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uzzword for IO writers. For example, a recent 2004 Joint Warrior
Interoperability Demonstration (JWID), where information security issues
would be expected to appear, cited nine of sixty-one trials as worthy of further
exploration. These nine trials were: identity-based encryption, cross-domain
information sharing, interoperable decision support for defense, enterprise
application integration, interoperable alerts here and abroad, making visible the
entire network, securing message exchanges across nations, multiple network
access from one workstation, and automated information sharing among
networks. 2 This strong emphasis on systems integration and information
security and network issues is typical for a US military exercise. Cyber-related
terminology does not appear with nearly the same frequency or emphasis in
such exercises, if it appears at all.
The US military has been extremely successful in applying and
integrating information capabilities into its fighting apparatus—so successful,
in fact, that it may have become immune to an emerging need to look elsewhere
for new ideas and trends. It is hard to tell those who have done so well for so
long that they might be able to do better if they considered other options. The
US military is more than willing to experiment with new Cyber Age equipment
but just as unwilling to explore IO theory with the same abandon. Some IO
tasks in Iraq and elsewhere, for example, were assigned to artillery personnel
because they understood targeting, not IO theory and practice. This is simply
wrong. Perhaps this is because the US military doesn’t have an academy of
military science as some nations do. Such an academy would provide for
greater clarification of the capabilities, laws, methods, forms, and principles of
IO.
The US military writes more on IO by order of magnitude than most
countries. Still this doesn’t mean the US has it all right or that it has thought
everything through from various perspectives. That is why a review of IO
developments in other nation-states and IO developments among transnational
groups, such as terrorists and criminal elements, are of value. The review offers
alternative ways of viewing twenty-first-century developments and presents a
comprehensive outline of the impact of information or cyber technologies and
concepts on military and national security affairs. Such an analysis also helps
with the formulation of counterstrategies to a terrorist’s cyber activities.
While the primary US emphasis on technology meets the demands of
keeping the military-industrial complex engaged, the US tends to place less
emphasis on some of the equally important developments in the fields of cross-
2 Frank Tiboni, “Military Eyes New Technology,” Federal Computer Network, 18
January 2005, from FCW.COM, 20 January 2005.
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