Center for a New American Security

The debate between Henry Kissinger and Anne-Marie Slaughter about intervention in Syria rests on interpretations of sovereignty and world order that are more complex than popularly depicted. By properly contextualizing sovereignty and intervention in the world system, we can come to a better understanding of what is at stake in the current debate. Post Cold War interventions are part of a great continuum of intervention that goes back at least several centuries.

Kissinger begins by noting the role that the Treaty of Westphalia allegedly played in putting an end to Europe's wars of religion, and goes on to suggest that humanitarian intervention in the Middle East is undermining the norm of state sovereignty: 

The modern concept of world order arose in 1648 from the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. In that conflict, competing dynasties sent armies across political borders to impose their conflicting religious norms. This 17th-century version of regime change killed perhaps a third of the population of Central Europe. To prevent a repetition of this carnage, the Treaty of Westphalia separated international from domestic politics. States, built on national and cultural units, were deemed sovereign within their borders; international politics was confined to their interaction across established boundaries. For the founders, the new concepts of national interest and balance of power amounted to a limitation, not an expansion, of the role of force; it substituted the preservation of equilibrium for the forced conversion of populations.

While Kissinger's conclusions are very reasonable, the problem is that interventions in the Middle East represent the endpoint of a spectrum of intervention that the United States substantially contributed to with Cold War actions many realists supported. Furthermore, there's also a big empirical problem with the Westphalia-centric interpretation advanced in the op-ed.

First, in a critique of the then-dominant trend of New Medievalism, Lt. Col. Michael Phillips observed that Westphalia was more a metaphor for an at best imperfectly observed world order than a transformative shift in international relations. The treaty itself was silent on the concept of sovereignty, and served only to codify an informal set of arrangements that had already evolved in Germany. More relevant to the balance of power in the oft-idealized pre-Napoleonic European system was the political, financial, organizational, and military difficulties involved in levying decisive war. Warfare before Napoleon is so distant to us as to be alien--a time when the public had little to do with the making of war and conscripts could not biovac near forests lest they desert. Certainly, aggressive men and women existed, but lacked the means to realize their dreams of domination. European warfare in the Americas, however, was waged as if the Thirty Years War never ended. Women and children were targeted, crops and settlements were laid to waste, and irregular forces, pirates, and militias were decisive combatants. Wars in the Americas were wars of annihilation.

As would be demonstrated during the 19th century, intervention in the international system came to take several divergent forms. First, intervention in internal affairs was countenanced when a given state's ideology made it threatening to other actors. Revolutionary France was the Iran of its era, never fully trusted because of its fanaticism, ideological crimes against its own citizenry, and desire to export its ideology abroad. Second, intervention against transnational irregular actors--often in defiance of sovereign boundaries--occured because of the threat pirates and bandits posed to travel and commerce. These actors were viewed as criminals and enemies of all mankind. Finally, non-European powers that mistreated Europeans or populations Europeans were sympathetic to were targets for humanitarian intervention.

During the 20th century the Nazis and Soviets forced a merger of all three categories of intervention. Enemies that sought to wage global ideological war, who inverted Clausewitz--as Lenin did-- to conceptualize politics as war by other means had to be fought everywhere. As Dan has observed, these struggles were if anything much more invasive than the drone wars. The US and Britain routinely violated neutrality and sovereignty, assaulting Iceland to deny it to the Nazis and invading Iran to logistically support the Soviets. The US rightly regarded the Nazis and Japanese as war criminals, but did so in a manner that legal circles viewed with a skeptical eye.

During the Cold War, this logic was taken to another extreme through covert operations against governments and movements deemed to be sympathetic to Communism. It is easy to condemn such activities today, but it is worth noting why they were undertaken. The United States had internationalized its national interest, viewing Communism itself--a borderless ideology--as a national security threat. Hence Soviet influence in states once seen as peripheral to international security became probable cause for viewing these environments as battlefronts. Some of these interventions--particularly in Europe--were justified. Others were tragic failures with devastating humanitarian consequences. It is also interesting to observe that the tools being proposed for intervention in Syria--air and weapon support to rebels--are Cold War vintage. Countless movements--most notably the Cubans and the Contras--were supported by private American air forces and/or weapons support, enabling operations in environments the United States did not view as important enough to devote ground troops to.

Today we have come full circle. Post-2001, authoritarian states are simultaneously viewed as breeding grounds for dangerous ideologies, humanitarian criminals, and supporters of threatening irregular actors. Arguments about US policy towards those states blur all three categories of intervention justification together into a formless blob. While we live in a world that is in some respects safer than ever, debates about intervention still sit implicitly within the framework of global war. It made sense to consider Fascism and Soviet Communism--idious ideologies backed by overwhelming military and political power--mortal threats to international order. But does what happen "over there" really matter "over here" in the same way today? It is difficult to argue that the same relationship exists, but many implicitly do when discussing authoritarian states in international security.

A more difficult problem for sovereignty is the threat posed by transnational groups with absolute aims. Their aims in and themselves may not be strategic threats to the United States, but they certainly pose tactical threats in the form of mass-casualty attacks. The United States usually acts in cooperation with partner states in launching airstrikes and ground raids, but has acted unilaterally when circumstances demand decisive and preemptive operations. When not launching kinetic strikes, the United States has also taken on sovereign responsibilities rightfully performed by host governments in an effort to build host nation capacity. While kinetic strikes pose some risk of blowback, capacity-building arguably poses a moral hazard by enmeshing the United States in the domestic politics of local actors who see Uncle Sam as a walking ATM. When the US tries to make unruly local clients reform, it only deepens American involvement in their domestic politics and further threatens their sovereignty.

The problem is not simple and should not be viewed as "drones bad" and "foreign aid good." Rather, it's a problem of how far the United States can go in managing threats that emerge from troubled states without either making those threats worse or making the US another party in a local civil war or violent elite dispute. Whether firing Hellfire missiles or delivering aid, the US is becoming an actor in a political system it is not institutionally well-equipped to understand or alter. How this problem will be resolved is an important question for 21st century security.

We are still struggling to figure out how we will manage our own national security without either threatening others' sovereignty or performing sovereign responsibilites that they have, for domestic reasons, failed to exercise. While precedents exist in 19th and 20th century history for American diplomatic, political, and military efforts to create domestic security either by intervening in the Western hemisphere or globally, our situation is in many ways unique. The anarchist wave of terrorism was not as cohesive as al-Qaeda and Affiliated Movements (AQAM) are today and lacks AQAM's global reach. It is difficult to see how America could have avoided striking into Pakistan to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden, a move criticized by international organizations as a violation of sovereignty despite the manifold opportunities Pakistan had to bring him to justice. History is important, but there is a limit to how much historical context can shed light on a political-military problem.

