On Defining War between Superpowers - The Kinetic Effects of Cyber

 

 “It’s just not war in the way we typically think… For cyber, for electronic warfare, 

for misinformation, we need to be shifting more dollars to those domains.”

Michael Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) within the U.S. Department of Defense

China and Russia are well into the development and testing of hypersonic missiles, so fast that our conventional anti-missile systems are not fast enough to take them out before they carry their warheads to their designated targets. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SBMs) are also part of the Russian and Chinese arsenals and within reach for the North Koreans, able to carry nuclear warheads to just about any part of the United States. Space-based weapons are in development. Everyone is pushing artificial intelligence to process and analyze data and improve the response time and accuracy of just about any missile, rocket, aircraft, drone, tank, gun or major artillery imaginable. But artificial intelligence has a much more effective use.

While we may not be particularly well-positioned to deal with “asymmetrical” guerilla-driven combat, we are also playing a bit of catch-up to China and Russia who are pumping out computer science engineers at a serious multiple of the comparable output of our American universities. It begs the question: in a modern era, where a functioning society and economy is predicated on so much technical interdependence, what exactly is “war”? Blowing stuff up and killing enemy soldiers… or slow but certain erosion of the pillars of government, shutting down infrastructure and disabling commercial transactions at every level? We used to call them “trade barriers,” but now the vernacular describes them more frequently as “trade wars” often laced with “sanctions.” We politely refer to some of these weapons simply as “malware.”

These days, in an era of mendacious governments enamored of “plausible deniability,” it is often impossible to separate cyber-attacks seeking ransomware from private criminals to governments acting indirectly to destabilize their adversaries. Pipelines blow up or stop pumping. Electrical power generators stop working. Service stations are unable to pump gas. Nuclear enrichment facilities crash and burn. Commercial transactions on the Internet are compromised. And our most dedicated adversaries hide behind the First Amendment to coopt our domestically developed social media, turning it into a very individually targeted weapon of informational destruction, fomenting violence and insurrection at levels that threaten the ability of the United States to continue as a viable nation. Even our elections are slanted to destabilize through mis- and dis-information.

I wonder how many of the January 6th insurrectionists realize how much their activities are part of a Russian masterplan to take down the United States. Even the United States Supreme Court seems to have forgotten that the Second Amendment was created to enable citizen soliders, militias, to support the government, not attack it. And most definitely not to create a notion of a ubiquitous right to own weapons. Think “National Guard” vs the “Oath Keepers.” The connective tissue of social media, even in smaller, darker corners of the Web, are very much in the crosshairs of military cyber-disruption generated by our most implacable foes. 

Combine those anti-government right-wing militia, that misshapen interpretation of the Second Amendment, the freedoms inherent in the First Amendment, the constitutionally baseless notion of individual right to ignore the law with the tsunami of mis- and dis- information that forms the core of “believable conspiracy theories,” and you can better understand how our foreign enemies have used modern telecommunications to disrupt and polarize our nation, turning a vast horde of American citizens into their willing soldier-operatives. Armed, and as the FBI has notes, far more dangerous than foreign terrorist threats.

DIU Director Michael Brown, who recently left a lifelong career in the Silicon Valley to assume his current role at the DOD, understands where our military falls short in a cyber war, one that has engaged us for many years now, and what we must do to repel this “war.” Brown faces his own political issues as noted below. Yet so many aspects of American life, critical systems from power grids to hospitals, from banking to pipelines to power generating facilities and even to government agencies, are woefully under-prepared for cyber-attacks. And if we think that we are the only victims of such threats, that we sit innocently by and just let it happen, we need to be aware that we are equally involved, often with our allies, in comparable cyber countermeasures and attacks on our adversaries.

Indeed, our military has been forced to turn to the very source of those disruptive social media platforms – the Silicon Valley – to create, shape and perfect the cyber tools that we need to survive… if we can indeed survive… against our sophisticated adversaries. Writing for the November 1st FastCompany.com, Senior Writer Mark Sullivan fills in some needed details:

“The DIU was created in 2015, during the Obama administration. Brown, who arrived in Silicon Valley four decades ago as a student at Stanford’s graduate school of business and rose to become CEO of the security company Symantec, has run it since 2018. His success led President Joe Biden to nominate him in April to be the DOD’s undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer. In July, Brown withdrew his nomination amid an ongoing investigation involving a claim that he showed undue favoritism in his hiring practices. He denies the charge and declines to discuss it.

“The DIU’s success has spawned scores of other such innovation cells within the Pentagon. Although they operate independently of one another, together they reflect a distributed effort to modernize national defense—and a realization that the U.S. government needs to make history rhyme, echoing the efforts that ultimately won the Cold War with the Soviets by relying on the microwave and chip manufacturers clustered in the flatland south of San Francisco. At that time, in the 1960s, the DOD was funding twice as much R&D as U.S. businesses were, and it enlisted what came to be known as Silicon Valley to design and manufacture the processors that would guide missiles, launch satellites, and take humans to the moon. Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) set up its division to build Polaris missiles in Sunnyvale, and Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that in many ways spawned the modern technology industry, made 80% of its early revenue from the military. ‘We were the investor, we were the first customer, we were an early adopter,’ Brown says…

“Remaking the Pentagon in Silicon Valley’s image will be far more difficult a public-private challenge than, say, Uber and Lyft steamrolling municipal taxi commissions. ‘You have to think about the military as a large bureaucracy that has existing relationships with primes, and they all live in a symbiosis that makes sense to them,’ says Eric Schmidt, the former chairman and CEO of Google who has backed several defense startups and chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Those major contractors have entrenched themselves by influencing contracting rules, spending heavily on lobbying, and sprinkling stable jobs across congressional districts…

“[Russia was far and away our worst disruptor until recently. The] Silicon Valley views China as its chief rival as well. One-fifth of the world’s trade—which is increasingly being ordered online and procured via tech companies digitizing supply-chain logistics—flows through the patch of Pacific Ocean between China’s southern coast, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines known as the South China Sea. Most of the world’s computer chips are produced in the region. One Taiwanese company in particular, TSMC, currently manufactures the vast majority of the advanced processors that control many aspects of Western life.” Could China invade Taiwan, as it escalates its threats to do so, to take over that chipmaker so essential to every sophisticated nation on earth? Like it or not, we are actually at “war” with both Russia and China. And cyber needs just might generate a more traditional shooting ancillary response. It’s complicated… and very, very dangerous.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if our cyber enemies can help the United States polarize into a totally dysfunctional country, perhaps self-destructing into a civil war, do they really need the more traditional weapons of mutually assured mass destruction?