The New Air Force Mission? 444
mvnicosia asks: "The US Air Force has released its new mission statement, which reads 'The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace.' With the recent rows over US Internet governance, what do you think is the impact of a US government overtly practicing cyberspace warfare? And what are the US's legal limitations?"
My guess (Score:3, Insightful)
Just like anything, the U.S. has the power to abuse it. But I feel, as with many others, that the U.S. is less likely to abuse it due to its economic reliance upon it. The U.S. would only resort to "cyberwarfar" as one of the last resorts, it would seem.
Read It Differenty (Score:5, Insightful)
You could be worried about it but if you read it more narrowly and in context, it's not that scary. The USAF will fight in space, air, and cyberspace as it relates to warfare. Given how dependent the US miliary and other militaries are on information, it's reasonable to expect them to practice techniques for attacking and defend networks. Put it another way, while the air force practices gaining air superiority, we rarely ever see them go around downing civilian aircraft in times of peace (though there have been mistakes). Just because they're developing the ability it doesn't mean they're going to recklessly use it on everyone. The military needs to be prepared for things that might happen.
Legal Limitations?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Legal limitations (Score:4, Insightful)
Bluntly speaking, the US's legal limitations are whatever it decides they are.
AFAICT there are no international treaties about cybercrime and information warfare---except those involving copyrights. The U.S. seems happy to prosecute or cause to be prosecuted anybody who is electonically inconvenient to U.S. companies.
Lest we forget (Score:3, Insightful)
Legal limitations? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe I'm being a troll here (mod me down if you wish), but the current administration has pretty much made it clear that any "legal limitations" that may have previously existed are now void.
*sigh* (Score:2, Insightful)
Once upon a time those two were considered mutuall exclusive.
Re:My guess (Score:3, Insightful)
The road to debacle is littered with examples of politicians of all nationalities acting without thinking. In view of the fact that US politicians seem to have had a partickularly virulent spate of acting without thinking recently and doing so on a grander scale than politicians of most other nationalities have done during the same period I would not get my hopes up about US leaders resorting to Cyberwarfare only as a last resort. They might resort to it to resolve quite trivial disputes, you only have to take a look at some of the frightening bills that have been voted on (and sometimes passed) in the US national assembly over the years to realize this.
The Answer.... (Score:2, Insightful)
And where do you draw the line between POLICE ACTION on the internet and CYBERWARFARE? Is monitoring internet traffic for terrorist communications a POLICE ACTION or CYBERWAREFARE? What if you more from passive to active, by sending fake messages to suspected terrorist?
My guess... the US is already there and we're not the only ones in the game.
Read if this way too... (Score:3, Insightful)
Justifcation of one's budget usually means jumping the gun and laying ownership claims quickly. Expressing it in your mission statement is one good way of doing it. Now the other branches will have to figure out how to keep the Air Force from getting the sole control of that arena.
In other words, we want money and here is our justification, after all Cyberspace is so big and scary!
This August 2004 Doctrine lays out space options (Score:3, Insightful)
Kind of interesting that the document starts with a rationale based on the Iraqis having tried to jam GPS during Gulf War II -- "adversaries will target space capabilities" -- and then quickly moves on to a "We've got to be ready to do that to our opponents" stance that's openly aggressive.
Lots of interesting details in there. A sidebar says over 80% of US military satellite communications during GW II used commercial satellites.
Page 49 of the 63 has a scant paragraph about legal considerations. Basically the M.O. is "check with a judge advocate to make sure it's okay."
not inadvertent at all (Score:2, Insightful)
A key asset in our comms capability orbits in space: the constellations of comms satellites, along with GPS and other capabilities (including visual surveillance / reconaissance). Those satellites were put there by USAF in most cases and they retain operational responsibility for many of the military ones.
As far as the announcement goes (and Euro response) well
So be it. We aren't about to roll over and curl into a sobbing heap in response. If we need to go it alone to defend ourselves and those who are allied with us, that's just what we'll do.
Oh and snide boy above? You might be rather surprised at the depth of skill in the infowar ranks. Cyberwarfare has already been tested against us in a variety of probing attacks
Re:The Answer.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly I think it's ridiculously outside of their mission. Cyberwarfare ought to be the domain of one of the intelligence agencies, since they're basically the ones with the signals interception, encryption, and intelligence analysis capabilities already. Neither the technical capabilities nor institutional culture of the Air Force really lend themselves to this mission.
Huh? What's Love Got To Do With It?! (Score:5, Insightful)
What?!? Are you just, like, making up history as you go along?
We became the world's only superpower by (1) building a giant friggin' arsenal, (2) training a ridiculously immense armed forces, and (3) developing a staggeringly robust economy to sustain both. The previous century's other superpower had (1) and (2), then fell short on (3). (I leave the debate re the efficacy of the respective economic systems to a different thread.)
Now, China teeters on superpower-dom, if it can't be classified as one already. Is that because the Chinese have labored so hard at presenting a benevolent face to the world and building up other nations' trust? Obviously not.
If you got to be a superpower by being nice, Iceland would rule the solar system. Or, at least their women would...
ChairForce - Legal Limitations? (Score:5, Insightful)
Traditional Geneva Conventions apply to air. There are few practical constraints here.
There are separate treaties outlawing militarization of space. How prohibitive the treaties will be in practice is yet to be seen. Regardless the US will always act to defend itself, particularly in regards to its satellite system which is today's "high ground" that facilities military dominance. Certainly the US will deploy defensive systems to protect satellites. Whether it will deploy systems designed to disable enemy satellites is uncertain, but likely.
