Los Angeles - October 18, 1996

Major General John P. Casciano
Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence
HQ, USAF

Introduction

I appreciate the opportunity to share with you my thoughts about information warfare (IW). I'll explain what your Air Force and mine is doing about it, and our vision for a core competency of the Air Force -- Information Superiority. You'll find we are doing some pretty exciting things.

I believe, as do many folks who are objectively thinking about IW, that we in the Air Force are in the lead within the United States military in terms of a doctrinal approach, cultural adaptation, organizational adaptation, and plain capability. We ought to take pride in that. It's being done through a lot of bright, young people's hard work and good thinking. It is an important part of our future.

As I address the topic of information warfare, I will cover what it is and why it is important. I'll discuss vulnerabilities and threats. And, finally, I'll talk about how we are building our Air Force's IW capabilities to meet the core competency of Information Superiority. There are a lot of different policy discussions going on at various levels within Washington among the Services, the Joint Staff, and other organizations. We in the United States Air Force have a particular approach that we are advocating.

What is Information Warfare?

It all starts with a definition. The definition of IW we are using in the Air Force is: "Any action to deny, exploit, corrupt, or destroy the enemy's information and its functions; protecting ourselves against those actions; and exploiting our own military information functions." This means making sure you can do unto others so they can't do unto you; and then taking advantage of superior information capabilities to dominate in any kind of situation, peace through war. I don't want to belabor this, but we have been doing information warfare for a long time. When Doyle Larson, the AFA president, was at Electronic Security Command, he was in the midst of this. It was his brain child. He soed by one word: precision! Whether a precision weapon is lethal or non-lethal, it will require precise information. This is fundamental to our future. We have to know where is the enemy, what his capabilities are, what his weaknesses and critical targets are, and what his centers of gravity are. It's something we've classically done, but when you get into the era of information warfare, it demands more precision and more rigor than we have ever had to grapple with before. We've got to be able to manipulate information. That is characteristic of warfare and has been for a long time.

For example, during World War II, the Germans used to guide bombers over Great Britain using intersecting radar beams. We were able to determine they were doing that; spoofed it, making the bombs fall away from their targets; and consequently disrupted the German capability for a period of time.

We also need to deny the enemy the ability to do the same kind of thing to us. That involves protection. That involves defense in ways that we have not really thought of before -- protecting our information realm.

That puts us into the fifth dimension of warfare. Technology first allowed us to operate on land and sea. At the beginning of this century, we then moved into air and, eventually, space. That is the domain where we have unique competencies in our U.S. Air Force. We also have competencies to operate in the infosphere, "the fifth dimension of warfare" as General Fogleman has called it many times in speeches.

Information is a domain that is not uniquely ours, but is certainly one that culturally we find very comfortable in the Air Force. We are used to global and theater ranging capabilities and the use of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. That is what the whole history of our U.S. Air Force has been about for 50 years. It enabled us to build the SIOP [Single Integrated Operational Plan]. It enabled us to win the Cold War. It enables us today to apply information precisely at times and places of our own chooHow does this fit in doctrinally? First, Cornerstones of Information Warfare was published a little over a year ago to address our traditional capabilities in air and space and our view of the requirement to maintain information superiority and information dominance, just as we maintain air and space superiority.

Second, in today's revolution in military affairs, there are three components. You take new technology, you develop doctrine and concepts for using it, and you adapt organizationally so that you can handle it for the future and gain an advantage over an adversary.

Why is this important? In the past, using closed information systems, the kinds we were used to during the Cold War, we had all kinds of protection for classified information, whether it was operational information, warplanning information, or intelligence information. Today, we are very dependent on the microchip and the Internet for global communications, which, by and large, are commercially driven. Our dependence on information, and our dependence on commercial, unclassified technologies and links represent both certain vulnerabilities and certain opportunities to us.