To answer the title question: no one lost Westphalia, because Westphalia is a useful myth for international relations theorists seeking a shorthand for systemic change in the international system. Drones didn't kill Westphalia, and Libya--while injurious to sovereignty--has really principally demonstrated that dictators in coastal regions without nuclear weapons, Russian-supplied integrated air defense systems, or basing agreements with the United States Navy might do well to explore alternative career options. But beyond Syria polemics, the real challenge of sovereignty lies in moving beyond the framework of global ideological war that World War II and the Cold War set in place. A different international environment requires a course correction towards security policy inclined, as a rule, towards skepticism on whether or not local security problems have international implications. 

Earlier today Shadi Hamid set off something of a minor conflagration on Twitter by asking why, in the face of clearly horrific and mounting violence in Syria, should think-tank civilians advocating intervention be expected to come up with detailed military plans for an intervention?

Speaking as a civilian writing on a think-tank affiliated blog, this struck me as a very distressing position. If one is going to advocate for a military intervention - of any kind - serious analysis of a military plan is absolutely vital, and think-tanks - unlike, say, service members or policymakers, have a unique position to publicly weigh in on such debates with candor. Let me be blunt: if an analyst or the think-tank she or he represents cannot offer a plausible military strategy for an advocated intervention, then it is difficult to treat that advocacy with weight or authority.

It is a cliché to note that war is too important to be left to the generals because it's also absolutely true - and it would also be unfair to single out Hamid or the issue of Syria. Similar arguments have been trotted out by commentators, analysts and public figures on a variety of military issues, although more often as excuses to defer responsibility to military staffs for decision-making, or arguments to wrest away decision-making from policymakers with undesired views. As Adam has noted, basic victory definition is inseparable from policy prerogatives. Think-tanks, like other public institutions and figures engaging in policy debates, have a role in offering informed advice, even on matters might not be the professional domain of civilians, that can help shape those prerogatives. If an organization advocating intervention lacks access to civilians, veterans or military fellows with sufficient expertise such that it cannot confidently and cogently substantiate its case for military intervention, that's a problem for the organization to rectify, not for the audience to accept.

Nobody is expecting a think-tank to elaborate a full OPLAN – although there are some which probably could. But an ends, ways and means analysis subjected to the scrutiny of those with defense experience and expertise is all too often lacking in our public discourse. At a point when “leaving it to the generals” has become a rhetorical stoplight to paper over strategic aimlessness in debates over Afghanistan, it is not simply a necessary component of argument but something of a civic responsibility to ensure that the public have a chance to assess the likely costs and outcomes of the use of force - something that the government, by virtue of political and operational concerns, will be reluctant or unable to do without restriction.

Hamid has argued it is unreasonable to demand this since analysts can’t predict what actors would be in play - but the beauty of an ends, ways and means analysis would be that it could formulate what was necessary to achieve objectives, and then determine what combinations of actors, resources, and techniques would be necessary to make the executions of those plans a reasonable choice. Obviously, analysts, which are not psychic, cannot be expected always either to predict the future or read the minds of those privy to militarily relevant information they lack. But they can offer plans that relate the ends, ways, and means of their course of actions, with their assumptions made explicit so that effective debate and critique can be offered - and they should respond to those critiques by examining what kind of resources or strategies would be necessary to address the risk that those assumptions might be false.

War is a grave matter, and discussing war on its own terms is hardly an unfair expectations of advocates who would wish the U.S. participate in it. Similarly, as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has noted, advocates of non-intervention should be frank about the consequences of the status quo and the feasibility of alternatives. What is dangerous, however, is advocacy without substantive engagement in the subject matter of its aim - whether about Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, or anywhere else. Policymakers and publics alike need voices outside the military capable of assessing military subjects, at least so long as we live in a society that exercises civilian control over the armed forces.

During the American Civil War, the U.S. was lucky enough to be led by perhaps our finest self-taught strategist ever, Abraham Lincoln. If today, a coterie of officials were able to claim a monopoly on military knowledge and operational practice as McClellan attempted to, it would be difficult for the public and policymakers alike to effectively resist the charm of their authority and expertise. Not only, then, does military uninformed civilian debate make it more difficult for a policymaker to undertake militarily-reasonable operations, it can also create space for the military to resist civilian policies. Strategy (and even passing familiarity with operations) should not be cult knowledge kept by an anointed caste, they should be published in vulgate and nailed to doors. Not every policymaker, let alone every voter, can be Lincoln. Hawks and doves alike must endeavor to ensure that their policies and critiques have enough strategic fluency to be worthy of informing laymen and advising leaders.

Update: While I was pounding away at this, Jason Fritz wrote a far superior post. Check it out.

Up at Information Dissemination, Owen Cote Jr. of MIT has an interesting take on the future of naval warfare. Those interested in the future of US defense strategy should pay attention to these two grafs, from which I quote at length:

The next major change in naval warfare caused by U.S. submarines will likely result from the marriage between the submarine on the one hand, and precision, land attack, tactical ballistic missiles (TBMs) and small, long endurance UAVs on the other.In general, fast weapons and small UAVs would give submarines a capability to find and strike high value, mobile targets ashore. Specifically, in the context of the new Air-Sea Battle strategy, they would enable a submarine-based capability to destroy rather than merely suppress modern, ground-based air defenses, or in the DOD vernacular, DEAD. A submarine-based DEAD capability would close a major capability gap against modern A2/AD networks.  The systems that form these networks often seek to use the sanctuary provided by mobility in the cluttered environment ashore as a base from which to launch missile strikes against fixed targets necessary for power projection like air bases, or more ambitiously against ships at sea. 

DEAD? I suppose someone had some fun with that one. Of course, Cote observes that air defenses under this scheme are also assumed to be mobile, which presents a set of different problems:

Ever since the failed “SCUD Hunt” of Desert Storm, persistent airborne surveillance has been identified as key to the rapid identification and precise geo-location of mobile targets, as has been a source of precision weapons for attacking those mobile targets in time urgent fashion when they are found. Everything learned during the decade-long war on terror in operations against IEDs and terrorist leaders has amplified that message. This means that persistent airborne surveillance and time urgent weapons will also need to play a central role in defeating the mobile targets that form the heart of an A2/AD network. ... At the heart of any DEAD capability against a modern air defense system is the need to destroy relatively small numbers of expensive, phased array engagement radars. Without them, SAM batteries lack the ability to track targets with the accuracy needed to guide missiles against them. These radars need only emit intermittently during an engagement and can be quickly moved afterward. Thus, traditional radar-homing weapons like HARM will not work because they require a continuous signal to home on, and traditional single-platform, angle-of-arrival (AOA) ELINT techniques cannot provide accuracy sufficient to target coordinate-seeking weapons.

Cote goes on to look at how an alternative ELINT/COMINT technique called Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA). At this point, I fear that my acronym limit has been reached. The point, overall, is something Dan and I have highlighted in the past. These are major conflict capabilities, but will most likely find operational use in humanitarian interventions, offshore counterterrorism operations, and missions in the Persian Gulf. As Robert Caruso observed about the Afloat Foreward Operating Base, naval ships that enable light projection of special operations forces, Marines and allow dominance over onshore battlefields without the need for large infrastructures are indispensible for current American strategy. A DEAD (OK, bad pun) giveaway is the way Iraq and Afghanistan experiences with improvised explosive devices and high-value targeting has influenced the design of counter-shore capabilities for conventional warfare.

