Chapter 3 “THEY ARE ALREADY AMONG US” T o understand modern warfare, you need to begin, of all places, in Budapest.

[...] Much of the twentieth century’s brainpower was born within Hungary: John von Neumann, inventor of both quantum mechanics and the computer program; atomic scientists Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, and Isidor Rabi; Elie Wiesel, humanitarian and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize; Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel Corporation. All were Hungarians. Or, more precisely, ex Hungarians. Budapest may resemble a fairyland. Its onion-domed churches and hot-spring fountains may seem enchanting. But the city has always had a dark side. Hungary is at the crossroads of Europe, another way of saying that it has been on the invasion routes connecting Germany, Russia, and Turkey.

Things got especially chaotic in Hungary after World War I, when the Allies carved up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and got even worse after the Fascists and Communists began to compete for control. Eventually the Fascists won out, and Hungary sided with Nazi Germany during World War II. As a result, the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force flattened Budapest, and the Red Army pillaged what remained. The combination of a cosmopolitan society, a devotion to education, and a penchant for war and riot has made Hungary a leading exporter of human genius.

Among those fleeing all the chaos were Edward and Irene Rona, who sent their son Thomas and his older brother George to the more tranquil environs of Paris soon after Tom was born in 1923. Tom grew up a Parisian, taking his finals in engineering at the École Polytech-nique on V-E Day. After a brief detour with the French engineering corps building bridges in Cameroon (partly to dodge an irate father and a shotgun marriage), Rona returned to Paris and met Monique Noel, a bank clerk. Tom and Monique soon married.

Tom and Monique began moving farther and farther west to escape the chaos and constraints of the Old World—first to Montreal, then to a junior faculty position for Tom at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By that time he and Monique had three sons and a daughter. An assistant professor at MIT earned an annual salary of $2,400, so money was tight. Tom heard about an opening for a staff scientist at Boeing. He and Monique flipped a coin. Boeing won, and they piled the four kids in the car and began the drive to Seattle. Tom reported to work, and Monique got a job at the University of Washington.

It’s hard to tell if Rona ever actually used his engineering degree at Boeing, at least in the sense that he never designed a bomber or missile. Officially he was a senior scientist. Defense contractors like Boeing charge the government an extra fee beyond the basic materials and labor it takes to build a B-52 or an air-launched cruise missile. This money goes into an account for preparing bids and proposals (B&P, in defense contractor jargon), which Boeing used to pay for most of Rona’s salary.

The idea was that Rona would develop new ideas for using military hardware—hopefully, new Boeing hardware. In any case, Rona effectively had a license to look at any technology or topic that seemed interesting and was a potential market for Boeing. It was almost as good as being a professor at a major university, if not better.

People were still trying to assimilate the lessons of World War II when Rona arrived at Boeing. The war was just ten years past, and everyone was still trying to figure out the legacy of what Winston Churchill called the “wizard war”—the contest of electronic weapons and countermeasures.

The British had learned the hard way just how complex this game could be. Electronic warfare had become a critical factor in World War II during the Battle of Britain. In 1940 émigrés who had escaped the Continent told British intelligence that the Germans had developed some kind of “beam” weapon. At first the Brits thought this might be a ray gun that could shoot down aircraft by electronically frying their ignition systems; the refugees had talked about the Germans’ testing a “beam weapon that stopped cars.”

When they dug deeper into the reports, though, the Brits discovered that translators had mangled the syntax; what the émigrés really meant was that the Germans were testing a weapon that required them to stop cars-that is, stop nearby traffic to avoid radio interference. Later the British bugged the cells of some German POWs and learned that the weapon was a radio device for guiding bombers to their targets. 1

The Luftwaffe had developed a system of steerable radio beams criss-crossing Britain from stations in France and Germany. A primary beam traced a path to the target for the pilot to follow. If the pilot went off course, the beam would grow weaker, and this would trigger a buzz in his headset telling him to correct his heading. Additional beams bisected the flight path to alert the bombardier as he approached the release point. When the signal from the final crossbeam peaked, the bombardier heard a signal in his earphone and he knew he was over the target. It was like an electronic “. marks the spot.”

