We have entered a new age. This is the first example of Information Warfare being waged at the national level. An entire nation was shut down (okay, it was a small nation, but still) by a team of politically-minded hackers from somewhere inside Russia. There were no ground troop movements in this war. There was no air bombardment. There was only a… dare I say it? A cyberterrorism incident. Regardless of whether it was state-sponsored or not, this is a turning page.
I heard of this first from my Estonian friend A.T. about twelve hours before it hit ABC and BBC. She said I was getting the news three weeks late. In case you don’t want to read ABC’s decent synopsis, here’s a transcript of her super-brief rundown:
A.T.: Soviets cleared the German control here and substituted it for their own
A.T.: We just see it as another invasion
A.T.: Russians consider themselves to have freed us….So it’s a conflict of understandings
A.T.: And our new government promised to remove the statue
A.T.: So one day they put a yard around it, dug the thing up and took it to a memorial…thing…slightly less idiotic than the middle of the city
WMX: Good deal, except the politically active young Russian asshats got all up in arms about it?
A.T.: Yup
A.T.: Millions in damage
A.T.: Russians feel insulted
A.T.: So now we’ve suddenly pissed off 25% of the country. The rest of the 75% are bloody pleased.
There ya go, from the horse’s mouth. Whatever it was, at least it was an isolated incident (isolated being several weeks and an entire country). We (we being cadets, mostly) mock the addition of “cyberspace” to the Air Force’s mission statement, and Navy’s “cyberwarriors” are the brunt of quite a few snickers, but it looks like they might actually be needed, and not too far in the future. I have my doubts about whether a federally controlled, militaristic bureaucracy can handle a horde of fast-thinking foreign blackhats, but we should be ready. Maybe if they’re equipped like a Special Forces team. “These things we do… that others may play Solitaire.”
I’d like to leave you with a quote from a decently prescient movie:
Trackposted at Diary of the Mad Pigeon.
Provincial Reconstruction Teams are where the money is. Well, maybe not the money, but definitely the goodwill and trust of the people we’re trying to protect and make prosper. “Habitat for Humanity, ‘cept you get shot at,” one commenter had it. These teams have the scary, amazing and incredibly important mission of rebuilding infrastructure and providing a helping hand to locals. The shoutout to an Air Force Captain was especially exciting. I hope that my classmates, the ones majoring in Civil Engineering or some other equally arcane yet utterly necessary field, are out there within the next few years, leading these teams.
Even among those of us supportive of the effort over in the sandbox, talk about how what we need to do is “connect to the people,” get into their hearts and minds- and how badly we’re failing- is quite heavy. These men and women are out there getting their hands dirty, which is amazing. Here’s hoping their story gets a little more press and that they can get the support they need to continue this important mission.
Good news! The senate has taken a vote that delays any real decision in the forced withdrawal from Iraq until at least Memorial Day. I’ll be the first to admit that all the political mumbo-jumbo is bloody confusing, but at least business will continue as usual for a few months.
It’s good Congress is stepping up and trying to take back the reins of the war- the Authorization for Use of Military Force is one of the worst documents written in the history of politics, I’m pretty sure. Congress dropped the ball when it abdicated its constitutionally stated war powers. The American government needs to find the balance between giving our Commander-in-Chief the freedom he needs to do his job and leaving him alone like a kid in a candy shop. I’ve hyped Brian Orend before, but I’m going to do it again. His just post bellum ideas would be a good start for a series of benchmarks on the road to Iraqi autonomy.
((As a counterpoint, check out this post from the Pidge discussing this article. It suggests that America’s circumstances were perfect for our rise to federalized democracy and that Iraq’s… aren’t. The full article is on my reading list.))
Senator Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Armed Services Committee has it exactly right: whatever happens, it’s a bad thing if the troops overseas feel that Congress- or the American public- has deserted them. I think Mike Shinoda says it best:
“Get some, I know you boys got some work to do.”
UPDATE: ABC just updated their article, and I thought I had to share this priceless quote: “How many more thousands of innocent Iraqis have to die before we finally accept our responsibility to bring this war to an end?”
Senator Durbin needs to realize that our presence is the only thing keeping many innocent Iraqis alive. If we pull out before both we and the Iraqi security forces are ready, the area will be a carnage-fest faster than you can say “Mogadishu.”