Right now, much of our unclassified, but nonetheless sensitive, information from a war planning and military execution stand point, moves over the commercial backbone. We consider encryption and closed systems, but ultimately we've got to manage the risks out there. We can no longer, at least within the current budget environment, build a completely closed system. It just would not work. About 90 percent of our critical information for planning and execution runs over commercial links these days, quite a change from the world in which many of us grew up.

Opportunities and Vulnerabilities

Let's turn now to the opportunities, vulnerabilities and threats. We face a double-edged sword. Our reliance on technology confronts uare from Napoleon's time, and before, warriors were able to move small rom the use of the telescope, men went to the pony express and then to the wire telegraph where they were able to move a little more information a bit farther and faster. Today, however, we are moving massive amounts of information literally at the speed of light. That is why I say the future of warfare -- our future as an Air Force and U.S. military -- is going to be dominated by the precise application of force based on precise information.

What is vulnerable? A lot. We have spent a lot of time trying to determine what our vulnerabilities are. We are moving a lot of relevant information on commercial communications and it affects virtually every part of our Air Force operations at a typical base.

For example, we move medical information and order blood and medical supplies over commercial links. We also manage the movement of cargo and fuels the same way. In an expeditionary world, where we must deploy fast to get to a hot spot, fuels and logistics tend to be long poles in the tent. Yet, most such data goes over essentially unprotected commercial links. We are taking advantage of telemedicine capabilities in the military to do diagnostics from a long distance and move medical supplies, blood, medical information and so on. All of this information is vulnerable. We are taking advantage of the commercial opportunities, but it is a double-edged sword that also opens up vulnerabilities. You don't want the wrong kind of blood going to the wrong place at the wrong time.

In communications, we are relying more and more on INMARSAT, but it is subject to being exploited, jammed, denied, and manipulated...yet we proliferate these systems. We have to. We have no other alternative. Even something as common as bank Automated Teller Machines (ATM) breed vulnerability. When I travel now, instead of going to the finance h my government credit card and I draw money. Those transactions move over relatively unprotected lines. Imagine the kind of turbulence thatystem and started manipulating our financial records. What would it do to a spouse in a family whose military member was deployed overseas? You could quickly run into a lot of financial difficulty. It would affect morale, and it would overload the system. It would cause the individual who was deployed not to focus on the primary warfighting job. Those potential vulnerabilities are there. We have to streamline our support functions to take advantage of technology and cut down costs, but it means we are more at risk.

I don't want to belabor this. The actual intrusion into these systems is relatively benign and today is mostly at the hacker level. But, the more people think and talk about computer intrusions, and the more it appears in movies and television programs, the more folks are going to try their hands at it.

It is not only our networked communications and computer systems that we need to protect; some basic warfighting capabilities are also subject to these kinds of vulnerabilities. We must protect embedded computer systems as we build new systems for the future. The Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom [AFB, Mass.] has the lead for this in Air Force Materiel Command.

Threats

Let's now turn to the potential threats. I like to categorize them in three ways: The hacker or the "ankle biter," which I think is what we are primarily seeing or detecting right now; the nation-states that are interested or involved in information warfare; and then, very significantly, transnational groups who can and do operate in this fifth dimension.

Hackers get their "handles" from the Internet. They are adept at their trade, but some of them end up in jail. These are the gunslingers of the 21st century. They attack and use the same kinds of tools that we use in the military. They do reconnaissance in cyberspace -- "surfing the net" -- and collect information. They do intelligence preparation of the battlespace so they can map our systems, our capabilities and our information. They use stealth tools, breaking into systems and leaving trap doors for later exploitation, and they use precision attack. Their tools and techniques are not unfamiliar to us in the military, and we've seen all kinds of examples. Senator Nunn held hearings on this subject and the President has set up a new commission on the protection of our nation's critical infrastructure. This commission includes representation from the financial community, banking community, commerce, transportation, and logistics.

The tools of the hacking trade are available over the Internet. You can go out there, find the tools and download them. You don't have to have a lot of technical knowledge; you don't have to be a software programmer. You don't have to know the guts of the computer and communication business. You just download the software, simply point and click and you can be an information warrior. We see lots of evidence of this.