Eventually the British learned how to deduce the direction of the beams and thus figure out which targets to protect. Yet this breakthrough had little to do with detecting the beams themselves. The real trick was in intercepting and deciphering the communications that the Luftwaffe used to tell their radio stations where to aim their beam each night. This revealed the direction and frequency of the beams, and with this information, the British could both determine the target the Germans planned to bomb, and also track a beam back to its transmitter.

The British soon learned how to transmit their own signals on the same frequency, jamming the receivers on the aircraft or causing the bombardier’s signal to go off before his aircraft actually reached its target. Combined, all of these separate ingredients provided the components of an information warfare operation. The British learned where the Germans planned to attack, manipulated the Germans’ view of the situation, decided how to respond, and then reacted before the Germans knew what they were up to.

The British thus had the advantage, but they then had to answer the Perennial Question of Information Warfare. Even Indian faced the Perennial Question when they first discovered a rival tribe using smoke signals. it sill confounds information warriors even today: Deny, deceive, destroy, or exploit? Do you transmit your own smoke signals to interfere with his? Do you send bogus signals to confuse your adversary so that he is easier to kill? Do you find the enemy sending the message and kill him? Or do you quietly watch the signals so you know where your adversary plans to be, head him off, and kill him then?

If the Brits jammed the beams or destroyed the radio stations, they might have eliminated the beam system temporarily. The Germans, however, would then have known that their guidance system was successful, or at least successful enough that the British believed they needed to neutralize it. Some German program manager would likely have used this fact to justify a request to build new transmitters that were better hidden and transmitted on different frequencies.

On the other hand, if the British simply sent their fighters to protect the target designated in the deciphered message, some German bombers would have gotten through. Even worse, if a squadron of Spitfires or Hurricanes regularly appeared at the appointed place night after night, the Germans would have eventually figured out that the British had cracked the cipher, which was about the most valuable secret the British had at the time.

This question of how best to attack an information system once you have the advantage—and who should do it—is an old one. Even today it is good for countless interagency meetings and memoranda. The Indian tribes probably had strategy meetings to deliberate how to deal with the smoke signal threat. One warrior likely proposed killing the signal senders, leaving their rivals blind, while another argued passionately for using the information to lay an ambush for the enemy braves who were being directed by the signals.

In the end, the British did a little of each. They jammed some of the signals some of the time, just enough to confuse the Germans. They bombed some of the radio stations. They even leaked some fanciful reports claiming that they had learned how to “bend” radio beams.

The goal was to keep the Germans off balance, and the plan worked. The Germans never lost confidence in their technology and kept using the same beam navigation system. By September 1940 the British had shot down 1,400 German aircraft. German bombing became less accurate. And Ultra, the secret intelligence based on the decrypted intercepts, remained secret until 1974, when the British government itself revealed its coup. 2

Even so, no one had really given much thought to how all these pieces—jamming, deception, intelligence—fit together. The really important thing was always the weapon-a gun or aircraft. Communications, tracking, and guidance were merely “support systems.”

This was all about to change, thanks to other events underway in Seattle. As far back as 1851, when the city fathers convinced Henry Yesler to build his newfangled steam—powered sawmill along the banks of the Puget Sound, Seattle had risen, and fallen, on each new wave of technology. After Bill Boeing built his first seaplane for the Navy in 1917, the new technologies driving the Seattle economy were mainly based on aerospace—first airmail, then bombers, and more recently, missiles and satellites.

In the 1960s a new technology began to drive the Seattle economy: computers. Up to then, computers were scarce and expensive, and could only run one program at a time. Then in 1957 a young mathematics graduate student named John McCarthy proposed a revolutionary idea: time-sharing, or having a single computer run several programs simultaneously. This completely changed the computer business and, by extension, Seattle.

McCarthy, who was visiting MIT on a fellowship at the time, observed that the slowest part of a computer system is always the person operating it. We work at human speed; the computer works at electronic speed. The computer requires just milliseconds to run a typical calculation. McCarthy, later a distinguished professor in computer science at Stanford, realized that if you can collect computer jobs from many users, the computer can electronically rack-and-stack the jobs as they arrive, perform the operations as capacity becomes available, and thus run more or less continuously. 3

A Teletype—a typewriter that transmits a different electronic signal for each character in the alphabet—made it possible to do all this from miles away. The basic idea for the Teletype had been kicking around since 1909, but it was not until 1931 that the Bell System had introduced it into computers.

