Uncle Sam’s cyber force wants you

William J Astore / Asia Times | June 30, 2008

Recently, while I was on a visit to Salon.com, my computer screen momentarily went black. A glitch? A power surge? No, it was a pop-up ad for the US Air Force, warning me that an enemy cyber attack could come at any moment – with dire consequences for my ability to connect to the Internet. It was an Outer Limits moment. Remember that eerie sci-fi show from the early 1960s? The one that began in a blur with the message, “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission …” It felt a little like that.

And speaking of air force ads, there’s one currently running on TV and on the Internet that starts with a bird’s eye view of the Pentagon as a narrator intones, “This building will be attacked 3 million times today. Who’s going to protect it?” Two army colleagues of mine nearly died on September 11, 2001, when the third hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon, so I can’t say I appreciated the none-too-subtle reminder of that day’s carnage. Leaving that aside, it turns out that the ad is referring to cyber attacks and that the cyber protector it has in mind is a new breed of “air” warrior, part of an entirely new Cyber Command run by the air force.

Using the latest technology, our cyber elite will “shoot down” enemy hackers and saboteurs, both foreign and domestic, thereby dominating the realm of cyberspace, just as the air force is currently seeking to dominate the planet’s air space – and then space itself “to the shining stars and beyond”.

Part of the air force’s new “above all” vision of full-spectrum dominance, America’s emerging cyber force has control fantasies that would impress George Orwell. Working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and other governmental agencies, the air force’s stated goal is to gain access to, and control over, any and all networked computers, anywhere on Earth, at a proposed cost to you, the American taxpayer, of US$30 billion over the first five years.

Here, the air force is advancing the now familiar George W Bush-era idea that the only effective defense is a dominating offense. According to Lani Kass, previously the head of the air force’s cyberspace task force and now a special assistant to the air force chief of staff, “If you’re defending in cyber [space], you’re already too late. Cyber delivers on the original promise of air power. If you don’t dominate in cyber, you cannot dominate in other domains.”

Such logic is commonplace in today’s air force (as it has been for Bush administration foreign policy). A threat is identified, our vulnerability to it is trumpeted, and then our response is to spend tens of billions of dollars launching a quest for total domination.

Thus, on May 12, the Air Force Research Laboratory posted an official “request for proposal” seeking contractor bids to begin the push to achieve “dominant cyber offensive engagement”. The desired capabilities constitute a disturbing militarization of cyberspace:

Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root access to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms. Robust methodologies to enable access to any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware … [T]echnology … to maintain an active presence within the adversaries’ information infrastructure completely undetected … [A]ny and all techniques to enable stealth and persistence capabilities … [C]apability to stealthily exfiltrate information from any remotely-located open or closed computer information systems …

Stealthily infiltrating, stealing and exfiltrating: sounds like cyber-cat burglars, or perhaps invisible cyber-SEALS, as in that US Navy “empty beach at night” commercial. This is consistent with an air force-sponsored concept paper on “network-centric warfare”, which posits the deployment of so-called “cyber-craft” in cyberspace to “disable terminals, nodes or the entire network as well as send commands to ‘fry’ their hard drives”.

Somebody clever with acronyms came up with D5, an all-encompassing term that embraces the ability to deceive, deny, disrupt, degrade and destroy an enemy’s computer information systems.

No one, it seems, is the least bit worried that a single-minded pursuit of cyber “destruction” – analogous to that “crush … kill … destroy” android on the 1960s TV series Lost in Space – could create a new arena for that old Cold War nuclear acronym MAD (mutually assured destruction), as America’s enemies and rivals seek to D5 our terminals, nodes and networks.

Here’s another less-than-comforting thought: America’s new cyber force will most likely be widely distributed in basing terms. In fact, the air force prefers a “headquarters” spread across several bases in the US, thereby cleverly tapping the political support of more than a few members of the US Congress.

Finally, if, after all this talk of the need for “information dominance” and the five Ds, you still remain skeptical, the air force has prepared an online “What Do You Think?” survey and quiz (paid for, again, by you, the taxpayer, of course) to silence naysayers and cyberspace appeasers. It will disabuse you of the notion that the Internet is a somewhat benign realm where cooperation of all sorts, including the international sort, is possible. You’ll learn, instead, that we face nothing but ceaseless hostility from cyber-thugs seeking to terrorize all of us everywhere all the time.

Ugly babies, icebergs and computers

Computers and their various networks are unquestionably vital to our national defense – indeed, to our very way of life – and we do need to be able to protect them from cyber attacks. In addition, striking at an enemy’s ability to command and control its forces has always been part of warfare. But spending $6 billion a year for five years on a mini-Manhattan Project to atomize our opponents’ computer networks is an escalatory boondoggle of the worst sort.

Leaving aside the striking potential for the abuse of privacy, or the potentially destabilizing responses of rivals to such aggressive online plans, the air force’s militarization of cyberspace is likely to yield uncertain technical benefits at inflated prices, if my experience working on two big air force computer projects counts for anything. Admittedly, that experience is a bit dated, but keep in mind that the wheels of procurement reform at the Department of Defense (DoD) do turn slowly, when they turn at all.

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