Back to 2025 Home PageThe USAF strategy for information warfare will be developed by 2025 through its incorporation within the central USAF mission of the employment of air and space power. Air and space power will, as today, be conceived as global awareness, global reach, and global power.
The USAF has seen correctly that information is like air and space; it is a realm in which superiority will be contested and from which power can be projected or engagement conducted. Information, for the USAF, is likewise just as much part of the physical universe as the other realms in which it operates and, indeed, may be "the" realm. Thus, information warfare will be conducted according to the same principles as are air and space operations. If this axiom is correct, and there is no scientific reason to assume that information is not grounded ultimately in matter and energy, then the characteristics of information warfare are analogous or parallel, not merely metaphorical, to the contemporary and future characteristics of air and space power.61 The contemporary and future characteristics of air and space power, and the key to its centrality to those differentials which argue that aerospace power is the instrument for an asymmetric strategy are, of course, global awareness, reach, and power. Global awareness provides, increasingly, exact and timely information. Global reach permits a range and responsiveness to engage, not just fight, throughout the global battlespace. Global power, increasingly marked by the ability to apply precise and discriminating effects of power, will permit an asymmetric response which leverages the differential information-in-war advantage provided by global awareness and the information-based planning and execution control provided by global reach.
Global awareness, in the view of New World Vistas: Air and Space power for the 21st Century, is that the USAF can use "affordable means to derive appropriate information about one or more places of interest after a delay which is short enough to satisfy operational needs."62 Global awareness requires the USAF to have the ability to detect and understand friendly and adversary activities in space, on the surface, and in the air. Global awareness in 2025 will require, additionally, detection and understanding in the info-realm or cyberspace. In the info-realm, global awareness must provide the information-in-war essential for information attack on the strategic, operational, or tactical centers of gravity of an adversary's military, political, social, and economic infrastructure.63
Various capabilities to provide global awareness to support traditional air and space power employment will, obviously, be vital in providing for the employment of information attack in the alternate and intermediate futures of the 2025 Study and, indeed, any future security environment. There are also info-awareness-specific capabilities that will need to be developed.
The set of required capabilities for future global awareness include a new generation of sensors based on a distributed system of satellites, surface sensors, and standoff systems based possibly on Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicles (UCAV).64 As it may be too much to expect even the new Joint Requirements Oversight Council to force the development of a common USAF /Army/Navy system and standards of database management and data communication, an implied requirement of continued USAF leadership of the global awareness system is a generic crosstalk capability with sister services and coalition partners.65
A specific set of USAF requirements for information attack, defined as directly corrupting information without visibly changing the physical entity within which it resides, can be identified within the general requirement of database management within global awareness. As in the classic North American Air Defense Command nuclear attack defensive system, the information must be detected and identified before there can be any talk of interception or destruction. Consequently, a reorientation in thinking about the traditional target sets for militarily-relevant intelligence gathering needs to occur as the information warfare battlespace is the information-dependent global system-of-systems on which most of the "strengths, weaknesses, and centers of gravity of an adversary's military, political, social, and economic infrastructure" increasingly depend. That is, not only must the question "What and where are the data?" on which these infrastructures depend be answered, but, equally important, "What are the structures and patterns of human activity depending on these databases and communications infrastructures?" Information attack requires more than a knowledge of wires and, consequently, suggestions for an Information Corps of techno-wizards would only produce platform thinking as hackers fought hackers.66
Locating and corrupting a database that is of marginal relevance to an adversary's will and capacity to make war is a waste of scarce resources. It is the relevant information differential that is central to information attack as apparently benign activities or databases can hide potentially hostile cyber-strike capabilities. Thus, while global awareness for information attack appears to be about "everything," at the pragmatic level, artificial intelligence search-architectures for differentially-relevant "information" must be designed by the Air Force Intelligence Agency, the Air Force Institute of Technology, and other labs under the Air Force Material Command. The technologists, however, must be led by the strategists in the same way as planning the traditional air campaign requires a coherent knowledge of the adversary systems.67 It is the patterns of human activity that are central.
