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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 of logistics. Strategic direction in the form of information, intelligence, orders, and advice arrived in a river 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 in the south, in this case) – in favor of a more traditional armored attack, augmented by “shock and awe” strategic bombing of Iraqi infrastructure. The campaign unfolded in Blitzkrieg-like fashion, hewing to a playbook Heinz Guderian’s World War II-era panzer leaders would easily recognize. John Keegan made this point in his study of the campaign, noting that the invasion “was predicated on the principle of [coalition forces] advancing at the highest possible speed, brushing aside resistance and halting to fight only when absolutely necessary.”⁴⁴ In the event, conventional military operations went well, but a nasty insurgency soon arose that bedeviled the occupiers for years. And, as more troops were sent, they provided more targets for improvised explosives and snipers. Large reinforcements were sent as well to Afghanistan – overturning Rumsfeld’s model – which had remained relatively quiet for four years, but then insurgents arose there, too. The Blitzkrieg playbook proved useless in both countries, where US and Allied forces soon suffered from enlisement, the term the French used when they were bogged down in Indochina.

This brings us to the matter of how cyberwar applies to countering insurgency and terrorism. As important as an information edge is in conventional warfare, it is crucial in irregular conflicts. For without information, refined into actionable knowledge, it is simply too hard to find, much less to fight, elusive foes. Cyberwar, which emphasizes the informational dimension, offers two remedies: hack the enemy, and turn one’s own forces into a “sensory organization.” They can still be “shooters,” too, but “sensors” first. As Paul Van Riper and F. G. Hoffman put the issue – about what will matter most in 21st-century conflict – “what really counts in war is gaining and maintaining a relative advantage in . . . awareness.”⁴⁵

Lack of knowledge about enemy dispositions, movements, and intentions was the cause of the American debacle in Vietnam, where the insurgents were able to remain hidden much of the time, and had greater awareness of their opponents’ plans and maneuvers. And attempts to find the guerrillas by “dangling the bait” with small Army and Marine patrols proved costly and frustrating. As Michael Maclear summarized, “On patrol, the GIs were inviting certain ambush.”⁴⁶ This problem was never adequately solved in Vietnam, and recurred in Afghanistan and Iraq when insurgencies arose in these countries after American-led invasions.

In Iraq, though, General David Petraeus understood that failure to gather information about the insurgent networks was the critical deficiency that had so undermined the occupation forces’ efforts during the first three years (2003–6) after the invasion. Given overall command there, Petraeus repeated techniques he had used in the Kurdish north – i.e., embedding with the locals rather than surging out patrols and raids from a handful of huge forward operating bases (FOBs). He knew that, as Victor Davis Hanson has summarized the Petraeus strategy, “He had to get his men outside the compounds, embed them within Iraqi communities, and develop human intelligence.”⁴⁷ This was as much an information strategy as it was a military strategy. And the insurgents’ information edge was soon blunted by the flow of intelligence about them that came from Iraqi locals who felt exploited by al Qaeda cadres. In less than a year, violence in Iraq dropped sharply. Where nearly 40,000 innocent Iraqis were being killed by terrorists each year before Petraeus and his emphasis on gaining an informational advantage, just a few thousand were lost to al Qaeda annually from 2008 until the American withdrawal at the end of 2011. When US forces returned in 2014, to fight the al Qaeda splinter group ISIS, the Petraeus model dominated. Only small numbers of Americans were sent; they embedded closely with indigenous forces, and decisively defeated ISIS.

But this aspect of cyberwar – controlling or “steering” the course of conflict by gaining and sustaining an information advantage – still has few adherents, and the dominant view of limiting cyberwar just to cyberspace-based operations prevails. It is a reason for failure to repeat the Petraeus approach in Afghanistan, where the reluctance to distribute small forces throughout the country among the friendly tribes – which worked so well there back in 2001 – allowed the Taliban insurgency to rise and expand. Sadly, even the very narrow, tech-only view of cyberwar has not been properly employed in Afghanistan, nor in broader counter-terrorism operations globally. In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s command and control system, and movement of people, goods, weapons, and finances, all rely to some degree on communication systems – locally and with leaders in Pakistan – that are hackable. That they have not been compromised is proved by the growth of the insurgency. The same is true of worldwide counter-terror efforts; cyberspace is still a “virtual haven” for terror cells. Yes, they often rely on couriers. But the Taliban locally – as well as ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah and a host of other dark groups who operate more widely – would be crippled if they were to lose faith in the security of their cyber/electronic communications. And if these systems were compromised secretly, all these groups would be destroyed. Even this narrower approach to cyberwar, if employed as the lead element in the counter-terror war, would prove decisive. As yet, this has not been the case. The world is much the worse for it.