Future U.S. national security strategy is likely to be profoundly affected by the ongoing, rapid evolution of cyberspace--the global information infrastructure--and in particular by the growing dependence of the U.S. military and other national institutions and infrastructures on potentially vulnerable elements of the U.S. national information infrastructure. To examine these effects, the authors conducted a series of exercises employing a methodology known as the Day After ... in which participants are presented with an information warfare crisis scenario and asked to advise the president on possible responses. Participants included senior national security community members and representatives from security-related telecommunications and information-systems industries. The report synthesizes the exercise results and presents the instructions from the exercise materials in their entirety.
This book provides a systems-level introduction of the means by which information technology is changing conflict and warfare. This book is for war fighters, as well as the policy makers, commanders, and systems engineers who will implement the transition for strategy and concept to system design and implementation.
Impending technological advances will widen an adversary’s attack plane over the next decade. Visualizing what the future will hold, and what new threat vectors could emerge, is a task that traditional planning mechanisms struggle to accomplish given the wide range of potential issues. Understanding and preparing for the future operating environment is the basis of an analytical method known as Threatcasting. It is a method that gives researchers a structured way to envision and plan for risks ten years in the future. Threatcasting uses input from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and even a little science fiction to recognize future threats and design potential futures. During this human-centric process, participants brainstorm what actions can be taken to identify, track, disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the possible threats. Specifically, groups explore how to transform the future they desire into reality while avoiding an undesired future. The Threatcasting method also exposes what events could happen that indicate the progression toward an increasingly possible threat landscape. This book begins with an overview of the Threatcasting method with examples and case studies to enhance the academic foundation. Along with end-of-chapter exercises to enhance the reader’s understanding of the concepts, there is also a full project where the reader can conduct a mock Threatcasting on the topic of “the next biological public health crisis.” The second half of the book is designed as a practitioner’s handbook. It has three separate chapters (based on the general size of the Threatcasting group) that walk the reader through how to apply the knowledge from Part I to conduct an actual Threatcasting activity. This book will be useful for a wide audience (from student to practitioner) and will hopefully promote new dialogues across communities and novel developments in the area.
Rapid progress in information and communications technologies is dramatically enhancing the strategic role of information, positioning effective exploitation of these technology advances as a critical success factor in military affairs. These technology advances are drivers and enablers for the "nervous system" of the militaryâ€"its command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) systemsâ€"to more effectively use the "muscle" side of the military. Authored by a committee of experts drawn equally from the military and commercial sectors, Realizing the Potential of C4I identifies three major areas as fundamental challenges to the full Department of Defense (DOD) exploitation of C4I technologyâ€"information systems security, interoperability, and various aspects of DOD process and culture. The book details principles by which to assess DOD efforts in these areas over the long term and provides specific, more immediately actionable recommendations. Although DOD is the focus of this book, the principles and issues presented are also relevant to interoperability, architecture, and security challenges faced by government as a whole and by large, complex public and private enterprises across the economy.
Simulations are widely used in the military for training personnel, analyzing proposed equipment, and rehearsing missions, and these simulations need realistic models of human behavior. This book draws together a wide variety of theoretical and applied research in human behavior modeling that can be considered for use in those simulations. It covers behavior at the individual, unit, and command level. At the individual soldier level, the topics covered include attention, learning, memory, decisionmaking, perception, situation awareness, and planning. At the unit level, the focus is on command and control. The book provides short-, medium-, and long-term goals for research and development of more realistic models of human behavior.
Militaries with state-of-the-art information technology sometimes bog down in confusing conflicts. To understand why, it is important to understand the micro-foundations of military power in the information age, and this is exactly what Jon R. Lindsay's Information Technology and Military Power gives us. As Lindsay shows, digital systems now mediate almost every effort to gather, store, display, analyze, and communicate information in military organizations. He highlights how personnel now struggle with their own information systems as much as with the enemy. Throughout this foray into networked technology in military operations, we see how information practice—the ways in which practitioners use technology in actual operations—shapes the effectiveness of military performance. The quality of information practice depends on the interaction between strategic problems and organizational solutions. Information Technology and Military Power explores information practice through a series of detailed historical cases and ethnographic studies of military organizations at war. Lindsay explains why the US military, despite all its technological advantages, has struggled for so long in unconventional conflicts against weaker adversaries. This same perspective suggests that the US retains important advantages against advanced competitors like China that are less prepared to cope with the complexity of information systems in wartime. Lindsay argues convincingly that a better understanding of how personnel actually use technology can inform the design of command and control, improve the net assessment of military power, and promote reforms to improve military performance. Warfighting problems and technical solutions keep on changing, but information practice is always stuck in between.
Information warfare is emerging as the new war fighting paradigm of the U.S. and many of its allies. This book is the first in the field to address communication electronic warfare (EW) systems in the context of information warfare. Authored by a recognized leading authority, the book includes a unique formulation of EW system performance and presents results of system simulations that have not appeared previously in any related literature. Essential reading for EW engineers and researchers working in defense, aerospace, and military capacities, the book explores the properties of information, the properties of information communication means, information theory, EW system architectures, and two operational simulations, one in Northeast Asia and the other in urban terrain.
This book revises the strategic objectives of Information Warfare, interpreting them according to the modern canons of information age, focusing on the fabric of society, the economy, and critical Infrastructures. The authors build plausible detailed real-world scenarios for each entity, showing the related possible threats from the Information Warfare point of view. In addition, the authors dive into the description of the still open problems, especially when it comes to critical infrastructures, and the countermeasures that can be implemented, possibly inspiring further research in the domain. This book intends to provide a conceptual framework and a methodological guide, enriched with vivid and compelling use cases for the readers (e.g. technologists, academicians, military, government) interested in what Information Warfare really means, when its lenses are applied to current technology. Without sacrificing accuracy, rigor and, most importantly, the big picture of Information Warfare, this book dives into several relevant and up-to-date critical domains. The authors illustrate how finance (an always green target of Information Warfare) is intertwined with Social Media, and how an opponent could exploit these latter ones to reach its objectives. Also, how cryptocurrencies are going to reshape the economy, and the risks involved by this paradigm shift. Even more compelling is how the very fabric of society is going to be reshaped by technology, for instance how our democratic elections are exposed to risks that are even greater than what appears in the current public discussions. Not to mention how our Critical Infrastructure is becoming exposed to a series of novel threats, ranging from state-supported malware to drones. A detailed discussion of possible countermeasures and what the open issues are for each of the highlighted threats complete this book. This book targets a widespread audience that includes researchers and advanced level students studying and working in computer science with a focus on security. Military officers, government officials and professionals working in this field will also find this book useful as a reference.
Cyberspace is one of the major bases of the economic development of industrialized societies and developing. The dependence of modern society in this technological area is also one of its vulnerabilities. Cyberspace allows new power policy and strategy, broadens the scope of the actors of the conflict by offering to both state and non-state new weapons, new ways of offensive and defensive operations. This book deals with the concept of "information war", covering its development over the last two decades and seeks to answer the following questions: is the control of the information space really possible remains or she a utopia? What power would confer such control, what are the benefits?