When coupled with operational cyber capabilities for missions against state opponents, what you begin to see is the shape of a military building a capability for decisive onshore intervention. Granted, it is important to qualify this (as we have with drones). The US could, with sufficient investment, destroy Syria's air defense system with existing technologies. But even so, the real problem is the postwar situation and regional effects. Weapons do not make war, and the ultimate determinant of US intervention will be the way these innovations mesh (or do not) with policy discussion in Washington.

* * And because I promised ADTS in the comments of my Stuxnet post, a Lana Del Rey link. It's got alligators in a pool and stuff. Make some kind of crackpot analogy to US naval strategy, Internets.

OK, there is no sex involved in this post (I'm not a 4Chan guy, my apologies if that's your thing).  I just wanted a catchy title. And the "lies" involved are the usual sort that states employ for covert operations. But there is a lot of cyberhype and red herrings associated with the Stuxnet disclosure. The revelation (which was not unsurprising to those following the Stuxnet case) that the US has been involved has raised all of the issues of the cyberwar/cyberpeace debate: what constitutes war vs. security, the lexical inflation involved in the term "cyberweapons,"  the force of norms in cyberspace, infrastructure attacks, and the role of international regulation. I will deal with each of them in turn.

Separating Cyber "War" and Cyber Peace (I)

First, there is a very concrete difference between cyber conflict, cyber war, and cyber warfare. Conflict is a generic term that refers to all manner of adversarial interactions in the international system. States conflict in a variety of ways, some of which involve various forms of coercion. The United States and Iran are arguably engaged in in multiple kinds of financial, covert, and proxy conflict. But the definition of war should not be unnecessarily expanded. As Thomas Rid has insightfully observed, standalone cyber war is impossible. But before I explain why, it's worth going into what the domain we are talking about actually represents.

The notion of cyber "war" is based on a misunderstanding of what cyberspace constitutes. Cyberspace is a domain utilized since the late 19th century that always existed in some shape or form, but only has been recently accessed by human tools. Cyberspace is only as much a "man-made" domain as space or the ocean is. It is different in that it governs the seams between the artificially constructed domain relationships that DoD has portioned out. The term "battlespace" accurately demonstrates that air, sea, and land are really permutations of the same thing, and the realm of "command, control, communication, coordination, and cognition" that cyberspace represents is something qualitatively different.

Cyberspace is, of course, not a separation from "real" life any more than the sea, air, or space is. Human beings are embodied in cyberspace, but our inability to visualize the complexity of the space in which our communications travel across large distances leads us to create an image of it as somehow being a Tron-like universe we lose our physical selves to enter. All things that send and receive information have cyberspace, something that the Chinese have always recognized in their theoretical juxtaposition of computer network operations (CNO) and electronic warfare (EW) under the common banner of information warfare. True, CNOs may exploit pre-existing vulnerabilities through zero-day exploits and EW physically degrades systems, but they are not conceptually separate.

It is a common truth of naval, air, and space warfare that people live on the land, hence the goal of military efforts is to influence events on land. The goal of cyber warfare is to cause political effects through uses of force. As we have seen from today's disclosure, attribution is overrated when it really counts. Ambiguity rarely serves either domestic or international purposes. Unless one has a narrow technical objective or is simply doing it for the lulz, there is no benefit to keeping silent about being the originator of an cyber attack that actually matters. Would the Obama administration, if it sought to stop the killings in Syria, launch an airstrike with a completely invisible fighter jet? No. The point of using destructive force is to let the other team know that there could be more on the way.

Separating Cyber "War" and Cyber Peace (II)

Rid argues that the vast majority of what has been dubbed "cyberwar" by the media is actually sabatoge, subversion, theft, vandalism, or intelligence exploitation. All of these things are important forms of conflict relevant to national security, law enforcement, and private security. In order to be war, however, they have to be lethal, instrumental, and waged to further political objectives. Is cybersecurity an important problem? Yes. But cybersecurity and cyberwarfare are two conceptually different problems that are routinely conflated.

It is true that some cyber operations and tactics constitute cyberwarfare, but they can never be "war" alone. Certainly some cyber attacks can constitute acts of war (more on that later), but it is illogical to believe that an adversary could attain his or her objectives solely through cyberspace or that war would be limited to cyberspace. The DoD's Plan X, for example, is based on the explicit presumption that cyber operations and tactics amplify conventional attacks or work in concert with them. Furthermore, the vast majority of what are called cyber weapons are not actually weapons. A weapon is designed with lethal intent--to purposefully cause or threaten loss of life and physical damage. The present generation of cyberweapons utilizes the target system itself as a vehicle for creating damage, and EW platforms explicitly create direct damage themselves.

Now, is Stuxnet an "act of war," as many have claimed? The answer is really not as crystal clear as it has been made out to be. First, the phrase "act of war" is a political rather than legal concept. The United States chose to interpret the Gulf of Tonkin skirmish as a casus belli but the Republic of Korea did not choose to do so when the Cheonan was purposefully sunk. Inasmuch as war is a lethal relationship between two competing forces seeking to impose their will on the other through violence, the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan was a military conflict. But until India chooses to respond to Pakistan's numerous state sponsorship and in some cases operational control of terrorism against the Indian heartland and Kashmir, it will not rise to the level of warfare. Iran has not chosen to interpret the Stuxnet attack as an act of war and has even downplayed the damage. Had the United States executed an airstrike on the same centrifuges, do as anyone believe Iran would have sat on their hands? And this brings us into the next paragraph.

What we do have, however, are international law standards as to what constitutes an act that could justify retaliation. I will quote my own (rather crude simplification) summary of former Air Force JAG Charles Dunlap on this issue:

Charles Dunlap observed that international law of armed conflict (LOAC) tends to be "effects-based"--as in the effect of the action determines whether it constitutes an "armed attack" against which can be retaliated. LOAC can at times be confusing because it does not grant a clear go-ahead for states to respond to force more generally, even if it simultaneously prohibits threats of force (talking about Articles 2 and 51 of the UN Charter respectively).

The effect of Stuxnet has been vastly overestimated. It slowed Iran's nuclear program, certainly, by maliciously altering its operations. Had the United States desired to use Stuxnet as a means of compelling Iran through a more lethal attack, it could have done so. But this would contravene the purpose of utilizing a covert cyberweapon in the first place. The United States wanted to slow down the nuclear program in a narrow, technical sense rather than using lethal force to compel the Iranians to cease their efforts. Cyber covert operations offered the President the flexibility necessary to do so. The US, similarly, wanted to overthrow the Guatemalan and Iranian governments without engaging in warfare and used covert means to do so.

