Towards a National Information Security Strategy

From "The Information Revolution and National Security" (2000) edited by Thomas E. Copeland, Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), US Army War CollegeThis session built on the previous session on responses to security threats. A Video Teleconference

The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited)

The deepening of the information age will alter the nature of the state so thoroughly that something new emerges: cyberocracy. While it is too early to say precisely what a cyberocracy will look like, the outcomes will include new kinds of democratic, totalitarian, and hybrid governments, along with new kinds of state-society relations. Thus, optimism about the information revolution should be tempered by an anticipation of its potential dark side. This paper reiterates the view of the cyberocracy concept as first stated in 1992, and then offers a postscript for 2008. It speculates that information-age societies will develop new sensory apparatuses, a network-based social sector, new modes of networked governance, and ultimately the cybercratic nexus-state as a successor to the nation-state. This is the version of the paper that has been available at www.ssrn.com since January 2009. A dearth of comment motivates re-posting it here as a Political Networks Working Paper. Of particular interest may be the following: an early anticipation of the rise of network forms of organization; an effort to discriminate between social and organizational networks; a discussion about “government by network” in comparison to government by tribe, hierarchy, and market; and a speculation that a nexus state integrating all modes of governance will arise in the future

Swarming and the future of conflict

This documented briefing continues the elaboration of our ideas about how the information revolution is affecting the whole spectrum of conflict. Our notion of cyberwar (1993) focused on the military domain, while our study on netwar (1996) examined irregular modes of conflict, including terror, crime, and militant social activism. Here we advance the idea that swarming may emerge as a definitive doctrine that will encompass and enliven both cyberwar and netwar. This doctrinal proposal relates to our efforts to flesh out a four-part vision of how to prepare for information-age conflict (see Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1997, Ch. 19). We have argued, first of all, for adopting a broad concept of “information”—so that it is defined as something that refers not only to communications media and the messages transmitted, but also to the increasingly material “information content” of all things, including weapons and other sorts of systems. The next part of our vision focused on the organizational dimension, emphasizing that the information revolution empowers the network form—undermining most hierarchies. Moving on to the third part, we then exposited our ideas about developing an American grand strategy based on “guarded openness”—a principle that, for example, encourages reaching out widely with ideas about freedom and progress, while still being circumspect about diffusion of advanced information processes and technologies. In this document, we complete our four-part vision by articulating a doctrine we call “swarming,” and which we believe may eventually apply across the entire spectrum of conflict—from low to high intensity, and from civic-oriented actions to military combat operations on land, at sea, and in the air.Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence), OASD/C3I

Cyberwar and Netwar: new modes, old concepts, of conflict

The information revolution is transforming warfare, contend the authors. No longer will massive, dug-in armies fight bloody attritional battles. Instead small, highly mobile forces, armed with real-time information from satellite and battlefield sensors, will strike with lightning speed in unexpected places. The winner: the side that can exploit information to disperse the fog of war yet enshroud an enemy in it

Al Qaeda and its affiliates: A global tribe waging segmental warfare?

Al Qaeda and its affiliates are operating much like a global tribe waging segmental warfare. This paper describes the dynamics of classic tribes: what drives them, how they organize, how they fight. Al Qaeda fits the tribal paradigm quite well. Thus, continuing to view Al Qaeda mainly as a cutting–edge, post–modern phenomenon of the information age misses a crucial point: Al Qaeda and affiliates are using the information age to reiterate ancient patterns of tribalism on a global scale. The war they are waging is more about virulent tribalism than religion. The tribal paradigm should be added to the network and other prevailing paradigms to help figure out the best policies and strategies for countering these violent actors

Information-Age Terrorism

JOHN ARQUILLA is a professor of defense studies at the Naval Postgraduate School and a RAND consultant. DAVID RONFELDT is a senior social scientist at RAND. MICHELE ZANINI is a doctoral fellow at the RAND Graduate School. This article draws on the authors’ “Networks, Netwar, and Information-Age Terrorism,” in Zalmay M. Khalilzad and John P. White, eds., Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1999).Today, an instance or prospect of “cyberterrorism” makes the news almost every week. The idea of terrorists surreptitiously hacking into a government, military, commercial, or socially critical computer system to introduce a virus or worm, turn off a crucial public service, steal or alter sensitive information, deface or swamp a web site, route bogus messages, or plant a Trojan horse for future activation alarms security personnel, spellbinds the media, and genuinely worries policymakers. Although fears that the Y2K problem could provide opportunities to some terrorists have not been realized, other developments since January—such as the denial-of-service attacks against a few on-line commercial enterprises based in the United States (Yahoo! and eBay, among others), and speculation that software developers secretly associated with Aum Shinrikyo cult may have placed Trojan horses in sensitive computer systems in Japan—continue to enliven the threat of cyberterrorism.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited