown in the figure above.

I didn’t say anything about Information Warfare at the time. But, looking back on it, IW figured significantly in those elements that I suggested needed to happen. Without information and information management systems—good, long-range communications, night vision devices, the ability to "blind" the enemy so the move westward into the desert could go undetected, and so forth—the air campaign, and certainly the 100-hour ground war would not have gone as well as they did.

The key elements of victory were air power, an enemy command and control system that was blinded, which enabled a ground force to maneuver undetected and thus to achieve surprise at the outset of the counteroffensive to retake Kuwait. In addition to these elements, in which Information War played a major role, there were also significant psychological operations (mass enemy surrenders are one result) and a major deception operation¾ Marines aboard ships in the Gulf kept six Iraqi coastal divisions tied down and out of the fight. The use of IW technology enabled the ground forces to synchronize their maneuver and fire support, and do this day and night. This, plus the wide-open desert conditions allowed Coalition armies to disperse 100,000 troops over at least 30,000 square kilometers, and more in some instances.

The 1990-91 Persian Gulf War was notable for the successful application of Information Warfare technology, principles and organization. IW was generally robust and applied effectively against a symmetrical enemy. IW wasn’t perfect, and there were some notable failures, but it worked.(11) And it worked best as an integrated part of the whole force, not by itself.

As I discussed earlier, there are different approaches and understandings of Information Warfare. The U.S. military refers to "information operations" and doesn’t have an "official" definition. It is considered an essential part of "command and control warfare." Of course, every aspect of a military operation, from postal clerk to personnel records management, is the responsibility of the commander. But IW is a "function" of command and control, and that helps to distinguish it somewhat.

To understand Information Warfare, we need to appreciate what information is and what it isn’t. Simply put, information can be the content or meaning of a message, or an element of a database. But information is more than that. Information has been called "a difference that makes a difference." A quick example will show what this means. Effective engagement of a target requires location and identification of the target, which must be accurate and precise. The information must be relayed to a weapon system that will engage the target. Other parameters are also important, such as target vulnerability (e.g., thickness of armor or fortification), speed, direction of movement, and time of sighting. The weapon system used to engage the target must not have higher priority missions at the time, and it must be within range, have the correct ordnance, etc. Practically any one of these information pieces, if it is wrong or delayed, can be the "difference that makes a difference" in effective engagement of the target. In other words, we want information that is worth something, not just bits of radio traffic coming over the airwaves.

In the larger sense, information is processed and used by information systems. These can take various forms, viz.:

• Human interaction
• Self-interaction
• Man-machine interface
• Electro-mechanical
• Hierarchical structure
• Network structure
• Any combination of the above

Some information systems are human behavior-based, others are technology-based, and often these systems are hybrids or combinations. The key role of technology in Information Warfare is several-fold: greater accuracy and precision in sensing; greater speed, data volume, range and multi-point dissemination of information; faster processing; and so forth. But technology still serves the human decision maker, who in turn is supported by information analysts.

However, rudimentary decision making is already being performed by machines. Modern fuses, in cluster bomb units for example, have basic IF, THEN, ELSE logic built in. E.g., IF subjected to 250 pounds or greater pressure (from a tank tread), THEN detonate; ELSE wait (a specified period before self-destructing).

Collection, organization and analysis of information generates knowledge. In the case of the "smart" bomb fuse, enough knowledge to know when and under what conditions to detonate. In battle, knowledge is power. We equate knowledge to situational awareness. It is the domain of the decision maker¾ the commander.

Knowledge and the knowledge worker is the newest form of institutional structure. Knowledge is heavily leveraged by information systems and information processing. The Information Age (and IW) is still in its infancy, and if there is going to be a Knowledge Age and Knowledge Warfare, it is only embryonic at present.

Knowledge is also heavily dependent on orientation of humans and electro-mechanical sensors. If you’re not looking in the right location for the target (or the threat) then the best observation techniques and systems won’t help a bit. Orientation is the "Big O" in what the late John Boyd calls the OODA loop (observation, orientation, decision, action). The OODA loop is really a decision cycle. The successful battlefield commander will perform OODA functions quicker and more accurately than his opponent. OODA is fundamental to understanding situational awareness, which Boyd, a former successful Air Force fighter pilot, introduced to our military lexicon some years ago.

Right now technology serves primarily the observation and action elements of the OODA loop. Sensors help observe targets, while communications speed decisions to subordinate units or weapon systems for appropriate action. But it doesn’t seem that it will take much longer for technology aids to begin helping commanders orient their observation tools and participate in the decision making process itself, and perhaps even take part in the action.

Over the past 20 years or so a lot of research has gone into battlefield decision aids and planning tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) hardware equipment and software programming. Like many new technologies, the earlier promises of AI were hard to meet. Many good ideas fell by the wayside because the powerful processors that were needed to compute exotic solutions hadn’t been invented yet, or because sophisticated computer-programming techniques hadn’t been developed. Even when a sophisticated software approach is devised, it often overloads hardware to the point where practical solutions to problems aren’t possible.