International Implications

My CTOVision colleague Matt Devost is right to observe that this heralds the beginning of state use of cyberweapons for infrastructure disruption in peacetime. The private sector has traditionally conceptualized infrastructure attacks through the prism of criminality or thrill-seeking. Now it is clear that they already have been used to further international strategic objectives. But Matt, in referencing Chinese military texts, is right to highlight that the US' role in innovating this is overblown. There is nothing close to a "no-first use" norm that the United States has just violated. To state that there was is to overstate the degree of consensus in the international system and also ignore the covert context of Stuxnet. Furthermore, other states have conceptualized and planned for information warfare long before Stuxnet was even conceived as a means of balancing against American high-tech power.

The Chinese military text Unrestricted Warfare's actual influence within the People's Liberation Army (PLA) hierarchy has been massively oversold, but "unrestricted warfare" against infrastructure targets through IW is a staple of openly accessible and translated Russian and Chinese military writings. Ask Taia Global's Jeffrey Carr, the Foreign Military Studies Office's Timothy L. Thomas, and the Heritage Foundation's Dean Cheng about it and they will talk for days about the ways in which IW attacks are conceived as perfectly normal tools of statecraft by major powers. The Chinese and Russians have not done so because they have no concrete strategic interest right now in doing so that would counterbalance the massive risks involved. As Bob Gourley noted, if the attack is serious enough attribution will become an afterthought:

For example, regarding attribution, I would like to point out that at a high level, there really is not an attribution problem. I can attribute any attack, I mean 100% if attacks,  with 100% confidence that I have made an attribution. Of course I know we always imply that attribution needs to be accurate. But I am trying to make the point here that decision-makers should know you can make decisions based on assumptions. And if we have not been able to think through this well enough we might have to understand this. And maybe we should make our adversaries understand this as well. Maybe we should make it policy that we will make any attribution we want to make and those we attribute attacks to will pay the consequences.

The Russians and Chinese understand this. Attacks that they can get away with are likely to pose problems for information security but not necessarily information war. And as anyone who has talked to a network defender recently knows, the Chinese and Russians are already launching countless cyber operations of this sort already. Certainly there may be room for miscalculation and misperception, but this has less to do with inherent technical considerations and more with the political questions of redlines and other states' perception of those threshholds.

Is US use of Stuxnet going to lead to the normative legitimization of cyber weapons? As my blogmate Dan has noted in the past, norms in international relations are fundamentally sustained by coercion. Had the Axis powers won the second World War, the current structure of political, economic, and legal relationships based on the 1945 regime would be unthinkable. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is on some way a backhanded acknowledgment of this brute fact, as it depended on massive military coercion executed by the United States in Libya. It is foundering in Syria because the United States is not going (at present) to repeat the process and no one else has the capacity to substitute for us.  Each of the three most powerful states in the information realm has an incentive to flout whatever embryonic set of norms about information warfare that may or may not have emerged. The United States seeks cyberweapons to lock in its conventional military advantage and Russia and China seek them to precisely negate that overwhelming power. And this is without going into the problem of cyber arms control that Mike Tanji has blogged about.

What the Chinese and Russians will do is exploit Stuxnet for the purpose of lawfare. As Jeffrey Carr has blogged, the Russians in particular are attempting to execute a legal end run around the United States through the United Nations, protecting their usage of offensive information tools while clamping down on American superiority in cyber weapon technology and operations. This is called "soft balancing" and is not really distinctive to the cyber realm. The Chinese and Russians have been "hard" balancing against the United States' information dominance since the Gulf War through their extensive investment in information warfare capabilities. Where Stuxnet and American investment in cyber warfare does become a concern is if other states perceive it as a threat to themselves and invest accordingly. It will likely accelerate a process of investment in asymmetric weapons by other states that has been ongoing since 1991, but the idea that it will scare other powers more than, say, a carrier battle group is somewhat off-base. Where is some more concrete danger is the US, in turn, being blamed for future malware utilized by other powers and groups. There are also legitimate questions about how the open use of the tool could lead to its reformatting as part of a "digital arms market," but also reasons to be skeptical as well due to the highly specific kinds of target intelligence needed.

W. N. Hodgson on Memorial Day. Paul Fussell would have approved.

By all the glories of the day
  And the cool evening's benison,
By that last sunset touch that lay
  Upon the hills where day was done,
By beauty lavisghly outpoured
  And blessings carelessly received,
By all the days that I have lived
  Make me a solider, Lord.
By all of man's hopes and fears,
  And all the wonders poets sing,
The laughter of unclouded years,
  And every sad and lovely thing;
By the romantic ages stored
  With high endeavor that was his,
By all his mad catastrophes
  Make me a man, O Lord.
I, that on my familiar hill
  Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill
  Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
  Must say goodbye to all of this;--
By all delights that I shall miss,
  Help me to die, O Lord.

Before Action (1916)

Thanks to Carl Prine, I got a good look at Cerywn Moore's look at case studies of complex attacks in the North Causcasus. There is a lot of theory regarding swarming and complex attacks, but very little empirical work aside from Sean Edwards' dissertation on swarming in military history. Though John P. Sullivan and I like to use it, Mumbai is fast becoming the Algeria of swarming: an over-used case that has reached the culminating point of its utility to theory and practice. So I'm happy that someone has done a good look at these sorts of operations. Moore looks in particular at the 1995 Budyonnovsk Hospital raid and the July 2004 assault on Nazran. In the process, he gets at the core of what Sullivan has tried to get across in his writings on police and urban operations: it's about command and control.

The military has a C2 system that is--at least compared to many police systems--extremely robust and able to deal with dispersed tactical threats. The police have less resources and less experience, and face difficulty at times in managing situations over large urban expanses. In the case studies Moore reviews, Russian police C2 was severely strained at the point of impact. Of course, some major American cities also have engineered flexible systems that have successfully managed large and complex natural and human threats. More broadly, federal and local agencies train alike under the national Incident Command System.

As any reader of Mike Davis' work knows, Los Angeles is (to understate) a very demanding operating environment. LA's ecological fragilty is infamous and its municipal politics are very complicated. It is also a federally designated High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), the birthplace of MS-13, and the stomping ground of a veritable United Nations of internationally networked criminal organizations. Finally, Los Angeles and its environs stretches over 502 square miles with a population of over three million. From urban riots to wildfires, LA keeps police and emergency response agencies very busy.

Sid Heal of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department helped create a disaster response framework inspired by the Marine Corps' Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) concept as well as disaster response researcher Thomas Drabek's idea of Emergent Multi-Organizational Networks (EMONs). Heal was looking for a way to buld an disaster response ability that, like the Marine Corps he served in, could rapidly move with a comprehensive host of organic assets. This organization would also have to expand and contract rapidly based on operational needs during a disaster with clear lines of interagency command and control, and Heal seized on Drabek's idea as a means of accomplishing this goal. Sullivan himself also was involved with the Terrorism Early Warning Group (TEWG)--which he and I have often written about within the context of police C2.