There are many examples, within the Air Force, and elsewhere. We put a lot of focus on detecting this kind of thing. We have a capability that we built in San Antonio [Texas] that is a network security monitot did not have the network security monitoring capability. It is a matter of cost. We are going to complete the build by the end of this fiscal year, but we are not there yet. We found somebody entering Patrick through an Internet provider in Bedford, Massachusetts. That is one of the difficulties with this. You really don't know where it is coming from in a lot of cases. It requires a lot of detective work. Sometimes we are successful. The OSI and the FBI are often successful in finding the perpetrators. Other times we are not, because we don't have the tools fully matured to be able to do that. They came through Patrick to a couple of sites on the West Coast, again, doing the kinds of things that I talked about -- password sniffing, probing, intelligence preparation of the battlespace and that sort of thing.

A couple of people have suggested I arranged the attack on the Air Force Academy just to coincide with CORONA. It actually started before. A sharp systems administrator started seeing the systems slow down. There are two e-mail systems there, one for use by the cadets and one for use by the staff. The systems administrator contacted our Air Force Computer Emergency Response Team in San Antonio. They came in and did the analysis and tracked it. We have finally tracked it to a university host somewhere else in the country. School is back in session! It may just be as simple as that. The hacker introduced an e-mail bomb that proliferated itself and just slowed the system. That is the kind of thing that is possible.

Turning now to nation states. Obviously, I can't go into any detail on this, but suffice it to say that many nation states are aware of information warfare. There are about a dozen and a half countries that have active defensive or offensive information warfare programs. NATO is also examining what it needs to do in information warfare. Weof our traditional friends and allies over information warfare and command and control warliterally is a global problem.

Let me finally cover transnational actors such as those involved in international terrorism, various ethnic or fundamentalist groups and narcotrafficing. I'll give you a couple of examples. As the international political system evolves, we are moving into a multi-player world where actors other than nation-states can do a lot of damage. The Strano Leftist Network operating out of Italy is involved in all kinds of things, mostly as an intelligence network operating over the Internet, but it also has political agendas. Some of its political agendas have to do with the repression of minorities, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, and anti-nuclear testing. They organized an international effort to shut down the Internet in France during December 1995 and in Mexico in June of this year. This is real. These are transnational actors doing the kinds of things that nation-states have traditionally done.

Building for Information Warfare

What has the Air Force done to develop IW capabilities? Well, it starts with the legacy of Doyle Larson who organized a team of young people -- communicators, Intel people, traditional operators, and engineers -- in the former Electronic Security Command and Air Force Intelligence Command. They started seeing the kinds of vulnerabilities that are out there and the trends in the information age. They really did a lot of seminal work in bounding the problem and started developing tools. That led Lt. Gen. Ken Minihan, then the first commander of Air Intelligence Agency (AIA), to stand up the Air Force Information Warfare Center in September 1993 to focus on this problem, to develop concepts, and to build tools, tactics and techniques that could then be exported to the warfighting commands. That has been a successful venture.

There has been a lot of direction from the four-stars in terms of how we need to educate the force, how we need to invest, and how we need to operationalize information warfare in our Air Force. The CORONA Conference in 1995 issued the Cornerstones of Information Warfare document. Significantly, General Fogleman gave direction to stand up the 609th Information Warfare Squadron at Shaw Air Force Base to fully operationalize information warfare on behalf of the JFACC [Joint Forces Air Component Commander] and the fighting forces. I had the opportunity to travel to Shaw with Lt. Gen. Jumper [AF/XO] and Lt. Gen. Fairfield [AF/SC] a few weeks ago to visit the 609th IWS. The squadron is up and running, and has a cadre of good, motivated people. They are taking this challenge very seriously and making great strides in operationalizing information warfare. They have a plan of action that is going to get IW into our exercises -- at Green Flag and Blue Flag and some joint exercises. The recent CORONA generated a lot of discussion on IW. The Secretary and Chief believe it iso just follow this train of thought. Everything we do needs to be put into a joint context. That is the world as it exists today, and it is the right way of doing business. Anything we do in the Air Force has to be consistent with a CINC's requirements or a JTF commander's requirements and must meet those objectives. We believe that IW is absolutely critical and integral to Air Force operations at the JFACC level and below. We have some things to offer other communities, but our focus is on the operational and tactical levels of warfare. A lot of the targets and a lot of the things we would want to affect -- command and control nodes and the adversary's integrated air defense system (IADS) -- are things the Air Force worries about on the battlefield. We don't claim IW exclusively. We think we've got good ideas. We think we've got good capabilities. And we are reaching out to the other services and the joint community to offer what we have. But, our focus is going to be on JFACC and below.