Still, AI continues to make inroads in the situational awareness arena. Some examples of AI systems or sub-sets that have promise are:

• Expert systems, which can be embedded as modules in other software programs. Expert systems contain the expertise of experienced practitioners of a particular domain, such as engine repair and maintenance, and are able to guide novice or less-able individuals.
• Case-based reasoning is an approach to using cases or data sets that describe a particular field. Historical combat engagements are an example of cases that have been used to develop successful prototype planning aids for military applications.
• Neuro-networks are multi-processor-based systems that "learn" from experience.
• Hybrid systems are what the name implies, and incorporate several AI techniques or approaches in one knowledge system.

Because of all the work being done on knowledge systems these days, it is quite possible that the rapid advances of information systems and information technology will give rise to a knowledge age and also to Knowledge Warfare. The information age won’t go away, any more than the industrial age or the agrarian age has gone away. They’re still important aspects to society, but they’ve been supplanted in importance by new conditions. Knowledge is liable to be the next revolutionary condition, but its Desert-Storm-like manifestation is still a way off.

Earlier we discussed that Information Warfare is as old as warfare itself. But the early ideas about information were simple: know yourself, know your enemy, know the territory and climate. Modern technology has increasingly influenced our ideas about information and this has had an impact on the battlefield. For one thing, C³I has become far more complex.

The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is an organizing construct that helps us examine the impact of Information Warfare in three dimensions: organizational, thinking (or doctrine) and technology.(12) In this manner, RMA combines the "art" and "science" of Information Warfare.

Information Warfare has changed the way we think (doctrine), organize and fight. At the same time IW has made the battlefield smaller, but it has vastly increased the potential scope of battle and the tempo of battlefield operations. To further complicate matters, IW has introduced unbelievable "clutter" and chaos onto the modern battlefield.

IW has influenced thinking in ways that are both positive and negative. A negative example is that American society has now become conditioned to believe that military technology (i.e., IW technology) can make wars "brilliant, bloodless, brief and a bargain."(13) Society’s beliefs affect the way the military plans and prepares for future wars. Not surprisingly, there is a continuing emphasis on modernization at the expense of other accounts, such as operations and maintenance.

A positive influence of IW on military thought is that it encourages investigation and exploration into new and different operational and organizational concepts. For example, some thought has been given to organizing an "Information Corps" specifically to conduct Information Operations. Whether this kind of organization is ever created or not is less important than the fact that people are thinking about new ways to fight wars.

Military organizations have already reacted to IW in several ways. Organizations have dispersed over greater areas of the battlefield than previously thought possible. This has helped to decrease casualty rates, but it has also made coordination problems greater.(14) IW will also place greater emphasis on small unit leadership, primarily because small units will be farther from C² headquarters. However, the impact of terrain and weather remains important. Deserts aren’t jungles or built up areas, and IW on the battlefield won’t work quite the same or as well in most cases when the terrain becomes hilly, vegetated or subject to weather that might affect visibility.

The major impact of IW on operations should be to speed them up so that commanders can "stay inside" their opponents decision cycle during a battle. With increased OPTEMPO, however, command and control problems will become exacerbated. With time compressed and space enlarged, it is easy to see how this will happen.

But the real operational challenge to modern IW forces will be to "clean up" the clutter and chaos on the battlefield (or at least adapt processes and systems to make sense of it, discard what is worthless, and keep what is valuable). Too, terrain and weather will affect operations similar to the way they affect organizations.

As we move into the future, there are some guiding elements that should be paid attention to regarding IW.

Doctrine for IW, because it is relatively new, must represent the best thinking available. Thinking must also be flexible and alert to new conditions and new ideas. No one or thing can afford to be excluded until their ideas have been given a fair hearing or battlefield test.

However, a caution: thinking, like organizations, tends to ossify over time. We have to wonder if our bureaucracy is too cumbersome to take full advantage of or appreciate the advances in IW technology and thinking.

In this latter regard, IW necessarily places a premium on good leadership.

Like thinking, organizations are resistant to change. Technology won’t change the way the military is organized, it takes people and ideas to change organizations. It is not clear that IW has yet had a major impact on changing organizations, although there are certainly signs that a lot of thinking about change is going on.

Some of the signs of organization adaptation to IW are seen in staff sections responsible for computers in addition to communications. The U.S. Air Force is probably farther ahead in thinking about IW than other services, and units at the squadron level are actively discussing, organizing and implementing IW methods into their daily operations.

Some future thinkers, however, have also suggested that we might want to consider an "Information Corps" to address IW needs of the Total Force.

The primary technology areas that are revolutionary today, according to Prof. Walt Rostow, are: optics (including lasers); micro-electronics (including robotics); materials; and micro-biotics. The keys to the successful application of these technologies to IW are speed, miniaturization, and data volume.

C³I/RISTA is a term that embraces the entire range of information-gathering functions included under the acronyms for command, control, communications and intelligence, and reconnaissance, intelligence, surveillance, and target acquisition. In the future a highly networked system will be needed to allow integration of these functions. The sensor segment of C³I/RISTA will include large numbers of optical, infrared, radar, acoustic, and radio-intercept receivers. Robot vehicles, either airborne or ground-mobile, will become increasingly important as carriers of in-theater sensors. They will be augmented by satellite-based sensor systems and systems operated by other services.