It did not take long for some early entrepreneurs to put all the pieces together and see a business opportunity. One could buy a computer, hook users into it with Teletypes, and sell portions of the computer’s capacity to companies that couldn’t afford to buy their own.

Time-sharing became popular at universities, which typically had two or three large computers located somewhere on campus, and tens of thousands of faculty and students who wanted to use them. So it was little wonder that many of the people who tried to get into the timesharing business were college staff, like Monique Rona.

By then Monique had expanded her repertoire from oceanography to computer science. Soon she found herself running the university’s computer center. Tom helped with the financing and Monique got together with some university colleagues to buy a Digital PDP-10. They set up the Computer Center Corporation—C-Cubed, for short—in an office near the campus. Monique put a Teletype on the kitchen table, and they were in business.

The PDP-10 had just hit the market. Being a new machine, it was prone to electronic burps and hangfires. The C-Cubed partners thought they might cut a deal where Digital would give them a discount on the computer if they worked out the bugs.

As it happened, one of the Rona boys attended the Lakeside School, a local private academy, and had heard of some classmates who liked to work with computers. Some of the Lakeside moms had bought their kids a Teletype and a few thousand dollars of computer time from local companies with money raised from a rummage sale. The moms hoped their kids might learn a few computer skills writing programs to play ticktacktoe and the like.

The kids had other ideas. They began playing with the Teletype day and night, taking apart programs and writing some of their own. In no time they burned through the computer time their mothers had bought them and had to look for some new benefactors, just when Monique was looking for some eager minds to test her PDP-10. The boys cut a deal with C-Cubed: the boys would look for bugs in the PDP-10, and C-Cubed would give them some time on its computer.

Two of the kids, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, seemed to have a knack for computers. When the machine crashed, they would fetch the “core dump” from the trash and search through the machine language line by line to find the bug. They wangled operating manuals from the staff. Eventually the “Lakeside Programmers Group” came to know the insides of the PDP-10 about as well as C-Cubed did. So, when they ran out of their allotted time on the machine, they naturally took the simple expedient of fiddling with the computer’s operating system to set back the clocks. Bill, Paul, and their Lakeside buddies Ric Weiland and Kent Evans were four of the earliest computer hackers. 4

Alas, the market for computer time-sharing never worked out as well as Monique had hoped, and C-Cubed eventually went broke, another case of roadkill on the path to IT riches. Gates and Allen went on to other ventures. One was a new company, “Micro-Soft,” which they incorporated in April 1975 to sell programs for the Altair 8800, the first personal computer.

Meanwhile, Tom and Monique had that Teletype on their kitchen table. Computers—especially computers that talked with other computers—were part of the family. Tom could see that the Teletype in the Rona kitchen communicating with the PDP in the C-Cubed office near the university was no different than, say, a radar off the coast of New Jersey communicating with a central computer at the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado.

Rona could see that any widget that collected, moved, or processed data was part of a system, each dependent on the other. He could also see that every widget in a system was a potential point of vulnerability, as was the information that passed through them. These so-called support systems were potentially a better target than the weapon itself.

This had not occurred to anyone before, probably because information machines had never routinely talked to one another before. But what Rona now saw was clear: Control the information flowing through your adversary’s computers and communications networks, and you could control the outcome of a battle or a war. Or, as Rona’s monograph, Weapons Systems and Information War , put it, “Countermeasures aimed at the external flow of information will be further improved to the point that they may well become crucial in influencing the outcome of future engagements.—” 5

Often, in common English, this meant that the best way to defeat your enemy was to attack the components of its information systems, and Rona was broad-minded in defining “component.” It included the hardware, of course, but it could just as easily be software, the people operating the system, the people getting the information out of the system, or the data that traveled through it. The best component to attack depended on the opportunities at hand and the risks one was willing to take.