I would be remiss in portarying this simply as an organizational or technical challenge. American municipal agencies exist within a unique political ecosystem very much shaped by local politics and needs. The Los Angeles Police Department's evolution since the 1991 Rodney King riots and the 1997-1998 Rampart scandals to the William Bratton era is a case study in the problems that can ensue when an municipal organization falls out of step with the public. The LAPD shook by the riots was predominately affiliated with the city's older and more established political interests and Bratton's chief innovation was to build a wider base of political support by overhauling its internal culture.

Other major cities have different, but equally valid emergency response frameworks. Urban attacks certainly pose challenges, but American cities have successfully adapted C2 and operations structures for complex contingencies and disasters.

As Adam recently reminded us to beware bad quantitative measures, it’s important to remember that bad qualitative ones are similarly subversive. To stay on the subject of Sino-American rivalry, note David Axe’s post comparing the J-20’s progress to American frustration with its 5^th generation fighter programs. While the reader’s first temptation is to fear for American superiority because China appears to be developing new aircraft faster than America, jet-for-jet comparisons and procurement process envy only tell part of the story. Even when Axe notes that China’s stealth programs have their own problems, I think comparing weapons systems that China isn’t likely to field equivalents to in large numbers leads debate down the wrong track.

States with the best hardware or most technically-impressive defense establishments don’t automatically win. Niall Ferguson, in his Pity of War, pointed out that the Central Powers were more fiscally efficient in inflicting casualties. In World War II, the Allied powers were often technically inferior side. Certainly the German R&D programs had some notable advantages over U.S. equivalents in some fields. The Germans led the way in sophisticated tanks, aircraft, small arms, and rocket and jet technology. But ultimately, logistical and geographic advantages bought the Allied coalitions time that initially technically or tactically superior foes could ill afford to waste.

Similarly, while China’s development of 5^th generation fighter technology is certainly concerning, it’s not the prime concern in theater. The more concerning issue is that China might be able to muster a large number of platforms and personnel that are good enough to deny a more limited number of qualitatively superior American and allied equivalents. John Stillion and Scott Perdue made this point, most explicitly on a tactical scale, in “Air Combat Past, Present and Future,” noting sortie generation – with scant mention of J-20s, and even with soft-balled estimates of Chinese A2/AD measures against American local infrastructure – could deliver  devastating results as American airmen struggled to overcome distance and inferior numbers.

If America suffers a disappointing result in a conventional war in the near future, it will likely not be because the victor fielded, pound-for-pound, better equipment. It would more likely be that the enemy is able to “get there first and with the most,” and maintain that longer than the U.S. is politically willing to muster additional resources from either geographic redistribution or internal economic extraction. None of this to say that technological superiority or fast R&D don’t necessarily matter, but only to note they only matter to the extent they can leverage advantages or mitigate disadvantages in the broader geographical and logistical framework that allows the arms to be brought to bear.

As is wont to happen, the current forms of warfare the United States in engaging in and preparing for lend themselves easily to misrepresentation and simplification. As the U.S. appears to wind down the era of large scale U.S.-led land operations, particularly ones in which the U.S. is bearing the brunt of combat against insurgencies, the new form of U.S. operations against non-state actors has unsurprisingly been described in terms such as drone wars or components of an offshore or counterterrorism strategy, while conventional platforms and capabilities are viewed in reference to the apparent "pivot to Asia" and AirSea Battle. However, recent events in Yemen demonstrate that such these sorts of small war operations, while they have a significant covert component and often involve the use of remotely piloted aircraft, also involve boots on the ground and the use of what are often conceived of as conventional military platforms such as naval and aerial ISR and strike assets.

On Sunday, a U.S. special forces trainer embedded with Yemeni troops suffered a serious combat wound. This came on the heels of a LA Times piece last week which noted that several dozen U.S. military personnel were on the ground in Yemen embedded with Yemeni forces and assisting with targeting for U.S. strike capabilities. Also notable is a recent story by David Axe highlighting the work of bloggers who have publicized the presence of a unit of F-15Es based out of Djibouti. All of these developments reveal some uncomfortable truths about the nature of U.S. power projection.

Firstly, while drones are undoubtedly a significant portion of U.S. operations in its counterterrorism campaigns across the Indian Ocean rim, they are but one platform in one prong of the effort. The phrase "drone war" might be accurate for Pakistan, where by tacit agreement with the Pakistani government and military the U.S. has restricted its strike operations to drone activities. But even in Pakistan the presence of proxy forces such as the Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams and significant amounts of on-the-ground CIA and JSOC personnel supporting targeting are a major portion of the campaign. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has more flexibility diplomatically and geographically, expansions in strike campaigns have meant more U.S. forces operating on the ground, as well as the use of manned aircraft and naval vessels.

Despite the hype, even in politically sensitive counterterrorism options drones remain but one instrument in the U.S. arsenal. The primary perceived advantage of drones, that they keep service members out of harm's way, is really not a significant concern in these theaters. Pakistan is not in the habit of seriously defending its western airspace, nor does Yemen or AQAP have the will or capability of imposing significant military obstacles to U.S. standoff strikes. All these sentiments hold even more true for Somalia. Indeed, as the crash of the U-28 in Djibouti recently demonstrated, pilots of fixed-wing aircraft are at a greater risk for accidents than they are of being shot down in the Indian Ocean "shadow wars." And indeed, manned aircraft are frequently employed - AC-130 gunships were frequent features of U.S. operations in Somalia, along with helicopter gunshipsand JSOC assets. So too has the U.S. used cruise missiles to strike targets in Yemen and naval gunfire to support U.S. special operations on the ground in Somalia.

Ultimately, to a non-state threat in a conventionally permissive environment, a submarine, frigate, Strike Eagle or an AC-130 gunship is just as invulnerable as a drone, and offer a variety of other strike options drones cannot provide. Additionally, the use of manned aircraft such as the F-15E has likely allowed the U.S. to conduct mysterious airstrikes in support of Kenya's "Linda Nchi" incursion last fall, or conduct airstrikes which seemed implausible for Yemen's organizationally beleaguered air force. Nor are they necessarily significantly more costly. As Winslow Wheeler pointed out in an excellent series on the MQ-9 Reaper, when the cost of the additional infrastructure on the ground necessary to operate drones is factored in, similar overall maintenance costs make them fiscally competitive with many manned platforms.

Secondly, offshore strike campaigns are simply one prong of these so-called shadow wars. Supporting offshore strike, of course, are personnel on the ground, and often ones acting in support of foreign partner or proxy forces. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and I noted earlier, in Somalia, for example, strike campaigns are simply one component of a larger effort that involved supporting Somali intelligence, a proxy war using Somali armed groups, and supporting partner nation counterinsurgency efforts. All of the thorny dilemmas of dealing with COIN remain, even if most of the blood price of grappling with them is passed on to foreign soldiers. While it may take longer for the U.S. to embroil large formations of conventional forces directly into another insurgency or civil war, the dilemmas of how to balance U.S. strike campaigns without endangering counterinsurgency efforts still remain.