As asymmetric response may be the best strategic choice in many cases, the relevant information target for global awareness attention may not be those data and communications systems that support directly the adversary's fielded military activities, (the Joint Staff's nominal target for information warfare and the adversary systems most likely to be best defended), but those other supporting data, infrastructure, and patterns of activity on which most contemporary and future military operations depend. While specific information attack activities will be discussed below in the section on global power, one example of the "other" data systems which might be subject to discriminate or precision asymmetric information attack are an adversary's Supervisory Control and Data Activity (SCADA) systems for the operation of the air traffic control or fuel pipeline network.68 Clearly, then, the SCADA data bases and networks of potential adversaries must be detected, identified, and mapped.
At the most generic and nontechnical means level, global awareness for information attack will require monitoring commercial developments in information infrastructure architectures and capabilities, among whom these systems are employed, and how and by whom they are used. And, as it should be obvious that there is a defensive aspect of information warfare in that these capabilities will be used by an adversary against the United States or an ally, careful monitoring will be required of developments in commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems which could be used to attack industrial processes (for example anti-SCADA programs), financial and communications networks, and break-through systems that might provide differential advantage in information management and communications. Equally important, patterns of human activity or organizational change that suggest a developing potential for hostile information attack must become part of the normal business of global awareness. Identification of commercial industrial espionage in info-systems, even by an ally, should be presumed to indicate the intent to develop an information attack capability.
To support information attack in the near-future, whether for information warfare or C2W, USAF global awareness systems will need to develop and incorporate specific database and database management and correlation acquisition to its collection, processing and analyzing of activities currently monitored for planning and execution control.69 This set would include, logically, standard intelligence and surveillance architectures, command, control, and communications systems, especially systems designed to detect and defeat information attack, target and tracking, guidance, and navigation systems, especially space-based and other long-range communication capable systems, and attack assessment and reconstitution systems.70 The intelligence challenge will be more demanding than when the United States faced only one strategic peer competitor.
To support future capabilities for information attack in the asymmetric engagements required in the 2025 Study, current USAF global awareness and monitoring activities will need to be expanded to include the other database and database management information systems. These might include general computer systems such as the internet and the world wide web, power generation and distribution systems, industrial, financial and transportation systems, and, in general, any system which might be used by an adversary to launch an information attack, first on US armed forces, and ultimately, on other domestic information assets.71 Such an expansive system of monitoring will be essential to protect these domestic assets on which US joint force power projection itself ultimately depends.
It is important to note that the reorientation of intelligence activities needed to support information attack (and defense) in both the near and 2025 future as a USAF global awareness mission is in complete conformity with current US law. The object of USAF global awareness is not the American domestic database and database management systems. Domestic counter intelligence and law enforcement agencies will develop an ability to monitor adversary activities in the United States. On the other hand, USAF global awareness assets may be the main source of intelligence support for alerting law enforcement agencies charged with protecting domestic information-dependent activities from adversary information attack about hostile capabilities.72
Global reach is usually thought of as the ability of deploy aircraft from the Continental United States or out-of-theater bases into the area of interest in a rapid and timely fashion. The role of air refueling is likewise central to global reach. Whether delivering bombs, special forces troops, or humanitarian assistance, the speed, range, and lift of aircraft are usually seen as the key issues in delivering what is required. This differential ability to reach out with rapid, discriminate, and precise effect is central to the USAF's leading role in asymmetric response even in traditional operations.
