-Caveat Lector- Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com http://www.ioa.com/~davehart GUARDIAN (London) Friday November 5, 1999 Cyberwar could spare bombs Nato commander Wesley Clark boosts the case for telecom assaults with a vision of how they might have been used in Kosovo Julian Borger in Washington The general who led Nato's forces in Kosovo believes the bombing campaign might not have been necessary if new electronic methods of waging war had been used to force President Slobodan Milosevic into submission. General Wesley Clark, the outgoing supreme allied commander in Europe, stunned a recent session of the US senate armed forces committee by calling for a complete rethink of western strategy and questioning the need for the aerial assault on Serbia, which caused an estimated 1,500 civilian casualties and came close to losing the propaganda war. His testimony last month was the highest level of endorsement so far given to the use of forms of "cyberwar" which, their supporters argue, could have stopped Serb ethnic cleansing faster and with far less bloodshed. Such a war would have used "offensive hacking" against Belgrade's computers and Mr Milosevic's bank account, and jammed or subverted his communications and propaganda. Meanwhile small groups of special forces sent into Kosovo with powerful computers would have directed Nato's overwhelming firepower at the Serb troops responsible for the slaughter. "We need to look at all of the instruments of power that can be brought to bear," Gen Clark told the senators. He argued that as well as legal means of blocking the Danube and the Adriatic ports, Nato should have used "methods to isolate Milosevic and his political parties electronically". "There were a number of measures that could have been taken sooner and some that were never actually implemented that would have augmented - maybe even been more powerful than - the military instrument, maybe have prevented the use of the military instrument." In the course of the Kosovo war, Gen Clark came to be regarded as a maverick in the Pentagon, and his forced early retirement from his Nato post - he leaves next spring, several months ahead of schedule - was widely seen as a calculated snub to his views. But his outspoken remarks to the senate have added significant weight to a growing body of thought among US strategic thinkers. In a report published this month, the US council on foreign relations (CFR) argued that new non-lethal technologies offered a "middle option" between "classic diplomatic table-thumping and indiscriminate economic sanctions on the one hand and major military intervention on the other hand". Nato troops have been experimenting for years with ways to bring the west's overwhelming technological superiority to bear on its enemies without resorting to the vast destructive power of high-altitude bombardment. They call it the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). But it is a revolution that has hitherto been kept top secret. "The US admits it has SF [special forces] troops but it doesn't admit it has IO [information operations] forces," said Martin Libicki, a cyberwar expert from the National Defence university in Washington, who is researching the issue for the Rand Corporation. The Kosovan conflict has been called the first war on the internet. Hackers disrupted and defaced Serb and Nato websites, and jammed computer messaging systems with "email bombs". Some were government-sponsored and some private, but they had a limited effect on each side's military capabilities. Meanwhile, a hidden internet battle for far higher stakes was under way. According to defence analysts, US computer hackers burrowed into Serb government email systems to read Belgrade's mind day by day, while some infiltrated their way into the internet systems of banks around the world in search of accounts held by Mr Milosevic and other Serbian leaders. There are divided views on whether they succeeded, but analysts agree that it was an early example of the wars yet to come, in which the struggle will turn on access to the enemy's financial and communications computer systems. With that in mind, the Pentagon set up a specialised agency two years ago aimed at securing US classified systems against a "cyber-terrorist attack" in which, for example, hostile hackers would cause chaos in the American skies by planting a "logic bomb" in air traffic control computers to scramble their software. Cyberwar proponents argue that Nato put the interests of financial stability first and decided not to erase Mr Milo sevic's bank accounts. They also argue that the west failed to use the non-lethal means at its disposal to disrupt Serb television propaganda. The CFR report said microwave technology could have disabled Belgrade's electronic equipment, while cruise missiles armed with carbon-fibre payloads could have shorted out the Serb electric grid. Alternatively, transmissions from neighbouring countries or electronic warfare planes like the EA-6B Prowler could have subverted Belgrade's television broadcasts by slotting in reports of Serb atrocities in Kosovo or replacing them wholesale with the BBC or CNN. To that end, it argues, video cameras could have been distributed to the Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovan civilians to accelerate the flow of live evidence of Serb ethnic cleansing. By using non-lethal means Nato would have avoided rallying Serb popular support around an otherwise hated regime, and would have found it easier to maintain a Nato consensus behind its campaign, the report argues. But it is in Kosovo itself that the new forms of warfare might have had their greatest effect. According to John Arquilla, one of cyberwar's leading prophets and a professor of defence information sciences at the Naval postgraduate school in California, small groups of US, British and French special forces were infiltrated into Kosovo and could have been used to direct bombers or helicopters against the Serb militias carrying out ethnic cleansing. With the help of satellites, electronic warfare planes like the Prowler and the unmanned drones under development, these troops could have provided their commanders with an accurate and constantly updated picture of what Mr Arquilla calls the"information battlespace". In a joint article with David Ronfeldt, a Rand researcher, he wrote: "Advanced information-gathering tools, including orbital and aerial assets, night vision equipment and unmanned sensors deployed along the lines of movement, let our units know where enemy units are, when they are moving and in what numbers. Our preliminary view is that a cyberwar campaign might require only one-tenth the number of an adversary's forces." Instead of exploiting these possibilities, the Pentagon fell back on the "Powell doctrine", called after the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Colin Powell, which maintained that the US should intervene only when it could muster overwhelming force. The special forces in Kosovo and the Apache helicopters waiting just over the border were never used to stop the slaughter. ================================= GUARDIAN (London) Friday November 5, 1999 US refines 'non-lethal' weapons for use on civilians Richard Norton-Taylor Western democracies will resort to non-lethal weapons, including sticky foam, jamming devices and the control of water supplies, as public opinion becomes increasingly sensitive to casualties among its own armed forces and enemy civilians, US analysts told a conference in London this week. Colonel George Fenton, director of the US joint non-lethal weapons office, said western values, including respect for human life, coupled with technological advances, "underscore the importance of non-lethal weapons in armed conflict". Armed forces would face the likelihood of more frequent clashes involving civilian populations as cities got bigger, he said. Russell Glenn of the Rand corporation also told the Jane's defence information systems conference: "An army having to fight in a modern megalopolis not only confronts a daunting task in confronting an enemy; the tasks associated with the control and support of non-combatants could easily demand more manpower than was necessary to seize entire cities in the mid-20th century." The answer to high casualties, he said, lay in non-lethal weapons and intelligence from unmanned aerial vehicles - able to transmit images while flying between buildings. Remote-controlled robots would mount road blocks and seal routes with smoke or foam. In a report for the European parliament, Steve Wright of the Manchester-based Omega foundation listed ultra-sound generators, which cause disorientation, vomiting and defecation; "human capture nets" laced with chemical irritant or electrified; foam guns; blinding lasers; and "thermal guns", which incapacitate through a wall by raising body temperatures to 42C. Dr Wright said many so-called non-lethal weapons were far from non-lethal. "There is a real danger they will make conflicts more lethal by enraging crowds." ================================= *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. *** DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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