Additionally, any change in one prong of the strategy necessarily effects the importance or execution of the others. For example, in controversy about Yemen, the issue of signature strikes has prompted understandable concern. However, improving intelligence products contributing to offshore strikes requires greater resources being put towards clandestine intelligence or special operations units acting on the ground, or towards greater work with partner nation intelligence services. However, partner nations often have their own agendas, and particularly in an era when the U.S. is at least publically reticent to work with strongmen and unsavory regimes for the sake of "stability," trading strikes for greater support of regime security and intelligence services may end up having even more debilitating - and long lasting - effects.

While offshore strikes in and of themselves are far less costly and resource intensive than large formations operating in land campaigns, they are not all that cheap or small, and they exist only as part of a larger constellation of programs to feed intelligence and address partner nation concerns. Counterterrorism is no more a strategy than is counterinsurgency. It is a capability, a set of tactical building blocks, aimed at political objectives which, more often than not, require the employment of other capabilities in a broader war strategy.

The new U.S. force posture does not mean the death of U.S. support of COIN campaigns, but it does change their character. The U.S. discomfort with the Arab Spring's outbreak in Yemen is emblematic of this reality. Because the conception of counterterrorism required working with partner nations, it required accepting regime stability, and accepting regime stability required involvement in the regime's efforts to maintain power against peaceful and violent attempts to overthrow it.

Thirdly, the prosecution of multi-pronged military operations from an offshore and covert posture is a reminder that rhetoric about AirSea Battle and the Pivot to Asia notwithstanding, conventional military forces will remain major assets in combat against irregular assets, and that these conflicts will continue to rage outside PACOM, political rhetoric notwithstanding. This should not, of course, be all that surprising. Hopes that reductions to land forces would somehow starve the beast and reduce the U.S. appetite for waging wars against irregular threats were obviously misplaced, and indeed the Asian "Pivot" really serves to increase U.S. freedom of action for prosecuting such campaigns by providing a host of platforms capable of projecting power into navally-accessible regions and reducing the level of political attention and controversy surrounding the Middle East and American activities there.

The supposedly offshore shadow wars in fact involve major ground operations by partners, an active ground presence by the U.S., and large amounts of conventional military assets. Rhetoric and planning aside, for the near future the U.S. will likely remain militarily engaged in and around the Africa and the West Eurasian rimlands against irregular foes. These operations will likely also likely involve greater degrees of ground combat troops in the future. As Brett Friedman explains in an excellent post at the Marine Corps Gazette, the USMC will likely take a larger role in these small wars, as it did during the early 20th century. A survey of British history also demonstrates that despite the portrayal of Britain as dispassionately concerned with offshore balancing, it frequently engaged in onshore warfare across its colonial area of interest.

Ultimately, fixation on specific platforms or their elemental nature (land, sea, air), or specific prongs and their shorthand typology (counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, etc) obscures more about the nature of these conflicts than they reveal. Ignoring this weakens quality and utility of the debate the debate for both proponents and detractors of America's present military undertakings.

Over the weekend, I had a Twitter conversation with the always stimulating infosec blogger Krypt3ia on the subject of hard and soft power. Krypt3ia has a new post on his site that grew out of the conversation. While I would encourage you to read the whole entry (there are shades of some of Timothy L. Thomas's recent work on China, Russia, and information warfare), I would like to build off of one of the more interesting parts of the post:

Finally, I would also put it to you all that the battle space is much different today than it has been in the past. Not only do we have the digital landscape, but said same digital landscape, that makes it easier to steal, also makes everything more interconnected. By interconnected, I mean that it is far easier to effect large changes to companies by the automation that we all have in place today to speed up our transactions. Today it is far easier to quickly make instant trades, and effect the bottom line of a company for the better or worse as well as steal data in minutes that in the past, would have taken days, weeks, or months to ex-filtrate from a company via conventional HUMINT means. In the scenarios run on trades on the markets, you can see how one alleged “fat finger” incident can have a large scale and rippling effect on the whole economies of states, never mind businesses individually. So, once again, the battle space has changed greatly because of the interconnected-ness of things. It seems that the matters of state now more than before, can be changed through the soft power of the digital attack or manipulation. This is what I mean by “soft power” or perhaps the term I mentioned above “Covert Soft Power”, attacks that we are seeing now, and are having trouble truly attributing to nation-state, corporate, or individual actors are having larger and larger effects on our economy, our policies, and our long term viability as nations, companies, or groups.

One of the classics of the neorealist literature on force is Robert Art's article "The Fungibility of Force." Art argues that force, expressed roughly as a state's power for physical coercion, has ripple effects on other issues. The United States has historically benefited economically from its ability to protect the Persian Gulf, and the core of the deal made with Saudi Arabia has been one of economic benefit for the physical protection of the regime. This, in part, is what helps a single family dominate a country that Middle East watchers have perpetually predicted would be ripe for revolt. Barry Posen has also argued that military control of "commons"--air and sea lanes of commerce--underpins the US' current strategy of primacy. Force is also "fungible"--it can be utilized in a variety of ways and be exchanged for a multitude of political "goods." But despite being fungible, force is often tremendously costly to actually employ. Hence we should not confuse the shaping power of force structurally for force necessarily equaling an ability to create certain political effects in domestic political systems. The US, for example, can use force to shape the Persian Gulf security architecture in an attempt to thwart Iranian ambitions. This requires military investments in naval warfare systems, basing architecture, and military deployments. But the bluntness of force in use is infamous. You cannot guarantee, say, that an OPLAN for an invasion and occupation of iran or even devastating standoff strikes would result in Iran changing its system of government to American liking or giving up its nuclear program.

Hence states often search for indirect routes to benefit from military force or substitute it for other forms of decision.  Indirect forms of coercion seek to shape national-level outcomes as opposed to regional or systemic outcomes. These can take form of compellence and coercive diplomacy.  Compellence can involve discrete force but coercive diplomacy involves the threat of force integrated with economic pressure and psychological operations directed against enemy leadership targets. But coercive diplomacy itself has something of a mixed track record in recent years, and economic statecraft, while undoubtedly the root of all power--political and military--also is not necessarily a very efficient means of coercion. Let's not mince words--economic coercion can completely destroy a state's basic standards of living, as the Iraq sanctions did. But without positive sanctions (a suitable carrot), strictly negative measures often fail to convince states to change their behavior. The Iraqi sanctions were forged in a political climate that desired the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Limited uses of force or coercion cannot hope to succeed if tied to total outcomes. And even if we perceive our aims to be limited, they may not be limited to those we hope to coerce. The Iranians see a "surge" capacity for nuclear mobilization as intimately tied not only to their means of power projection but also to their basic survival as a political entity.

