Introduction to Information Warfare

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Lecture 1
Introduction to Information Warfare
Mohamed Sharif
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Lecture Contents

• Warfare
• Information Warfare
• Information Environment
• Information Operation
• Ethics

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How to Study Information Warfare?

• Discussions about Information Warfare tend to be
  either
• High level discussions, riddled with trendy
  buzzwords, with rhetorical debates about
  terminology and taxonomy.
• Highly technical discussions about a particular
  technology.
• This course will try to plow a middle ground by
  introducing each topic at the high level and then
  drilling down to the technologies and their
  applications.
• In this way, we will prepare students for more
  advanced
• course work/career work in this field.

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What are the Origins of Warfare?

• Gimme your stuff!

• Fine! No problem man!

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What is Warfare

• Armed fighting between groups
• Period during war
• Method of warfare
• Conflict
• Serious effect to end something
• There have been four generations

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Four Generation of Warfare

• First Generation
• Started with the rise of the nation-state
• Top-down Military Structure
• Limited weapons and armies
• Ended in the early 19th Century
• Second Generation
• Started around 1860 in US
• Large Armies with artillery
• Formal assault tactics
• Mass weapon development
• Logistic support
• Ended around World War I (WW I)

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Four Generation of Warfare (Conti)

• Third-Generation
• Started in WW II by Germany
• Shock-maneuver tactics
• Weapon Mass Destruction
• Ended around 1980
• Four-Generation
• Started around 1989 in US
• Television
• No distinction between military and civilian

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Warfare in the Context of Social Evolution

• Is violence necessary to achieve military
  objectives?
• PGMs (precision guided munitions)
• Deterrence threat
• Emerging non-lethal weapons
• Sun Tzu (mid-first millennium BCE) who wrote a
  famous military treatise stated that the
  objective of war is the least possible loss of
  life and utilization of resources.

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Warfare in the Context of Social Evolution

• Is violence necessary to achieve military
  objectives?
• PGMs (precision guided munitions)
• Deterrence threat
• Emerging non-lethal weapons
• Sun Tzu (mid-first millennium BCE) who wrote a
  famous military treatise stated that the
  objective of war is the least possible loss of
  life and utilization of resources.

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Recent Wars

• In the 1991 Gulf War, despite the fact that Iraq
  had one of the largest armies in the world, the
  US had 382 casualties. This success is
  attributed to superior night vision, navigation,
  and precision guided munitions.
• To date the 2003 Iraqi War has claimed over 350
  US, 50 British and 5000 lives.

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Command Cycle is Becoming Shorter
Adapted from Sullivan and Dubik, War In the
Information Age. SSI US Army War College,1994
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What is Information Warfare ?

• Information warfare is a coherent and
  synchronized blending of physical and virtual
  actions to have countries, organizations, and
  individuals perform, or not perform, actions so
  that your goals and objectives are attained and
  maintained, while simultaneously preventing your
  competitors from doing the same to you
  According to Andy Jones.

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What is Information Warfare? (Conti.)

• Information Warfare is about operations that
  target or exploit information resources, D.
  Denning, Information Warfare and Security. (1999)
  21.
• Information Warfareis simply the use of
  information to achieve our national objectives,
  George Stein, Information Warfare, Airpower
  Journal 9 1, 32 (1995).

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Information Warfare (Conti.)

• Information Warfare is Information Operation
  conducted during times of crises or conflicts to
  achieve or promote specific objectives against a
  specific adversary or adversaries.

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Information Warfare (Cont.)

• Information Warfare is used to provide your
  organization a competitive advantage while at the
  same time limiting the competitions capability
  to reduce your advantage and increase their own.
• Information Warfare is not possible with out
  control of your Information Environments.

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Information Environments

• Information Environment (IE) is the aggregate of
  individual, organization, or systems that
  collect, process, or disseminate information
  including the information itself.
• IE is the interrelated set of Information,
  Information Infrastructures and Information-based
  processes.

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Information Environments (Conti)

• Information
• Data
• Knowledge
• Information Infrastructures
• Display
• Store
• Process
• Transmit
• Information based processes
• Obtain
• Exchange

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Related Information Warfare

• Knowledge Management
• Network-Centric Business
• Coherent Knowledge-Based Operation

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Information Warfare areas

• INFOSEC / Information Assurance
• Intelligence
• Computer network exploitation
• Network management
• Knowledge Management
• Information operations
• Command and Control
• Business Continuity
• Marketing
• Legal
• Research Development

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Examples of Information Warfare

• Business
• Three Blind Men
• Industry

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Attacks in Information Warfare

• Sources of Attack
• Internal
• External
• Forms of Attack
• Data attack
• Software Attack
• Hacking Attack
• Physical Attack
• Classes of Attack
• Passive attack
• Active attack

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Defense in Information Warfare

• Awareness
• Policies
• Information Assurance
• Military Forces
• Intelligence
• Cooperation between government and private sector

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Information Warfare (Conti)

• Objective of Information Warfare
• Exploitation
• Deception
• Disruption
• Destruction
• To achieve the objective of Information Warfare
• Natural hazard and unintended threats
• Tactical attack
• Strategic attack

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Information Warfare (Conti)

• Advantage
• Less human causalities
• Less cost
• Information Technology
• Disadvantage
• Trust
• Unexpected result
• Terrorism
• Un declare war

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What is Information Operations ?
Information Operation is an action taken to
affect adversary information and information
systems while defending ones own information and
information systems
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Information Operation Process
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Ethics of Teaching Information Warfare and Defense

• Will courses such as this result in greater or
  lesser loss of life?
• Are we training hackers (in the bad sense) or
  enabling society to defend itself?
• If we are to take the next step in cultural
  evolution, should we be teaching and studying
  conflict resolution rather than warfare?

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Ethics of Teaching Information Warfare and Defense

• With precision guided munitions that allow
  targeting within minutes, does life become cheap,
  reduced to a video game?
• With life and death decisions being made in real
  time, without adequate time for reflection or
  analysis, does the world become more dangerous?

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Ethics (cont.)

• Finally, is the relative ease with which the US
  won the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq likely
  to lead to a false sense of security?
• For example, with weapons of mass disruption
  might the US cause so much confusion that an
  enemy might panic into doing something extreme,
  such as launching a nuke.