Cyber Spying For A Future War

New information and communications technologies are beginning to profoundly affecting how current and future wars will be waged.  Driven by a combination of 5G mobile networks, long-endurance drones and low-earth-orbit satellites we are moving towards a future where almost everyone will have easy access to real-time geolocation and and  video data.

As a consequence, powerful states and non-state actors alike will soon be able to track US and allied military equipment, detecting patterns of training and operations.

The countermeasures of past decades, from shutter control to careful timing of sensitive force movements, are all but drained of their potency. Nearly 20 years ago, a thesis titled The End of Secrecy by then US Air Force Lt. Col. Beth Kaspar, discussed the implications of transparency to US military competitiveness. 

“Information and communications technologies are having a profound impact, both domestically and globally, on how future war will be waged.... These technologies are providing affordable, worldwide, near real-time, 24-hour, CNN-like news coverage; worldwide Internet access; and more importantly, access to commercial space systems, including remote sensing, communications and navigation..... Unfortunately, this explosion in world-wide information and communication systems creates vulnerabilities for US national security.” 

Kaspar recommended a variety of activities ranging from innovating new doctrine and developing fast decision-making processes to integrating camouflage, concealment, and deception both vertically and horizontally into military operations. 

In 2012, the US  journalist and security specialis David Sanger reported that the United States, in conjunction with Israel, had unleashed a massive virus into the computer system of the Iranian nuclear reactor at Natanz, where the Iranians were engaged in enriching uranium for use in nuclear weaponry, a starling example of effective and covert cyber warfare. More recently Lt. Col. Kaspar has written “DoD should go back to basics and actively incorporate deception into all organisational levels and all levels of warfare.”

Typical deception and denial techniques, such as camouflage, are well known to military operators and warfighters. But these ideas must be advanced in ways that adjust to frequent and continuous monitoring in various bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Hyperspectral sensors can identify chemical elements from space and could, in principle, make a camouflage canopy stick out like a sore thumb. 

The US national security estalishment's attempts to maintain levels of secrecty and surprise by limiting commercial space-based imaging have created a false sense of security and neglected developments that are not under US regulatory control. 

Even today, exercising shutter control, in the form of ordering an American company to limit its overhead image collection at a certain time and place, is time-consuming and cumbersome. Such requests must pass from the military operator to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the Secretary of Defense, and to the Secretary of Commerce, who then notifies the company operating the satellite.  Furthermore, these limits have no bearing on high altitude pseudo satellites including balloons; airplanes; international space companies, foreign governments.

Better deception and denial techniques would allow the military to dispense with the increasingly irrelevant tool of shutter control, lifting the regulatory burden on the domestic commercial remote sensing sector and helping compete on a global scale. It would also allow commercial imaging to support public messaging for national security without revealing the capabilities of the existing government systems.

Advancing and developing new deception and denial techniques may appear costly at first. But the alternative may be more expensive; indeed, restricting remote sensing licenses now would simply delay the cost to a later time when existing methods have become ineffective due to the growth of foreign remote sensing capabilities.

A “don’t look at me” approach to maintaining a military advantage is not feasible anymore. Instead, operators need to find new ways to hide. As Kaspar wrote in her thesis… “The appearance of the written word, a few millennia before the invention of the printing press in the Seventeenth Century, transformed military power...It enabled the preparation and dissemination of complex orders and the delegation and coordination of operational and tactical command functions and organising logistics.

As a result, larger armed forces could be mobilised, logistically supported, and deployed effectively in combat. “Today is information revolution is analogous to the written word revolution. It is the catalyst for economic, political and military change on a global scale... If the US military wants to maintain its competitive position, it must evolve doctrine, acquire superior weapons and systems, and adapt a viable organisational structure. If we fail in this, commercial technology diffusion and advances will outstrip doctrinal and weapon system developments with potentially devastating consequences. 

“After all, as an ancient Roman general said, ‘He who desires peace, let him prepare for war.’“The time to prepare is now.” 

CSIS:         DefenseOne:        Federation of American Scientists:          University of Pennsylvania Law School:

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