Covert power is a "grey area" of statecraft not really well-covered in policy literature. As I noted in a previous entry, low-intensity warfare and covert operations can look alike at the lowest tactical margin. One interesting question that Kryp3ia raises in his discussion of Chinese and Russian (as well as non-state) cyber power and digital espionage is whether covert power is similarly "fungible" in the way Art argues that conventional military power is. For example, can states leverage proxy power, subversion, espionage and long-range cyber-reconassiance, the use of information warfare, or private force to shape outcomes in the way that an overflight of TU Backfire Bombers might? Plenty of decisionmakers seem to think so.Queen Elizabeth I saw subversion and divided loyalties as a mortal threat to the defense of the realm, and created a domestic intelligence apparatus to root it out. Robert Kaplan has written about Iran's use of covert power as a force multiplier in the Middle East. In the 1950s, many saw Communist psychological operations as a mortal threat against open societies, discussing them in terms similar to how some talk about cyber warfare today. Carl Schmitt attributes fear of Communist subversion as an explicit motivator for coup plotters against De Gaulle. Covert operations also have demonstrated the ability to change a domestic set of political relations. Political warfare altered the political composition of the Guatemalan and Iranian governments and augmented a conventional NATO strategy for the defense of Europe through the construction of stay-behind networks and a means of secretly intervening in domestic politics.

There are some advantages to the use of covert or paramilitary power as a means of power projection. The United States has, through the fine-tuning of the joint special operations community since the debacle of DESERT ONE, created an apparatus that compresses integrated logistics, advanced technology, and raw human strength into paramilitary war machine. It is useful for "reaching out and touching" J.D. Salinger-like reclusives holed up in air-gapped compounds in the suburbs of Abbotabad. These kinds of operations also create a dilemma for the target state. They take place in a murky realm populated by spies, criminals, and arms smugglers, proving that difficulty of attribution is not just a cyber problem. Moreover, even in the case of attribution it is hard to see what recourse is often open to target states. It was obvious to any intelligent observer that the United States, facilitated by Pakistan and a host of other partners, was funneling arms and money into Afghanistan during the 1980s. But what could the Soviets really do about it? The problem, however, comes when states expect covert ops, espionage, or discrete force to work as a standalone effort without being tied to a sound policy.

This brings us to the intersection of information and covert power. The postwar science of cybernetics is the backbone for our understanding of information power. Cybernetics--the science of communication and control---is about information as a feedback mechanism. Claude Shannon's idea of information theory is based on the idea that information is a signal, or a "difference that makes a difference" as Gregory Bateson artfully puts it. Whereas first-wave cybernetics looked at closed systems that adjust their internal states to preserve a set value (like a thermostat that adjusts a room's temperature) based on negative feedback from the environment, second-order cybernetics and complexity theory have looked at how information causes systems to shift to new frames of reference.

Thus, information warfare pioneers like Dorothy Denning and Martin Libicki have looked at information warfare in ways that draw from Shannon's mathematical theory and cybernetics. To Denning, information warfare involves operations that target or exploit information resources. Information resources consist of containers (information media that contain forms of data), transporters (objects and communication systems that transport information from one location to another), sensors (humans and machines that extract information objects and the environment), recorders (objects that place information in containers), and processors (people and objects that manipulate information). In Denning's theory, you gain advantage by increasing the value of your own information resources while degrading the other side's ability to use theirs. Martin Libicki has a taxonomy of information warfare targets and methods that also are useful for thinking about the subject: the physical (hardware), syntactic (machine operating software) and semantic (the content of the information exchanged). You can drop a bomb on a command or control node and physically destroy it, certainly. You might also compromise a system through various cybernetic means, or you could, through military deception, attempt to prevent your opponent from utilizing information available to him.

While it may seeem like physical and syntactic information methods are particularly powerful, the power of strategic deception should be not be underrated. In 1944 and 1945, the Soviet Union utilitzed maskirovka on a massive scale to carry out Operations BAGRATION and AUGUST STORM, completely destroying the German and Japanese armies in Belorussia and Manchuria. The former laid bare the German heartland to the ravages of the Red war machine, and the latter may have--in conjunction with the atomic bomb--knocked Japan out of the war. It certainly also posed a direct Soviet threat to the Japanese heartland due to the threat of potential Soviet control over China. Strategic deception also protects intentions and capabilities in peacetime, such as crucial weapons projects or crucial geopolitical designs. Deception can also make a state seem more powerful than it actually may be. Hitler's Germany integrated numerous deception operations to play on the psychological weakness of Allied decisionmakers in the 1930s, convincing them that his military forces were ready for protracted war in spite of their actual material deficits.

Getting to the root of infomation power requires engagement with the fact that we live, largely, in the world Claude Shannon made. Information--as message rather than content--is key to many massively complex and integrated systems that underpin our day-to-day existence, from the stock exchange to military command and control systems. Thus information warfare and information power might broadly be understood, again,  as the plain use of information resources in order to improve our own information resources and degrade, exploit, or otherwise co-opt those of our adversaries. This process is not necessarily entirely technological. From a systems perspective, the British Double-Cross System or the Soviet Trust operation were analog-era attempts to manipulate organizational systems by sending distorting feedback through information channels. In a world increasingly governed by the way information interacts with organizational, technical, and social systems, information power becomes more important. Digitization and the delegation of authority to more and more automated systems in everyday life is creating a "second economy" well-known in the information technology community. There are certainly political and military implications in such a technological shift, as especially when paired with emerging informatized architectures and ecological systems.

So, with this understanding of information, we can go back to the original issues of fungibility Krypt3ia brought up. What can information, taken through the lens of Denning and Libicki, do?

Strategic deception not only distorts the quality of information available to a decisionmaker but also can, when coupled with targeted psychological operations and counterintelligence, disrupt a decisionmaking system by eroding its ability to process and use information. The British did the latter by riddling the Irish Republican Army with informers.  The ability to exercise individualized information targeting, as demonstrated through Anonymous and the Chinese "human flesh search engine" opens up intriguing possiblities for both deception and psychological pressures and disruptions. 

The informatization of critical infrastructure poses opportunities for countervalue attacks on civilian targets. Though these threats often have been massively inflated, they do exist. They can cause everything from financial damage to injury and death. And air-gapping is not a panacea. This perhaps may be most useful not necessarily as a tool of "cyber-doom" but more as a tool of escalation dominance at the lowest rung.  Industrial espionage can create economic gain. China and Russia, after all, are following a longstanding French practice of using spying to bolster state-suppotted industries. French intelligence, in fact, used to bug first-class sections of Air France jets to record commerical conversations. The knowledge that crucial systems may be vulnerable could create a deterrent effect, but it is important to note that these threats are of an operational rather than predominately strategic nature. 

