In the Cold War, information warfare began to play a role not only in military confrontations, but geopolitical landscapes. The focus shifted from nuclear weapons to destroy people in the 1960s, to the use of information to destroy political systems and create political advantages in the 1970s. The year 1985 is commonly known as “The Year of the Spy” because the United States and the Soviet Union played a cat and mouse game of capturing the opposition’s spies and prosecuting them, leading to over a dozen convictions in the United States. The significance of this year was not realized fully until the next decade, with the capture of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanson, who had betrayed such projects as Operation Ivy Bells and various spies the US had placed against the KGB – the Soviet Intelligence Service and secret police, which was the Soviet counterpart to the CIA. Paul Redmond and Milt Bearden – both top managers at the CIA in 1985 – summarized these chain events by their exchange: “’How’s business?’ ‘Getting a little slack. Everybody’s getting rolled up. This whole place is falling apart. And not just Moscow. You heard the bureau just arrested a secretary in Africa Division for spying for the Ghanaians? For chrissakes, the Ghanaians can penetrate this place!’” (Bearden 65). These betrayals cost the United States billions of dollars worth of investment and countless lives of spies who were working for them.
Network-centric warfare is the most modern development of information warfare, which focuses on the attack and defense of information systems and the data within them. Since the rise of the information age in the middle of the 1980s, computer and communication systems have become networked to a point where almost everything is connected to almost everything else via the internet (Coming to Grips). Personal computers are in almost every household, school, and even in many Starbucks around the world, usable by anyone who plugs in to the network. Network-centric warfare exploits this network for an unexpected advantage.
Information warfare has wide reaching implications into the national security of the United States. The most accurate portrayal of the urgency that surrounds information warfare can be summed up in Cliff Stoll’s recollection of his boss’s response to being informed of a hacker in U.C. Berkley’s computer network, “The director says, ‘This is electronic terrorism. Use all the resources you need to catch the bastard. Take all the time you want. Spend three weeks, if you have to. Nail the bastard.’” (Stoll 35).
One might ask how vulnerable the internet is, and it can best be answered as “Extremely. Just about anyone with a modicum of determination can successfully mount an attack” (Smith). Very few domestic systems have any standard defense mechanism built in, as the Department of Defense does not have jurisdiction in because of the domestic nature of the infrastructure. Even in the military, ninety percent of internet traffic goes over public-accessible infrastructure. Of all government network traffic, nearly 95% travels over this same public infrastructure. Government traffic can consist of anything from school information and tax records to highly classified weapon systems, and yet, there is little to no control over the network which it travels (“Information”). The lack of government understanding and control of its information technology infrastructure is a potentially fatal mistake that must be corrected immediately.
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