A more sophisticated view recognizes that the USAF ability to deploy and fly its space-based assets anywhere, anytime is essential for contemporary reconnaissance, communication, and command and control. This capability will be even more important in 2025. Discussions of direct broadcast satellite sensor-to-shooter or satellite-to-Joint Surveillance, Targeting, and Reconnaissance System (JSTARS) and then to all relevant parties is a central component of global reach. The capabilities of aircraft like Commando Solo or follow-on variants based on UAVs or direct broadcast satellites and the variety of on board electronic warfare wizardry already deployed on most US combat aircraft are recognized, again, as central to global reach. Future requirements for air refueling will include servicing UAVs and UCAVs used for information attack, perhaps via batteries recharged by airborne or satellite-reflected, ground-based lasers.73
Many of the current and projected global reach capabilities in speed, lift, and all-weather performance based on ever more precise navigation will be even more central to information warfare and information attack in 2025. As the new generation of sensors based on a distributed system of satellites, surface sensors, and standoff systems is developed, USAF "atmospheric" global-reach thinking must evolve to include the mission of precise, point-of-use delivery of surface-based sensors. Global reach must develop the capability to deliver sensors, or other information attack hardware, with the same stealth, speed and, most importantly, precision now focused primarily on bombs. Global reach requires that ultra-high altitude air drops of information attack devices via, perhaps, Global Positioning System (GPS) based steerable parachutes must receive the same attention currently given precision guided munitions.74
The future role of USAF space reach is, of course, central to global awareness and global power. Specific space-based information warfare capabilities such as direct broadcast of video-morphed news broadcasts by the enemy leader announcing surrender are easy to imagine. These "Hollywood" capabilities, however, may not be the best use of space by the USAF. Whether protecting free access to space, defending against hostile use of commercial satellites by an adversary, developing an antisatellite capability, or having launch-on-demand capabilities, any and all of these could have some application to information attack (and defense). However, as the liberal, free-market, information-based economies of the United States and our allies are among those most likely to depend on "freedom of the high frontier," the USAF should be hesitant about the militarization of space. On the other hand, if information attack is correctly identified as directly corrupting information without visibly changing the physical entity within which it resides, the potential for information attack against the United States or its allies via space-based commercial or neutral third-party systems cannot be ignored.75 As shutting down the space-based planetary navigation or communications systems may not be an option for either technical or political reasons,76 USAF global reach to support global awareness and power will require a residual capability to provide launch-on-demand or activation-on-demand of secure systems.
USAF global power, increasingly characterized by the ability to engage with precise and discriminating effect, permits the asymmetric strategic response which leverages the differential information-in-war advantage provided by global awareness and the information-based planning and execution control provided by global reach. USAF global air and space power capabilities increasing demonstrate that the USAF's concept of decisive maneuver, engagement with precise and differential or relative superiority, should replace the Joint Vision 2010 concept of dominant maneuver.
Dominant maneuver, recall, proposes to bring together widely dispersed joint forces to replace the sequential march through the enemy's fielded military, population, infrastructure, and system essentials to get to the adversary leadership to convince him to change his behavior by attacking the adversary throughout the height, breadth, and depth of the battlespace and by attacking all levels of the enemy's centers of gravity simultaneously. The adversary system goes into shock and its ability to react is paralyzed. Dominant maneuver has become the Holy Grail of joint force employment. In reality, this massive and simultaneous engagement of joint forces appears to be required primarily because the joint force campaign planners lack the real-world, near-real-time knowledge of the key structures and patterns of activity, information, communication, or databases on which the adversary is dependent. Joint Vision 2010's "Full Spectrum Dominance," a very traditional American vision of war fighting, reflects the continuing inability to recognize the potential of information warfare. The emerging mission of USAF global awareness, as noted previously, must be to address this requirement to identify the strategic and militarily-relevant information differential. Dominant maneuver may be an obsolete concept for the exercise of military power in many of the security challenges of the near-future. Decisive maneuver, seen by the USAF as engagement with precise and differential or relatively superior air and space power assets, will be the future strategic choice and the rational use of scarce military resources. It will be the way to do more, differently.
Information warfare in the dominant maneuver universe is likewise usually discussed analogously to cumulative war in that a full-spectrum attack on the adversary's information infrastructure results in rendering him blind, deaf, and dumb. Lacking command and control of his military forces then, his actions are supposed to become chaotic and his forces are thus easier to defeat. It has not, however, been demonstrated that a blinded, chaotic actor represents the enemy decision maker from whom one could expect rational compliance with US strategic objectives.77 Battle is supposed to be about "some" thing, not "any" thing. Total information warfare against the adversary may be closer to "making the rubble bounce" than intelligent war fighting.