Who are the players? The BNCC (Base Network Control Center) initiative is building cyber fences around our bases, whether in garrison or deployed, so that anything that comes in, passes through network security monitoring equipment and we can tell whether we are being attacked. We have got about 1,500 people in the POM invested in this. Lt. Gen. Fairfield has taken the lead on this and it includes setting up a BNCC at every Air Force base and furnishing the tools that allow those BNCCs to operate. I already covered the 609th Information Warfare Squadron. We are up and running with it. IOC [Initial Operational Capability] was in August this year, and it is going to be the prototype for how we do business in the future. The Information Warfare Center in San Antonio will be a center of excellence for bounding the problem, developing concepts, tools and techniques for the operating forces to use.

General Hawley has the responsibility to lead the CAF [combat and obviously has the space domain. I've discussed AIA, and I see a big role for Special Operations Command in this whole arena. Of course, everyone has a responsibility for the defensive aspects.

Probably the most significant part for the future is the emphasis that the Chief and the Secretary and all of the four-stars have put on training. We are putting IW into all of our curricula. We are educating the force. It is consistent with our culture. Air University produced a 24-minute video called Cyberstrike. It has been out about 7 or 8 months with 2,500 copies around the world. We are implementing two new courses this year; a three day course for General Officers and senior civilians and a five day course for others. We expect to train about a thousand people during this coming year at Maxwell [AFB, Ala.]. IW is going into all of our training programs from the most basic level through tech training through professional military education.

We are also investing money in academic and advanced degree programs to learn more about information warfare, again primarily from the opportunities and vulnerabilities standpoint.

In conclusion, our U.S. Air Force has been a big user of the information domain ever since its beginning...and we continue to be. We are just looking at it in slightly different ways. We have addressed the opportunities and vulnerabilities, and I think our Air Force is responding in the way you would expect. With that, I will conclude my remarks and open it up to questions.

Questions

Gen. Shaud: The questions are in two general areas: Information warfare and about Russia. Would you please help us shift gears just a little bit and talk about General Lebed, his removal as national security advisor, and possibly about the security of the strategic rocket forces, those forces that Sure. I'd be glad to. Let me discuss Alexander Lebed first. If you look back in Russian history, this is not an unusual peir system. There have always been personalities throughout Russian history vying for power and influence. We saw that during the days of the Czars. We saw it certainly during the Communist regime. We have seen it since the end of the Cold War. It is also very characteristic of Boris Yeltsin and the way he has managed his version of the democratic transition. He has a number of people that work for him, some in an inner circle, some in a far outer circle, that he balances off against each other.

He has not hesitated to hire to balance nor to fire to balance. We have seen examples of that over the last five years. Chubays, the chief of staff, got fired a little while ago. Now he is again part of the inner circle and a fairly influential person. Khorzhikov, the Russian general that was so close to him, got fired when Lebed came in. He seems to be reemerging to a certain degree. This is not uncharacteristic of Russian history or the Russian way of doing things. Alexander Lebed has a lot of support. He is a nationalist, but not an ultra-nationalist, like Zhirinovsky, but he believes in Russia. He is proud of Russia and its accomplishments over its history. He is very much committed to a democratic transition.

