The basic problem with understanding information warfare today is that there is no clear sense of just what is being discussed. The futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler have argued in their recent book War and Anti-War that the United States armed forces need to develop a systematic, capstone concept of military "knowledge strategy" which would include clear doctrine and policy for how the armed forces will acquire, process, distribute, project, and protect knowledge and information to serve national strategy.²² The Tofflers and others have argued that the concept of information warfare includes those information-based operations which attempt to influence the "emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior" of others.²³ The strategists John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, on the other hand, have argued in their important essay "Cyberwar is Coming!" that "netwar" and "cyberwar" are the key concepts for understanding information war.²⁴

Originally emerging in the science fiction community as, for example, in the very thought-provoking future war suggested in Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net,²⁵ the concepts of netwar and cyberwar provide one thoughtful starting point for exploring the military and civil/military issues of information war. Netwar, according to Arquilla and Ronfeldt, is a "societal-level ideational conflict waged in part through internetted modes of communication." That is, they suggest that what is today seen as strategic- level, traditional, state-to-state conflict through the use of a nation's electronic intelligence and communications assets is the essence of netwar. Unlike traditional propaganda that seeks to provide information (whether true or false) which the adversary must understand, netwar or strategic level information war attacks another society's epistemology and decision-making process. Netwar attacks how the adversary knows, not just what the adversary knows.

Cyberwar is seen as the operational level of information warfare whereby the armed forces use netwar principles, techniques, and technologies to attack the epistemology and decision-making process of the enemy armed forces- especially its commanders. Most current discussion of information war in the armed forces seems to focus almost exclusively on the tools and techniques of cyberwar rather than strategic-level netwar. At the operational level of war, a national information war or netwar strategy would be translated by the armed forces into cyberwar or command and control warfare, often referred to in military shorthand as C²W. Cyberwar, in the hands of the local military commander, attacks the mind of the enemy commander through various tools, many of which are from the universe of electronic warfare, to produce bad decisions and prevent, delay, or deny information for good or militarily effective decisions.

For the purposes of this essay, information warfare is seen as analogous to netwar and, as noted above, from within the USAF view, as "actions taken to achieve relatively greater understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, and centers of gravity of an adversary's military, political, social, and economic infrastructure in order to deny, exploit, influence, corrupt, or destroy these adversary information-based activities thorough command and control warfare and information attack."

Command and control warfare would be understood by the armed forces as analogous to cyberwar. Information attack, recall, is "directly corrupting adversary information without changing visibly the physical entity in which it resides" and is the key to both netwar and cyberwar.

Within the general and authoritative military context, however, there is little agreement on definitions or the scope of the debate. Words have meaning as, at least, the components of military doctrine and, as such, affect how each service will "organize, train, and equip" its forces to support national security policies. Much of this essay may seem to be mere semantic nit-picking, but the "right" words and definitions are vital because of the authoritative nature of doctrine. The services fight over words.²⁶ Whether each service will be able to make informed decisions on the future evolution of the armed forces depends on their having a coherent understanding of the promise and perils of information warfare and, especially, information attack.

As the service most likely to be able to develop its current information warfare assets embedded in global awareness and reach, and its information attack potential in global power, the USAF has a special and historic responsibility to lead clear thinking and doctrinal development for the new forms of strategic operations permitted by information warfare and information attack.

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