There are no legal treaties explicitly controlling cyber wars. There may be some older international law that could be applied to this new arena. Such would be similar to the desire of some to apply the international laws allowing nations the right to attack and capture pirates to the current war on terrorism -treating terrorists as pirates. If legal scholars can see parallels here, they'll surely see them in cyber warfare.
Today many would consider carpet bombing an entire city filled with civilians in an attempt to destroy a radar tower as a practical violation of the Geneva Conventions' rule against targeting civilians because the same tower could be destroyed with other means that would not endanger a whole city of noncombatants.
Would targeting an entire ISP to take out one terrorist website be similar? If that ISP refused to take down the website, how careful does the US have to be if it chooses to electronically attack it? Can it wipe out the data on all the ISP's servers, thus affecting "noncombatant websites?" Or must it be more careful and try to affect only the enemy's website? Probably not because the collateral damage is not that serious... loss of a website, eh... he'll live.
But what if the US is at war with an entire country, how careful must it be in attacking entire networks in that country? In that case, there may be some serious considerations. Taking out a major ISP may disrupt not only government and military networks of the enemy but also hospital networks or networks that control municipal water systems, etc, etc, which would knowingly endanger civilian lives and possibly affect third party nations. In war a country must differ to saving its citizen's lives over those of the enemy when it has no other options. So, I suppose the legal limitations are such that the US has to decided, what options it has that will likely defeat/incapacitate the enemy and then choose the ones that least endanger civilians (lives and property). Maybe it will be that cruise missiles are safer to civilians than a cyber war.
Re:The Answer.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Read It Differenty (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:...And what are the US's legal limitations? (Score:2, Insightful)
On the contrary- when the US enters into a treaty, which ocurrs when the Senate ratifies it, the treaty has the same force as any other law in the United States. We are a nation of laws, and therefore, also a nation of treaties. Treaties do come with clauses allowing nations to leave the treaty if it is in their national security interests, but doing so must be done publically which has an international audience cost.
I agree that many nations bend agreements when in their interests, but the best treaties are the ones that are well defined, fair, and most importantly, verifiable.
Re:Read It Differenty (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that military members from various branches already work at NSA, having the Air Force expand its role to meet the obligations it already has isn't ridiculous.
One of the big reasons to do this for the Air Force is because they are also generally given aerospace command, including satellites.
This is not to say that other branches don't also have this, as the Navy just recently renamed its cryptology officers as information warfare officers, and has retasked and renamed the Naval Security Group. Many of the information systems locations are moving towards joint tasking anyway. With the vast experience in telecommunications, if the Air Force becomes the main branch for running these various ops, it won't change the fact that the Navy, Marines, and Army also have trained units for these tasks, too.
Cyberspace == Satcomm (Score:3, Insightful)
The Air Force had always launched and maintained most of the military communication satellites. These uplinks usually form the trunk of deployed military networks... after all, it wouldn't be too convenient for the Army to subscribe to the nearest middle east DSL line or for the Navy to spool thousands of miles worth of fiber behind a flotilla. So most of what the military considers the "network" is this wireless communications system, which needs to be heavily secured, defended, etc.
One of the first things the Air Force is responsible for during an invasion is to take out the enemy's command and control infrastructure - destroying their radar, microwave tranceivers, satcomm, and other network and surveillance equipment. Whether this is done using bombs/missiles, jamming equipment, or perhaps some kind of network attack/exploit, I suppose you could agree that the latter modes could be less destructive and more subtle in terms of offering you counterintelligence options ("no, the invading force is actually over *here*". And the less infrastructure you physically destroy, the less you have to rebuild later, I guess.
While some of this might be carried on over the internet, I imagine the vast majority would occur over isolated military intranets.
I'd be pretty surprised if Air Force honeynets and botnets start duking it out with the supposed North Korean hacker army over the normal internet we know and love, playing a game of cat 'n' mouse over the tattered remains of a compromised IIS server... though I wonder who
Re:Fight in Cyberspace? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fight in Cyberspace? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ChairForce - Legal Limitations? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: WWI aftermath (Score:3, Insightful)
Air Force "turf" (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as letting CIA/NSA run this, you don't want an intelligence agency conducting offensive missions. Period. Yes, they're doing that now, but we already have huge oversight problems of intel groups (even the budget total is classified).
Besides, the Air Force is the US's "standoff" branch. They can attack, cause mayhem, destroy and kill - but air power and cyberwar are both constrained by the fact that they cannot singly defeat an enemy. Both roles are support for another effort, be it political or on-the-ground military. The fact of jointness enjoyed by US commanders makes this seem like a natural fit.
Re:The USA is a sovereign nation (Score:2, Insightful)
You people have a colored history of violence for the sake of national or ideological interests. What you don't give proper conisderation to is that your interests are not always in the best interests of everyone else. And that you couldn't care less, because you need another crusade.
We all have been shown time and time again that you do not act in everyone's best interests no matter how much bleating we hear from your country to the contrary.
Re:Legal Limitations?? (Score:3, Insightful)
With all due respect, these are some of the same people who brought us the highly tactful "shock and awe", applied to a civilian city interspersed with military and Baath party apparatus. A wiser choice would have been to stick with "surgical strikes" and "precision munitions". Old and boring as those may be, at least they make it clear that the target is the opposing military and that pains are being taken to avoid civilians. "Shock and awe" made us sound more like an indiscriminate bully high on his own power. Just because some verbiage has been looked over and discussed by lots of people with the same training and social norms doesn't guarantee a judicious decision on it.