Information attack, on the other hand, as seen by the USAF more narrowly than full-scale IW, will be the essential component of decisive maneuver and may, in some situations, be the only exercise of discriminate power required to shape relatively predictable actions and produce the "strategic situation so advantageous" that US security objectives are met without dominant maneuver of the whole joint team. For the USAF to develop the capability for discriminate, precision information attack, new USAF research must address precise modeling of a potential adversary's Markov chains78 and revisit the theories of power distribution control.79
Information warfare can be direct or indirect. While it may appear at first counterintuitive, indirect IW involves creating information (or disinformation) that the adversary must observe if the intended effect is to be achieved.80 A false radio transmission that is not intercepted by the enemy is a waste of electrons. For the USAF, indirect IW as a form of perception management81 will be executed in the future most often by the traditional means of command and control warfare: psychological operations, military deception, security measures, electronic warfare, and physical destruction.82
Direct information warfare involves changing an adversary's information without involving the requirement that it be observed. Direct information warfare, counterintuitively, bypasses the adversary's perceptive or observing functions.83 Thus, direct IW will be executed in most cases by information attack: directly corrupting information without visibly changing the physical entity within which it resides.84 The goal is to "access the adversary's base of information used for decision making, thereby minimizing the unpredictability of the perceptive process."85 Based on the information provided via USAF global awareness capabilities and the ability to deploy provided by global atmospheric and space reach, both indirect and direct USAF IW capabilities will be developed.
Planning for information attack would need to include the assembly of baseline critical data, the analysis of adversary essential networks or systems, and human activity patterns. Thus, as the essential first step, a vulnerability assessment of the processes, procedures, and physical characteristics of adversary information-dependent activities would need to be developed and continually updated.86 To prepare to use information attack in asymmetric response, USAF info-warriors in 2025 must be guided by the principle that adversary military force is ultimately an output or peripheral of a weapons system and its sustaining, often civil, infrastructure.87 Corrupt the sustaining system and, like a diver deprived of his oxygen supply, the adversary military force may be ineffective.
The chief technical requirements for information attack that would need to be developed by the USAF in 2025 would include awareness of future trapdoors in computer programs and components; future systems to defend and penetrate, in peace and war, critical military, commercial, and educational, information-dependent systems; and future systems to protect against and deploy corrupt information via common carrier globally distributed information systems, false-flag (commercial products), or third-party (coalition partners) systems.88 Capability for precision stealthy deployment of sensors and information attack devices would need to be developed. Most importantly, alternative sets of databases and communications architectures will need to be developed and kept on the shelf in the future. Returning to the classic North American Air Defense Command model, once the pattern of information-dependent human activities is identified, the information target can be detected and identified, and the data on which the activity is dependent could be intercepted, destroyed, or corrupted by appropriate replacement. Is this science fiction? The Air Force Scientific Advisory Board notes that "methods for attacking information systems are under development"89and future "technologies and concepts for intelligence gathering and information attack in the commercially based, distributed global information system of 2025" can be discussed.90
If, for example, an emerging peer competitor of the type identified as "Khan" in the 2025 Study were to conduct missile tests or war games in an area or manner deemed unacceptable to the US or an ally, a standard response might be to redeploy a US carrier battle group to the region to signal or deter. The asymmetric strategic response would be to conduct information warfare through several means. Data could be manufactured and broadcast from USAF satellite assets which showed to all parties listening that Khan's missiles are woefully inaccurate as second-stage burn was only 87 percent complete. This would be indirect IW. The future capability needed for direct IW through information attack would be the insertion of the identical data into Khan's own sensor systems and the sensor systems of third parties, say a regional ally of Khan, to confirm the data. Finally, and most ambitiously, Khan's sensor architecture could be corrupted so that even if true data from, say, a commercial satellite system were examined, the corrupt results would still obtain. That one or two other sources might provide the correct data only complicates further the adversary's orientation and analytic problems. The battlespace of future conflicts could be shaped by the long-term effects of nonlethal disorientation information attack.