He is also very worried about the Russian military. There is no question that he is worried about the Russian military. Two hundred and fifty thousand military families are without housing. Talk about concerns for quality of life -- people who haven't been paid and who can't get the basics! Military people have to go out and essentially do the lowest jobs in society in order to feed their families. They are tempted to engage in black marketing and organized crime. The Russian military is still very proud. It is still very professional. I think it is t right thing, but the problems that it faces are really tremendous.

Alexander Lebed will be around for a long time. He is one of the most popular politicians in the country. He is cernd compete for the presidency next time or, depending on what happens to Boris Yeltsin with his health situation, sooner. But I don't think he is gone from the scene. I would not be surprised to see him hired back at a later time as others have been hired back. If you are into prayer, pray for Russia. The country is going through a rough transition to democracy and capitalism.

Now, about strategic nuclear forces. If there is one bright spot in the Russian military, it is the strategic forces. That is where the money, the talent, and the emphasis that is available has been going for a whole lot of good reasons. The only sense in which Russia remains a superpower is in the nuclear arena. That doesn't mean they don't have other capabilities, but the most viable part of their military is the strategic nuclear forces. We are seeing emphasis on that and the money that is available is going toward that as are good, talented people. Everything I see says there is still very much positive control over the nuclear weapons. Let's hope that continues; I expect it will. Some of the Nunn-Lugar initiatives over the last few years have helped in that respect. We just need to keep that emphasis and keep helping them. I don't lose sleep over Russian nuclear control, I really don't.

Gen. Shaud: The next question came from one of the young people present. Will there be an information warfare career specialty?

Maj. Gen. Casciano: I predict, ultimately yes. That is one of the "to-do's" in our long-range planning process. We have talked about it, and it was discussed at last year's CORONA to see if we need a specific career field for information warfare. It is still too early to tell. What we need are good, creative people, who are traditional operators, new information operators, folks who are in communications, the computer business, engineers, intelligence people and others who deal in information. I think it is too early to develop a separate career field, but it is a big house and a lot of people can be operators in that house. Just as in the movie The Graduate where "plastics" was the key field, today it is "information." If I was talking to someone real young, I'd probably talk genetics and bioengineering because I think that is going to be the next wave that we have to confront.

There are great opportunities and it doesn't depend on the career field. It depends on the mission, function and task that you are asked to perform. There are going to be lots of operator opportunities for people in this area.

Gen. Shaud: The next question relates to your trip to Shaw AFB. Could you describe the way you see the mission of the squadron, how they fit in and do you think there are going to be more squadrons like that?

Maj. Gen. Casciano: I think the squadron is going to be a success, so I tend to believe that there are going to be more squadrons eventually. The mission is to support the JFACC in integrating information warfare writ large into an air cambil a deployed situation, which is where we are going to be really vulnerable in a conflict.

That squadron has a role in protecting the air base, moving in, working with the communication squadron, working with others who are in that business, and building that cyber fence around the base. We have to worry about force protection in a physical sense. We now also have to worry about it in a cyber sense. We have lots of information warfare capabilities. In psychological operations and electronic warfare, we have Compass Call and other capabilities. Over time, we will see an evolution in capabilities. Whether it fits into that squadron or is somehow orchestrated by that squadron, I think it is still too early to tell.

Gen. Shaud: Some say it is illegal to do offensive information warfare in peacetime. Do you agree with this and how do we step into that world of offensive information warfare?

Maj. Gen. Casciano: I don't see the U.S. Air Force engaging in that. That is going to be a legal thicket that the national community is going to have to work its way through. The legal community is somewhat split on just what is and what is not allowed. Congress is going to have to grapple with the issue from a legal stand point. The courts are going to have to do that as well. I don't want to dodge the question, but there is not enough clarity out there now. I know it is something that Dr. Deutch, at CIA, has testified to Congress on and that has been covered in the press in terms of his view of some potentialities there. But, we as a nation need to develop the legal, procedural and organizational mechanisms to be able to deal with this. It is there. It is on our doorstep and we've got to deal with it.

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