Circling the wagons around Wolfowitz is an interesting move. I can understand the political subtext- don’t leave the planner of Iraq out to dry- but Wolfy’s going down, methinks. With almost all the other shareholding nations pushing to give him the boot, I’m not sure how much of a chance he’s got. We’ll see what happens. Frankly, I wish my girlfriend could give me a sixty thousand dollar pay raise. That’d be sick. Heck, I’d take a six thousand one.
The White House seems to be making a pattern of backing doomed causes lately, though. Take a look at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. His Number Two just announced his upcoming resignation, he’s under fire from all sides (except the White House’s, at least in public) and yet in the midst of Congressional hearings he finds time to back more draconian copyright laws. I especially like this phrase from a memo to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi regarding the proposed changes: “subject to forfeiture any property that constituted or was derived from any proceeds obtained directly or indirectly as a result of… infringement offenses.” That means (if this passes) anything that ever touched that mp3 you got off of myTunes is up for them to grab. Start running now.
Anyway, loyalty to the people who got you there is great, but I think there’s a time when you’ve got to cut your losses. I think that time is now. The administration has been taking some pretty heavy hits lately. Props for sticking to your guns, Mr. President, but when your approval rating is one third of our nation, there might be something a little wrong.
For the surge. It brings to mind the Tet Offensive. We won militarily, with a casualty-kill ratio of at least 1:5. It was psychologically that they beat us, striking into the heart of South Viet Nam, where we were supposed to be safe.
Same thing with the Green Zone. These mortars aren’t the Tet yet, but they could have the same effect. That’s why terrorists will always be dangerous. They attack ideas, not places. They destroy symbols. Like Nick Naylor, they prove us wrong, not them right.
So keep surging, surgers. And to the journalists, please! Realize this is the nature of the war and don’t give them the fear they want.
And to my readers: Any idea on how we might turn the symbolic frame of battle against them?
J-I-H-A-D. And we wonder why this war hasn’t ended for three millennia. Previous reports said the show had been “shelved,” but apparently that isn’t the case. Farfour will continue his message of armed resistance to the children of Palestine. This is pretty wrong, and I’m willing to bet that few would disagree.
I’m torn. On the one hand, I can understand the need for secrecy regarding military operations. Not everyone needs to know everything and supposedly the Tamil Tigers are using programs like Google Earth to plot out attack plans for their new air force. I have to agree with Threat Level’s Mr. Singel, though, when he says that the government can’t keep a lid on information forever. “Can’t stop the signal,” as some might say. And here’s the real question: do you even want to?
So what if we did this: put a moratorium on the satellite footage that goes out of these “sensitive areas.” Make it six months or so. The tactical situation will be unrecognizable in six months and there’s a good chance the operational will be too. You can have all the resolution you want of those areas, it’ll just be six months old. The government can’t keep the lid on ALL the information ALL the time, but it might be able to keep SOME of it for SOME of the time.
It might require our operational plans to be a little more flexible, changing H.Q. locations periodically for instance. How big is that price really? Besides, if we ever get into another semi-conventional war, we won’t just have to worry about our citizens’ satellites. We’ll have to worry about the other guys’, too.
Look here for an interesting overview on the Tamil Air Tigers and the way they serve as a guerrilla “think tank.”
Those awesome people over at Danger Room posted something about the upcoming ”Language Corps,” sort of like the National Guard for linguists. I like the idea, but like Ms. Weinberger at DR noted, there’s some obvious issues. She mentions the non-deployability of the tongue-speakers. Another one I see is security clearance. Sure, the backlog of untranslated intelligence is an issue. More available Arabic translation could have stopped 11 September back in the Philippines. But if we can’t read it, how can we tell if we want one of 1,000 civilians reading it?
If these issues can be overcome, though, and we can get a massive amount of trusted linguists networked throughout the country and chipping away at our backlog, the results could be incredible. Crowdsourcing for military objectives. “Theresa the Translator,” rather than “Rosie the Riveter.” I like it.
P.S.> That parallel gives an idea of how to deal with the lack of security clearances as well. All the Rosie’s only knew their part of the airplane they were building and didn’t know how it all fit together. What if the pieces of intel. were chunked up, by sentence, maybe? Enough to give context for translation purposes but not enough to let any one person know more than they should. It’s a thought, anyway.