In fact, Rona said, information war offers a major advantage over the old-fashioned kind. In information war, you have a menu of options—that Perennial Question of deny, deceive, destroy, or exploit? It offers an entire matrix of potential pressure points and methods for attacking the enemy. And if your target happens to figure out what you are up to, you can change tactics. The only challenge is to adapt faster than your adversary.

Boeing published Rona’s monograph in the summer of 1976 as a “think piece” for company staff and customers. Tom Rona was the first person to use the term “information war” in print. Considering that the Internet was still thirteen years away and a “home computer” was something you built from a box of components with a screwdriver and a soldering gun, it was not a bad piece of prognostication.

Chapter 4 THE ASYMMETRIC WARRIOR

Many people think that information warfare—in particular, the idea of attacking computer networks—was the Defense Department’s version of the dot-com boom. Some even believe that information warfare is like the management theories of Enron or Worldcom, a fashionable notion that will not last. But that is a faulty reading of history.

The origins of computer wars have a lot more to do with the Cold War of the 1980s than with the browser wars of the 1990s. The drafters and planners for information warfare were mostly Navy and Air Force officers who worried about fighting a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Even the rationale for information warfare was originally a grand strategy aimed at toppling the Soviet empire.

To understand all this, one needs to go down the Pacific coast from Tom Rona’s Seattle to Santa Monica, California, where the Air Force set up Project RAND in 1946 as one of the first not-for-profit think tanks. Project RAND was partly a leftover from World War II and partly preparation for the Cold War.

Planning a strategic bombing campaign is a lot like planning public works in reverse. Instead of building infrastructure to promote economic growth, the goal is to destroy infrastructure to kill an economy. The methodologies are even similar. You can run an industrial flow analysis to identify a manufacturing choke point and make a factory more efficient. Or you can run a flow analysis to identify a single point failure that will cause the whole plant to shut down when you blast it to bits.

From an analyst’s point of view, this is really interesting work. Dismantling a country’s infrastructure from 30,000 feet is usually a problem with several potential solutions: How many bombers? What kinds of bombs? Which targets? What is the optimal attack sequence?

During World War II the Army Air Corps recruiters - that is, drafted - economists, engineers, mathematicians, and assorted big-picture thinkers to analyze these problems.

After the war General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, the soon-to-become chief of the soon-to-be-created U.S. Air Force, knew he would need the same kind of eggheads. Unfortunately, the Air Force would have a hard time competing with universities and corporations for this talent in peacetime. And, truth be told, they were an odd fit for a uniformed service in any case.

That was the reason for Project RAND (Research and Development). At first, the Air Force put Project RAND inside the Douglas Aircraft Company. The operation got started just a month after the end of the war, as RAND set up shop in the Douglas Aircraft plant in the Santa Monica municipal airport.

The Air Force soon realized RAND would analyze proposals for all kinds of Air Force projects—including, most likely, aircraft and missiles proposed by Douglas Aircraft. Everyone knew this was an obvious potential conflict of interest. So in 1948 the Air Force spun off Project RAND into a nonprofit corporation. The new company continued to grow, and it soon moved to an office complex two blocks from the beach—a stone’s throw from the Santa Monica Pier and conveniently situated next to Chez Jay, a local bar and hideaway.

Andrew W. Marshall was one of the early hires. Marshall started out publishing papers with ferociously academic-sounding titles on basic statistical theory (“Some Tests for Comparing Points of Two Arbitrary Continuous Populations”) and methods for assessing the effectiveness of bombing operations (“The Estimation of Parameters in a Physical Vulnerability Model”). Soon, though, Marshall began to focus on bigger questions, like how to measure the military capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union and, by implication, how to tilt the balance in our favor.

Marshall soon found a theme that he would return to repeatedly over the next fifty years: “asymmetric threats.” At the time, most people measured the so-called superpower arms race by comparing apples to apples.

Marshall saw that such comparisons were usually irrelevant because you usually needed to compare apples to oranges. Comparing the number of tanks the Soviets had to the number of tanks we had told you nothing, said Marshall. Neither did comparing the size of their missiles to the size of our missiles. The reason was simple. Countries playing offense need different weapons from countries playing defense.

