Free Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

vulnerable, to whom is it vulnerable? Who are the other cyber warriors?
    WAKE-UP CALL FROM KUWAIT
    It may have been the first Gulf War that convinced the generals of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that they needed a special advantage, an asymmetrical technical capability against the United States.
    It was the first real war the U.S. had fought since Vietnam. In the decades before the 1990–91 Gulf War, the U.S. military had been relatively constrained abroad, by the continued presence of the Soviet Union and its nuclear arsenal. The invasions of Grenada by President Reagan and Panama by the first President Bush had been small engagements in our own backyard, and yet they had not gone terribly well. In those conflicts, U.S. military operations still showed the kind of dysfunction and poor coordination that marked the failed Desert One Mission in Iran in 1979 and helped to end the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Then came Desert Storm. President George H. W. Bush and his cabinet assembled the largest coalition since World War II. More than thirty nations coalesced against Saddam Hussein, bringing together more than 4,000 aircraft, 12,000 tanks, and nearly 2 million military personnel, all paid for by donations from Japan, Germany, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The war was to mark a new era in international relations, what General Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s National Security Advisor, went so far as to call a “new world order.” In it, the sovereignty of all nations would be respected and the mission of the United Nations would finally befulfilled, now that the Soviet Union was no longer in a position to check such actions. Desert Storm was also the dawn of a new kind of warfare, dominated by the computer and other high technology to manage logistics and provide near-realtime intelligence. The Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, an American industry group, publicly documented just how dramatically the use of computer networks changed that war in its 1992 book, The First Information War .
    While General Norman Schwarzkopf and the other military brass may not have been ready to use cyber weapons to take down the Iraqi air defense network, they were ready to embrace computer networks to target the enemy. The war fighters also loved the new breed of “smart weapons” that information systems technology made possible. Designed to replace traditional bombs that required many missions and many tons of munitions dropped to destroy a target, “smart bombs” were designed to put one bomb, and one bomb only, precisely on each target every time. They would greatly reduce the number of missions that needed to be flown and promised to nearly eliminate civilian collateral-damage casualties.
    Of course, the “smart weapons” of 1991 were not so smart, and there were not too many of them. In the 1996 movie Wag the Dog , a fictional political operative named Conrad “Connie” Brean, played by Robert De Niro, claims that the famous missile down a chimney was done in a studio in Hollywood. “What’s the thing people remember about the Gulf War?” Brean asks. “A bomb falling down a chimney. Let me tell you something: I was in the building where we filmed that with a ten-inch model made out of Legos.” What De Niro’s character claimed wasn’t true, but the smart bombs of 1991 were overhyped. While the video was real, the tightly controlled media did not seem to realize that most of the bombs dropped were not precision munitions guided by lasers and satellites but “dumb” bombs, dropped in the thousands by B-52s. The smart bombs thenwere unreliable and in short supply, but they showed the direction that warfare was moving in, and they showed the Chinese that they were decades behind.
    As Desert Storm unfolded, Americans sat glued to their TVs, watching those grainy videos of bombs being dropped down smokestacks. They cheered the renewed prowess of the once-again formidable American military.