The term "cyber warfare" gets thrown around every now and again. Most often, it comes attached to the fanciful notion of some virtual battleground of the near future, one where hackers are the foot soldiers, worms and viruses are the tools and dominance over the network is the ultimate military objective. It's an idea that owes more to Hollywood than to reality, however. In truth, bullets, bombs and control of all-too-real estate are likely to remain central to warfare for a long time to come.
That's not to say the U.S. armed forces are letting the fruits of the Internet Age simply drop from the vine — far from it. The military is among the first institutions to recognize the many contributions of the computing industry to solving real-world problems. So perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise when representatives of the armed forces came looking for ideas among a decidedly nonmilitary bunch: the geeks, hackers and codeheads attending last week's O'Reilly P2P and Web Services Conference in Washington, DC.
"If you haven't been in the Army in the last two years, you have no idea what it's like to be in the Army," explained Michael Macedonia, speaking at the O'Reilly conference. Macedonia is chief scientist and technical director for the U.S. Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command. Today's Army unit, he said, carries a dizzying array of high-tech equipment, from positioning systems and launch equipment to laptops and handhelds. (He even teased an appreciative murmur from the audience by mentioning that his research group prefers Linux to Windows CE on its iPaq handhelds.)
Living on the Edge
What had attracted the attention of Macedonia and his colleagues to the O'Reilly conference was the concept of peer-to-peer applications, the "P2P" of the event's wordy moniker. Napster remains the best-known example of P2P for the consumer market, but the idea encompasses a multitude of applications beyond music swapping. From Groove Networks' office-collaboration software to the Seti@Home Project's network-distributed search for intelligent life in outer space, what all these programs have in common is that they each take advantage of resources on the so-called edge of the network, rather than relying on centralized servers.
Once, companies like Sun and Netscape proclaimed that the Web browser would be "the last piece of software you'd ever need." Application functionality, they said, would be hosted on the server side — indeed, there'd hardly be a need for high-powered desktop computers at all. But beginning in 1998, according to conference keynote speaker Clay Shirky, developers began to rediscover the value of the CPU, memory and disk space residing on end-user workstations.
The result was applications like Gnutella, Mojo Nation and FreeNet, which united these edge resources in spontaneous, ad hoc relationships. The idea was that by empowering the edge of the network, such software could create a richer, more robust and more versatile computing environment than any centralized system. And it's an idea that's beginning to catch on with people like Michael Macedonia.
Digital Warfare
The military has long been an eager consumer of computer technology. The need for advanced missile-guidance systems during the Cold War made the Pentagon the primary patron of the nascent microchip industry, kicking off the mass production of integrated circuits. When the PC revolution brought computers into the home, the Navy put Commodore 64s into F-14 Tomcats. And each year the military's use of computers has grown more sophisticated, at a pace almost matching that of the commercial sector. Why shouldn't it take advantage of the benefits of P2P technology as well?
At the O'Reilly conference, Major Mark Bontrager explained that, as with the Internet, there are edge resources in warfare as well. In this case, they're the individual soldiers, sailors, tanks, missiles and bombs that are deployed to the battle zone. Bontrager and his colleagues believe P2P concepts can be applied to these resources as well, with the result a more effective fighting force. It's a concept Michael Macedonia calls "network-centric warfare."
What's needed for this concept to take off is a killer app, explained Lt. Col. Earl Wardell, special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Wardell gave the example of how portable, handheld computers that can check up-to-the-minute stock quotes have made life easier for active investors. "I want to be able to do that on the battlefield," he said.
A frank and engaging speaker, Wardell invited the audience to imagine how P2P concepts could enhance the efficacy of a modern fighting force. For example, he said, foot soldiers wearing vision-enhancement displays could inform one another of potential threats. A squad passing a building that snipers had been reported in a week ago could view an automatic warning message stored in the network by the last troops to pass through the area. With soldiers working in a peer-to-peer fashion, Wardell said, "If a guy over there sees it, I see it." On a larger scale, such a system could change the face of military operations.
Culture Clash
But challenges still remain before Wardell's vision can become a reality. The main difficulty, in a nutshell, boils down to communication. Despite the array of computing devices at the military's disposal, getting all the far-flung points talking to one another remains a sticky point. Equipment isn't really the issue here; the military has access to all the networking infrastructure, wired and wireless, it needs to tackle that job. Instead, the problem isn't technical, but cultural. In very real terms, the armed forces need nothing less than the means to shift to a whole new communications paradigm.
The military has traditionally operated under a rigidly hierarchical command-and-control structure, with decisions coming from the top down and information shared strictly on a need-to-know basis. The intelligence-classification system limits who can know what (especially where foreign allies are concerned), and long-standing cultural barriers even hinder communication between different branches of the armed forces.
None of these conditions will disappear overnight — indeed, some of them never will (nor ever should). Still, none of the uniformed speakers at the O'Reilly conference believed these problems were insurmountable — especially with the assistance of the private sector. "Microsoft is investing $2 billion to develop a game console," said Macedonia, referring to the upcoming XBox. "That's more than the Army's entire research budget.
"The great difficulty of education," he observed, quoting philosopher George Santayana, "is to gain experience out of ideas." And so, a few men in uniform had come to the O'Reilly conference to appeal to the existing experience of the private sector. Their hope: that the participation of eager Internet hackers could help demonstrate how P2P technology might reenergize the military's intelligence structure.
Future Fighters
"There's a lot of money to be made for whoever can make this work," said Wardell. Especially now, when our military faces a dispersed enemy composed of loosely connected cells, the need for the armed forces to adapt quickly to new situations has never been greater. On the battlefield, "I may reach a point where I have to share this piece of information with an ally, or we fail," Wardell explained, adding, "The global war on terrorism is the biggest incentive we've got" to change military culture.
There are other reasons for the Pentagon's top brass to take Wardell's advice to heart, as well. The Defense Department has plans to continue the technological development of the U.S. military well into the 21st century, and developing a sound, adaptive, network-oriented approach is bound to be critical to the success of its strategy.
Already, remotely computer-controlled surveillance aircraft are being deployed in the Afghanistan campaign, and, according to Macedonia, by 2015 fully 30 percent of U.S. ground forces will be robotic. When human troops are communicating and collaborating with these computerized combatants through a common network-centric war-fighting platform — something like what Wardell and others have envisioned — the age of cyber warfare will then truly have arrived.