The communications segment of C³I/RISTA must provide quick and secure transfer of information among all the various elements in the network. Preprocessing of sensor data within "smart" sensors (there’s the leading edge of Knowledge Warfare again), wide-band communications at tera-hertz speeds, data-compression techniques, and network management will be among the technologies needed to keep up with this communications load.

For the command and control segment of C³I/RISTA, battlefield management software will give commanders a familiar language and graphic context in which to view information, make command decisions, and have implementing orders distributed to appropriate units. Other important command and control aspects of a future C³I/RISTA network will be joint operability with the other services and fast, unambiguous IFFN (identification of friend, foe or neutral) for ground systems as well as aircraft.(15)

Information Warfare is here to stay. Its technology is growing at a rapid pace, but still has a long way to go before it is mature. IW will probably give way at some point to knowledge-based operations, and technology will have to make tremendous leaps forward to support this. Doctrine and organization of militaries will undoubtedly be hard pressed to keep pace, and many will be playing "catch up."

There are pitfalls, and as with the basic object of IW itself, these have to do with human behavior and conditions more than with the capability of technology. One has to ask how the affects of IW and IO can be assessed. For example, damage or disruption or changes in opposing commander’s beliefs from an IO attack may not be easily observed or measured. Students of combat operations and particularly of air operations will attest to the difficulty of conducting bomb damage assessments (BDA). Conducting information damage assessments (IDA) may be orders of magnitude more difficult.

IW is not yet, and probably will not be, a singular means of fighting a war; at least no more than say artillery could fight a war without infantry or armor or air support or combat service support logistics, and so on. Sure, you can have artillery duels in relative isolation. China and Vietnam provide an example from the early 1980s. And there will no doubt be Information Warfare duels. Can IW be decisive? Yes. Will it become the dominant sphere of warfare? It probably already has. But IW is not the dominating arm. It is the combat arms that best use IW that will dominate.

NOTES:

1. Several thousand references to Information Warfare can be found on the World Wide Web

2. There is no official U.S. definition according to Prof. George Stein at the U.S. Air War College. Some writers give their own definitions, but most writers on the subject of Information Warfare do not try to define it, they just discuss what IW is about.

3. However, at the time of this writing, there was indeed an "official" U.S. definition of Information Warfare and Information Operations. But these definitions were contained in a classified DoD document. When I gave this portion of the lecture to my Chinese colleagues at CDSTIC, they called me to account on this point. They knew a fact the "Western expert" did not. So I asked to see their source of information. After a buzz of discussion among senior members, one individual left the conference room to return shortly with a copy of a newsletter on U.S. defense information, apparently an open-source publication from the United States. The recipient’s name and address were blanked out. The newsletter gave "official" U.S. definitions for IW and IO, and cited the classified document from which they had come.

4. Andy Marshall, director of the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Net Assessment in the Pentagon, is given credit for coining this term. Others argue that the term is Russian (Soviet) in origin.

5. Star 21, Strategic Technologies for the Army of the Twenty-First Century, prepublication copy, National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1992.

6. Martin Libicki does this rather effectively in What Is Information Warfare?, NDU Press, Washington, D.C., 1996.

7. This is my adaptation of definitions by Col. Richard Szafranski, USAF, and ideas expressed by Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, U.S. Air Force chief of staff.

8. The Ten-Foot-Tall Electron: Finding Security in the Web, by Larry Seaquist, Center for Strategic & International Studies, Washington, D.C., 1996.

9. Human Intelligence, Signal Intelligence, Electronic Intelligence.

10. New thinking and tactics helped too. Von Moltke (the elder) foresaw the effect of new infantry lethality in 1865, and devised the concept of strategic offensive (necessary to win wars) combined with the tactical defensive (to win local battles). This concept survived, in modified form, in the German Hutier tactics of World War I (first on the Eastern Front, then in the West), and, with the addition of the close support fighter-bomber, became the basis for German Blitzkrieg warfare.

11. One such failure was a Patriot missile system in Saudi Arabia that failed to engage an incoming Scud missile that it should have targeted. The fault lay in a computer program that controlled the radar gate of the missile’s targeting radar. The only solution to the problem, which the troops did not know, was to turn the electronics off, and then turn them back on, resetting the computer.

12. Originally called Military Technical Revolution, too many folks mistook the term technical to mean technology. It was really meant to address organization and doctrine along with technology, so it was changed to emphasize that the revolution was about military affairs, including, but not limited to, technology.

13. Reported at an Army War College conference by Maj. Gen. Anderson, at the time working in the Pentagon, where he was told this by a Capitol Hill staffer.

14. U.S. VII Corps stopped moving at night during the 100-hour ground war against Iraq because of coordination problems and the fear of units running into each other at night.

15. Star 21, Strategic Technologies for the Army of the Twenty-first Century, op. cit.