asymetric warfare

In article , (John
Schilling) wrote:

Howard Berkowitz writes:

In article , (John
Schilling) wrote:

Exactly. I am _not_ in favor of gun confiscation, but I really can't
accept the idea of the unorganized militia, with sporting weapons,
deterring either regulars or invaders. With a laptop and intimate
knowledge of communications networks, I can be a MUCH nastier
deterrent.

More likely, you can come to the same end as Archimedes, accomplishing
no more in the end than one guy with a hunting rifle.

You are missing asymmetry. Archimedes' enemies used low tech, just lots
of it. Losing a major C3I node, or the logistics network, is much more
of a problem to a high-tech invader.

Even high-tech invaders still use tens or hundreds of thousands of
men with purely mechanical weapons guided by the unaugmented human
eye and brain, who can use all the traditional low-tech methods of
hunting down the fool who thinks his Archimedean brain alone will
triumph over their brain and brawn combined.

Whereupon they can get on with repairing the C3I node and you can
get on with bleeding out on the floor.

You seem to be assuming that the information/electronic warfare attacker
is in physical proximity of the guys with the assault rifles, swords,
flamethrowers, clubs, etc. SMART attacks can come from another
continent. Even if the attacker is in the same area, the attacks would
almost certainly be from computers, jammers, etc. that are triggered
remotely. As a specific example, the US buildup in Saudi Arabia in 1991
was quite vulnerable to expendable jammers in the general vicinity of
commercial-grade earth stations.


Hacking attempts against the academic and commercial internet, yes.
Military operations, outside of bad technothriller movies and novels,
are not dependant on the global internet. You can hinder the enemy's
R&D and procurement efforts and so delay his acquisition of newer
and better guns, but if you are wholly unarmed the guns he's already
got are more than sufficient.

Again, the military messaging and control is encrypted beyond plausible
attacks by non-national actors, but not so the underlying packet- and
circuit-switched transmission networks, especially the strategic
fixed-location ones. Look at the amount of leased commercial lines over
which things like SIPRNET and JWICS run. There are government-owned
backups, but you significantly degrade capacity by taking out commercial
switching nodes.

Do remember I am not saying use cyberwarfare instead of, but as a
complement. My original argument was not that the white-hat hackers
can't be tracked down -- it was against the argument that the
unorganized militia with sporting weapons was a serious deterrent to any
regular force. Now, you have the apparent regulars hunting the high-tech
resisters, apparently because they ARE a credible annoyance.

And the networks that help coordinate his gunmen at the operational
level, the ones which are of immediate concern to you, are not so
broadly distributed. The enemy has no reason to put a node, terminal,
or other access point anywhere he doesn't have at least a minimal
military presence, and those are pretty much by definition places
where his SWAT teams can reach.

I think you are assuming physical presence of the network attacker,
rather than a leave-behind jammer, a remote attack on the routing
software, etc.



For that matter, you'll probably have to deal with armed enemy soldiers
one way or another just to get terminal access in the first place.

You don't need terminal access if you are going after RF links. For
packet and circuit switching, there is still far too much in-band
signaling and back doors that OUGHT to be fixed. The Border Gateway
Protocol, the heart of any IP packet switching network, is not
significantly secure. Good operational procedures are the main
protection.