6th European Conference - Academic Conferences

Christopher Perr
Historical examples of this can be pointed to before the term ‘IT’ was even coined, one such being
General William T. Sherman’s use of the telegraph to effectively shorten the kill chain of his day.
The kill chain is how forces find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess an enemy force today. It is a
loop where the exit is the destruction of your target. In Sherman’s time the kill chain was shortened by
drastically cutting the amount of time it took to communicate with his geographically separated forces.
None of these terms were used in Sherman’s time, but the concept is not new.
According to Arquilla (2007), Sherman is also useful for another example. His dependence on the
telegraph and the lack of security was highlighted when the Confederate forces started to attack the
lines that carried the vital communications. This caused troops to be pulled from the battlefield for
protection, and while it may have been too late in the war to make a difference, caused a dilution of
the Union’s forces. The telegraph showed how the kill chain can be thought of not in distances but in
time to decision making, and was also shown to be a possible center of gravity to which doctrine must
be modified to defend.
History is rife with examples of how technology has affected the way we think about and execute
conflict. The telegraph is historically the single largest increase in communication bandwidth. As its
was recognized as a powerful tool for command and control, dependence on the telegraph as the only
manner for controlling troops was recognized as a possible center of gravity and weakness to be
exploited
4. The (more) recent history of information operations the environment of
information operations
“An information war is inexpensive, as the enemy country can receive a paralyzing blow
through the Internet, and the party on the receiving end will not be able to tell whether it
is a child’s prank or an attack from its enemy.”
Wei Jincheng, excerpted from the Military Forum column, Liberation Army Daily, 25 June
1996
The First Gulf War is widely viewed as a major success according to Campen (1992). The
preparations involved repetitive rehearsals, planning, critique, and then more rehearsal. The rest of
the world watched as, what was at the time, the fourth largest force in the world got rolled over in a
matter of days. That was 1991, and even though the communication network was almost thrown
together the tactics and techniques used proved to be game changing.
Baucon (2010) notes that by 1995 forces around the globe had taken such a notice to the
revolutionary way that U.S. forces had used modified blitzkrieg maneuvers combined with supreme
command and control enabled by a technical advantage that those forces had changed their strategy
and force composition. It was clear that smart weapons and use of information warfare had made a
profound effect
Fast forward a bit, and a lot has happened since the Gulf War. In 2007 a conflict arose in Estonia with
Russia over the existence and placement of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. This spawned what the
Russian government called a ‘online response by patriotic individual citizens’. Estonia, a ‘highly
connected web friendly’ country, was now the victim of various bot-net and denial of service attacks
which brought the internet in that country to a halt. Waterman (2007) wrote that the attack was
characterized by Professor James Hendler, a former chief scientist at DARPA, as
“...more like a cyber riot than a military attack”
Speculation seems to imply that the Russian government sought out the help of organized crime and
individual hackers to carry out the attacks. The effect was the same as a conventional siege, and the
attacks were reported as a ‘crime’ by the Russians. The Estonian government requested aid in
investigation as outlined in Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. Russia declined their requests (Leyden,
2008)
Other cases to look at are the cyber attacks perpetrated by North Korea on the United States and
South Korea in July of 2009. On the 4th of July North Korea attacked a large number of government
websites with bot-net and DDoS attacks seeking suspected political bargaining power. The attacks
were felt mildly here in the U.S. due to filtering addresses and distribution of website sources, but the
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