That being said, there are very many drawbacks. Strategic deception can certainly help realize a given policy objective, but also can significantly backfire. Saddam Hussein  attempted to simulate and dissumulate, presentating an ambiguous image of unconventional power to Iran and internal regime audiences while simultaneously trying to hide evidence of the truth from the outside world. The United States eventually decided that it was better to remove him from power than deal with the constant ambiguity his deception efforts created. The German deception efforts from the end of World War I to the late 1930s at first hid re-armament and then exaggerated German strength. But they would not have worked if the Allies had the political will to enforce the terms of the Versailles Treaty. It is hard to see what the Soviet Union gained in the long term beyond immediately tactical and operational gains from its strategic deception efforts.

Individualized information targeting depends on a dauntingly granular degree of information about an individual's worldview, habits, and psychology, paired with an accurate model of how he or she plays a role in the overall ecology of a regime's decisionmaking structure. Playing havoc with an organizational system may also result in undesired side effects. Targed disruption of individual links within the Syrian regime hierarchy should only be attempted if the targeteer is OK with such actions potentially resulting in intensified strife that may result in substantial civilian casualties. James Angleton's mental decline into the "wilderness of mirrors" is also an apt demonstration of what happens when counterintelligence begins to devour the bonds of trust within an organization intead of its adversary's organizational functioning. 

It is also true that critical infrastructure can present a countervalue target, but Sean Lawson's review of disaster response research and the historical record of the Air Force's "industrial web" strategy against German critical infrastructure and moral resilience in World War II suggests that disruption may only be temporary. Frederick Kagan has also observed that while command and control links can be reconstituted at a relatively low cost, the destruction of an army itself through annihilation requires an immense amount of resources to rectify.

Finally, as a part of the larger "grey area" of covert and paramilitary power, information power suffers from some of the same defects as special operations direct action or black propaganda. It is dependent on a host of pre-existing factors that may be difficult to be conjured out of thin air. Operation AJAX was only possible because powerful forces within the Iranian political ecosystem were receptive to covert power. American contractor support ended the Bosnian War, but only by utilizing the pre-existing Croatian Army as a hammer for a punishing ground offensive against Serbian forces. Operation BAGRATION may have been enabled by deception but was carried out by a preponderence of Soviet military force. And a determined countersubversion architecture safeguarded the English throne from the threat of subversion in the Elizabethan era. Iranian covert power projection allows it to punch above its weight but still does not make it a hegemon regionally due to the political, material, and military weight of the Gulf states and their external protector in Washington. The specific characteristics of information power also pose some quandries. One can, say, monitor, disrupt, or deny the electromagnetic spectrum but not control it in the way that the "man on the scene with a gun" can when he attacks land targets.

So we have ultimately a mixed picture of the fungiblity of information power. Krypt3ia and others writing on the subject have demonstrated that it should be regarded, like financial power, as a force to be reckoned with in world politics. But it lacks the ability, seen in military force, to be tied to other important issues or exercise ripple effects. To return to the example of Saudi Arabia, American military backing for the Saudi regime enabled beneficial economic effects. It's true that information power can bolster military and financial power, but its impact may be ultimately much more limited than military force in creating linkages. Information power can bolster other forms of power significantly and will certainly transform the nature of "grey area" force in the international aren. Krypt3ia is right that it should not be disregarded, and states should pay heed to how they construct their own information strategies.  

There's a lot of (correct) criticism about military buzzwords and calling things war which plainly are not.  So credit should be given when credit is due when someone gets it right, as US Cyber Command attorney Robert Clark has:

While happy to label so-called outbreaks of “cyber-war” as “B.S.”, Clark stated that “governments are in the business of offensive cyber-operations now.” Clark also said that cyber “attack” is over-used in the media, as he feels the planet is yet to see a real cyber-attack . “Stuxnet was not a cyber ‘attack’, Estonia was not a cyber ‘attack’, that pipeline that some people say ‘yeah, that was malicious code’ wasn’t a cyber ‘attack’,” he said. ....And why does this definition matter? In other words, why should we care about loose media use of “cyber war”? Because, Clark explained to El Reg: if policy-makers are only informed by the catchphrase and not the definition, they will make bad policy.

To be perfectly clear, there are a lot of things that also aren't war that have serious security implications. Espionage is threat, for example, even if thefts of crucial secrets are not literally military operations. A hurricane--not a foreign army--devastated New Orleans. And the bad economy has far-reaching implications for our ability to generate military and diplomatic power. But securitizing an issue is not always (or even partly) likely to lead to more effective policy. Calling obesity a national security threat or declaring wars on nouns is not going to lead anywhere productive. 

I tend to agree more with Tim Stevens on the issue of cyber war--it's a no brainer that distinctive cyber operations and tactics will augment more traditional military operations. Take it away, Tim:

At least 95% of this debate could be solved by substituting ‘cyber warfare’ for ‘cyber war’. That is, by accepting – as any sane person should – that ‘cyber warfare’ tactics and operations are part of war. ...We should also accept – at least, for now – that there is no pure-play cyber war. It’s either war or it’s not. Simple. A land war is still a war. A sea war is still a war. All ‘cyber’ is in this context is an environmental modifier. Useful for descriptive purposes but it doesn’t alter the essential nature of war as a political and coercive act.

I would be remiss in not observing that the line between military activities and covert operations and espionge is not really always easy to draw for policymakers or military analysts to draw in practice.

Since some forms of covert operations and military operations both aim to achieve strategic effect through violent coercion, it is easy to make arguments to the effect that Iran and Israel are engaged in "shadow war." Low-intensity operations tend to look remarkably like terrorism, crime, sabotage, subversion, and coercive diplomacy at the lower tactical margins. Those who like to eat out in Foggy Bottom (I enjoy a nice Thai place every once and a while) may be sympathetic to this agument because Iran may have gotten away with trying to put a bomb under their dinner plates.

Charles Dunlap observed that international law of armed conflict (LOAC) tends to be "effects-based"--as in the effect of the action determines whether it constitutes an "armed attack" against which can be retaliated. LOAC can at times be confusing because it does not grant a clear go-ahead for states to respond to force more generally, even if it simultaneously prohibits threats of force (talking about Articles 2 and 51 of the UN Charter respectively). Dunlap also soundly argues that the phrase "act of war" is really a political, rather than legal distinction.

There has been much understandable worry about the civil war in Syria re-igniting dormant conflicts in Lebanon and Iraq. Despite the ongoing violence in northern Lebanon, I used my World Politics Review column yesterday to explain why spillover was likely but also why it would not take the form of civil war.

(As my article went online, Emile el-Hokayem published this excellent analysis on the drivers of conflict in northern Lebanon. Highly recommended.)

Kelsey D. Atherton, responding to news the Dept. of State is about to strike the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MeK, from its list of foreign terrorist organizations:

The enemy of my enemy isn't really a terrorist if his lobbying is really, really good.

Shameful move by the Dept. of State.

Update: Former Obama Administration State official Tamara Cofman Wittes says I should be blaming the Congress, not the Dept. of State.