It is a silent, invisible, and deadly weapons system. It can paralyze an entire nation without a single soldier being sent to war. We glimpsed its potential on television when surgical strikes on radar sites, electrical power plants, and command networks crippled Iraqi forces during the Gulf War. Now, in The Next World War, James Adams shows how a new chapter in military history is being written as the Information Age comes to the battlefield: to bigger and stronger, now add smarter. As increasingly sophisticated computers and microtechnology have become available, the concept of "conventional" warfare has changed. Technology has already made its way to the front lines: soldiers are now equipped, for example, with new "smart" technologies such as handheld computers that allow them to e-mail their commanders. There are devices that can sense an enemy's presence before the enemy is visible, by detecting body heat or by communication with satellites overhead. Robotic "bugs" can even be sent in swarms to sabotage weapons or subdue enemy soldiers. But the most significant and important use of information warfare won't be on the battlefield. The most devastating weapons will be those that target an enemy's infrastructure -- air-control systems, electrical grids, and communication networks, to name just a few potential targets. "Trojan horse" chips or viruses designed to accept and respond to commands from U.S. military intelligence can be installed in computers being sold overseas, making them vulnerable to attack. By hacking into computer systems, the United States could override programmed commands and thus shut down air traffic control systems, and open floodgates and bridges. Misinformation could even be broadcast, for example, by using imaging technology to simulate a television appearance by an enemy nation's leaders. This type of combat puts civilians at more risk than ever, as financial, communication, transportation, and other infrastructure systems become prime military targets. And information warfare puts the United States -- a nation increasingly dependent on technology -- in a position of both definite advantage and extreme vulnerability. In The Next World War, James Adams draws on impressive research as well as his lifetime of reporting on intelligence and military affairs to give us a chilling scenario of how wars will be fought in the new millennium -- and how much closer to home they might strike.

James Adams is the Chief Executive Officer of United Press International.

Introduction	p. 13
	p. 19
War in the Infosphere	p. 21
A Desert Myth	p. 35
The Challenge of the Chip	p. 52
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight	p. 60
Riding the Tiger	p. 76
Trial by Strength	p. 81
The March of the Revolutionaries	p. 93
	p. 103
From Double Tap to Double Click	p. 105
Fly on the Wall: Weapons and Wasps	p. 122
Set Tennis Balls to Stun	p. 138
The Wrong Hands	p. 156
The Back Door's Open	p. 172
Venimus, Vidimus, Dolavimus (We Came, We Saw, We Hacked)	p. 193
Big Ears and Noddies	p. 213
Puzzles and Mysteries	p. 224
	p. 231
The New Arms Race	p. 233
A Mole in the Oval Office	p. 245
It's the Economy, Stupid	p. 258
Every Picture Tells a Story	p. 272
Morality and Megabytes	p. 291
Conclusion	p. 305
Glossary	p. 315
Notes	p. 323
Bibliography	p. 345
Index	p. 349
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

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INTRODUCTION

Kinkead's is one of Washington, D.C.'s, most fashionable restaurants. A few blocks from the White House, it is frequented by President Clinton, White House staffers and other movers and shakers who like to see and be seen. I like it because I can always get the same quiet corner table far removed from prying eyes or the eavesdroppers that are a constant nuisance in a city where people consider everyone else's business to be their own.

I had invited the Washington station chief of MI6 for one of our regular lunches and we had been enjoying some rockfish and an espresso when he began describing the problems confronting the intelligence community with the growth of organized crime and the expected developments in cryptography. The world he described was indeed frightening: gangs who cared little for national boundaries, who had enormous wealth that far exceeded the MI6's own budget and the ability to communicate in unbreakable codes over the Internet.

"It's all part of information warfare and it's so much what we are all about these days," he explained.

I had heard the term before but knew little about it. In the course of researching The New Spies, a book that examined the role of intelligence after the Cold War, I had heard occasional mutterings about the possibilities of a new form of warfare to meet the challenges of the postcommunist world. But it meant little to me then and at that lunch with the MI6 officer, I simply nodded wisely, as if I understood perfectly what the man was talking about.

Intrigued, I began to investigate the term "information warfare" to try to discover what it meant. I quickly learned that it meant different things to different people and that within the defense, political and intelligence establishments there was not only disagreement about its meaning but about its purpose. As I delved deeper, I discovered that information warfare was already a reality. In military bases, research centers and defense manufacturing complexes, new weapons and methods of waging war were being developed. In secret programs across the United States, billions of dollars had been quietly allocated to this promising new area of research.