Think of it this way: If you are attacking a castle, you need ladders to climb walls, battering rams to smash in the front gate, and shields to protect you from the arrows that the defenders will shoot at you from the parapets. If you are defending the castle, you need arrows to shoot down at the attackers, vats of boiling oil to pour on their heads, and so on.

So it doesn’t mean anything to count the number of siege ladders on each side. This may seem painfully obvious today, but it was new for many politicians, generals, and pundits who were accustomed to thinking the strategic balance was something you read off a scorecard to see who was ahead.

To complicate matters further, the Soviet Union and the United States had different strengths to draw on. For instance, the Soviets could build bigger missiles because they had better rocket engines. But U.S. missiles were more accurate because we had better guidance systems. So a missile-to-missile comparison was misleading.

The most interesting thing about asymmetric threats, though, was that even the strongest army or air force could have an Achilles’ heel. Indeed, a country might create such vulnerability for itself and not even know it.

This was a point that eventually made Albert Wohlstetter famous. Wohlstetter, one of Marshall’s colleagues, described the ultimate asymmetric threat, in which a critical flaw, astutely exploited by an opponent, could leave even the most powerful military force dangerously weak.

At the time, the U.S. Strategic Air Command had four or five times as many long-range bombers as its Soviet counterpart. However, Wohlstetter noted that most U.S. aircraft were parked out in the open on airfields or, even worse, at foreign bases that were within range of a pre-emptive strike by the Soviet air force.

If the Soviets got the first punch, Wohlstetter said, they could destroy most of the U.S. bomber fleet. In fact, our vulnerability, combined with their own weakness, gave them an incentive to strike first if U.S.-Soviet relations went sour. This was really perverse, because the whole point of U.S. nuclear forces was to deter a Soviet attack. Wohlstetter claimed that, as configured, the U.S. force was not only failing to deter; it might even provoke a Soviet strike.

Usually the best army for winning a war bore little resemblance to the army that it had to defeat. They were, in other words, asymmetric. The ultimate goal, said Marshall, was finding the links in an opponent’s forces that were not only weak, but which he couldn’t fix even if he tried. Now that was really an asymmetric threat. It was the way to win not just a battle but the whole superpower competition.

Marshall knew that the idea of asymmetric threats was not only correct, it was impeccably logical. In fact, it was elegant. If you were defending, it revealed the vulnerability that others had overlooked. If you were on the offense, it could lead to a new strategy that was irresistibly efficient.

Marshall continued to work on measures of military capabilities until 1971. By then he had been at RAND for more than two decades. It wasn’t a great time. The United States was en route to losing the Vietnam war, and it seemed that everywhere you looked in the developing world, some country was setting up a Marxist government or signing a “Friendship and Cooperation Treaty” with the Soviets. The United States badly needed a strategic solution—elegant, efficient, or otherwise.

The Soviet Union had pulled even in the superpower competition—or ahead, depending on how you measured it. Of course, measuring and comparing military capabilities happened to be Marshall’s specialty. So, he asked, even if the situation looks bad now, can the United States plan a strategy that wins in the long run? To borrow a term from the economist David Ricardo, the United States needed to find its “comparative advantage,” the areas in which it had a natural edge over the Soviets.

Computers seemed promising. A totalitarian country like the Soviet Union had to control the flow of information. The Soviet regime was so worried about the threat of samizdat that in 1971 the average citizen could not get near a Xerox machine, never mind a computer. This was a weakness that would help destroy the Soviet Union, although most Soviet leaders did not appreciate it at the time. The Kremlin’s information technology phobia allowed the United States to plot a strategy that would emerge in full bloom during the Reagan administration and eventually push the Soviet Union over the edge.

Because the Soviets were so obsessed with controlling information, they could never have their version of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. The very idea of two teenagers foraging for free computer time on some company’s PDP-10 was utterly nonsensical in the Soviet context. There were no computers in the private sector. For that matter, there was no private sector. All of the computers in the Soviet Union resided in state-sponsored research institutions and military bases, where they were protected behind security perimeters defined by fence lines three-deep.

The business world was beginning to outpace the government in developing new information technology. Marshall could see that as long as the Communists remained communists, the Soviets would never catch up. The United States, said Marshall, had to figure out some way to use this advantage. 1

As it happened, James Schlesinger—a RAND alum himself—became Secretary of Defense two years later and found himself searching for someone to head an “Office of Assessment and Strategic Planning.” Schlesinger had discovered he had no one in the Department of Defense with the responsibility to step back now and then, look at the world, and estimate who was ahead, who was behind, and suggest what the Defense Department could do about it. He called his old colleague Andy Marshall, and Marshall moved to Washington.

“When we brought the office here, we concentrated on the assessment part and left off the strategic planning,” Marshall recalls, smiling because he knew which part would likely have the greater influence. Thus began the Office of Net Assessment

“We got hold of some classified writings about how the Russians calculated the correlation of forces,” he continues. “We were interested in reconstructing their calculations so that we could see how we might influence them.” In other words, Marshall planned to find out how the Soviets decided whether they were ahead or behind in the superpower competition, and then mess around with their minds.

The Soviets seemed especially interested in computers and communications systems and how to attack them. Soviet writers recalled how the Red Army prevailed in World War II through radioelektronaya bor’ba , “radio-electronic combat.”

Censorship was so strict in the Soviet Union that Soviet military writers often had to use analogies and examples from the Great Patriotic War to make their point. According to the Soviets, there were four basic techniques in radio-electronic combat: jamming an opponent’s communications, using radio direction finding to direct artillery that would destroy the enemy, concealment, and inserting disinformatzia into the adversary’s circuits to confuse him. 2

The Soviet writers were worried. According to their calculations, U.S. soldiers were better radioelektronaya bor’ba warriors than they could ever hope to be. They had taken a look at the American electronics industry and the systems that the Defense Department had deployed, and concluded that U.S. war planners must have given the topic a lot of careful thought

As it turned out, they were mistaken. “They thought that we were going to attack their command and control systems, even though our capabilities to do so were really not well developed,” Marshall recalls. But this didn’t matter. “The important thing was that they thought we were in a radio-electronic revolution, and then screwing them.”

So Marshall began in 1978 to draft a Net Assessment on Command and Control. “The more we looked at it, the more we could see that the center of the change in warfare was in the sensors and the information systems. The information aspect of weapons had always been important, but now it was more important than ever. So one of your key operational goals had to be to establish an advantage,” Marshall recalls.

Before long Marshall heard about Rona’s monographs on “information war” at Boeing. The two met and hit it off. Marshall could see Rona was onto something. “No doubt about it. Tom was the first person to put it all together,” recalls Marshall. For the next four years Marshall supported Rona’s work on the theory and practice of information war, or, as it came to be called, information warfare. It was a bargain, as Boeing still picked up half of Rona’s salary. 3

NOTES - Tom Rona left Boeing on March 1984 ..

As one connection led to another, Rona himself came to Washington a few years later. Ben Plymale, a vice president at Boeing and former defense official from the Nixon administration, was Rona’s friend and mentor. Plymale introduced Rona to William van Cleve, a professor at the University of Southern California. Van Cleve had been an adviser to Ronald Reagan during the 1980 campaign and was directing the Defense Department transition team for the new administration. Rona started working for van Cleve, and soon caught the eye of [William Robert Graham (born 1937)], who was also working on the transition and was about to become Reagan’s new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Graham offered Rona a job as deputy director.

After Rona’s stint in government, he remained the rest of his life as a Washington writer, consultant, savant, and bon vivant to an informal band of mid-level officers and officials on their way up. In coining the term “information warfare,” Rona defined the most important factor in modern military thinking. And it was all because he could not afford to be an assistant professor at MIT, and Boeing was willing to pay him to think of new big ideas that would eventually sell more airplanes and missiles.

If anyone had told Tom Rona that his inventing information warfare was originally just a hook for selling Boeing’s electronic widgets, he probably would have appreciated the irony. After all, the power to shape the actions of a military organization is the whole idea of information warfare. And that was exactly what Rona did. But if you caught Tom Rona in a quiet moment, he would likely say that he would be satisfied if he had just discovered some way his adopted country could avoid all the chaos that he had seen in his own life.