This effort had resulted in a whole new generation of weapons and a new breed of soldiers, sailors and airmen ready to use them in the new kinds of wars that were being quietly planned inside the Pentagon. This is the world of the cyberknight, as some information warriors call themselves; of new weapons such as microwave cannons, plasma guns and fire ants. It is a place where dominance of the battle space is created not by bullets but by bits and bytes.

As the research unfolded and I began to travel across America and then to Europe and Russia, it became clear to me that the world was on the brink of a fundamental revolution in warfare. Not only had the end of the Cold War meant the demise of the old superpower rivalries but it also marked the end of our comparatively stable dependence on nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. Our understanding of war itself had changed dramatically. While the risk of a massive confrontation on the central plains of Europe between the massed armies of the Warsaw Pact and NATO had evaporated, new conflicts have come to fill the vacuum.

Today, we are at war on several fronts. The fights against terrorism, organized crime, economic espionage and weapons proliferation are permanent conflicts that are likely to confront us through the next century. At the same time, some of the old tensions remain, with ethnic conflicts in Bosnia and Somalia reminding the revolutionaries and the traditionalists that wars will continue however many chips and computers may populate the world.

What I also learned was that a new generation of visionaries has sprung up, enabled by the computer revolution. They predict a very different world that will emerge from the current uncertainty. It will be a place where wars of every type will be fought not by soldiers confronting soldiers but by new warriors engaging in the infosphere, the virtual world where commerce, conversation and connectivity will all occur. In those wars, new weapons will be needed and real power will accrue to the nation or group that understands the use of this new technology.

In this new world, the soldier will be the young geek in uniform who can insert a virus into Teheran's electricity supply to plunge the city into darkness. His civilian equivalent will be able to read every e-mail, crash any office computer anywhere in the world, invade networks and destroy systems, all from thousands of miles away. The bank account of the drug baron or organized criminal located in an apparently safe offshore haven will be an open book.

The soldier will also be the man or woman equipped with a uniform powered by body heat that automatically adjusts to the environment and that relays location and vital signs back to base. That soldier will have on his head a helmet that allows him to see in all conditions, to locate incoming fire and return it with deadly accuracy, and an eyepiece that will provide his location, the location of the enemy and the locations of others in his patrol. He will have in his backpack "ants" powered by new microchips that will be able to see, smell and hear or even explode on command. He will be equipped with tiny airplanes no larger than a small notebook that will fly ahead and show him the terrain and the enemy.

The enemy will be different, too. No longer will it be the simple terrorist armed with an AK-47 or the Semtex bomb (although he will still be around); the new threat will be groups who will bond in cyberspace and attack using the new weapons of war: viruses, bugs, worms and logic bombs.

Although little of the perils and possibilities of this new form of warfare has reached the public or the political leadership, I discovered that across America thousands of men and women have been quietly working to make what sounds like science fiction into a reality. And such is the pace of the information revolution that many of the tactics and weapons that sound like fantasy are already in place.

When I began the research for this book, I found at first that every door was shut. The intelligence communities refused to talk. Nearly every defense program on the subject was "black" (top secret), so it was hard to penetrate there, too. The dangers have been discussed only in hushed tones in the sanctuaries of the Pentagon or CIA headquarters. There has been almost no public discussion and no opportunity for an informed debate. Yet, information warfare is something that will affect every man, woman and child on this planet.

After many years of covering the covert world as a journalist and author, I found I knew enough people in strange places to begin to get a glimpse of what lay behind the curtain of secrecy. The result was visits to secret information warfare centers across America, to laboratories where twenty-first-century weapons are already being made, to think tanks where the new wars are being discussed and modeled. I took an extraordinary trip to Moscow where the Russian defense and intelligence community shared with me their real fears about the future of information warfare. They see it as threatening and likely to cause a new arms race between the major powers. Researching this book was the most exciting, fascinating and frightening journey of my life, rich in vision and color and filled with people of enthusiasm and insight. At the same time I realized that we are beginning a journey into a world that is fraught with danger.

It was disturbing also to learn that the countries that have the most effective information warfare capabilities are also the most vulnerable to attack. Uniquely in the history of the world, a single individual armed with just a computer and a modem can literally hold America to ransom.

A glimpse of that vulnerability was provided on February 5, 1997, when George Tenet, then the proposed Director of Central Intelligence, during his confirmation hearings took the Senate Intelligence Committee through the usual litany of threats and potential crises that confronted the United States.

"First is the continuing transformation of Russia and the evolution of China," he said. "Second are those states -- North Korea, Iran and Iraq -- whose hostile policies can undermine regional stability. Third are very important transnational issues -- terrorism, proliferation, international drug trafficking and international organized crime. Fourth are those regional hot spots -- such as the Middle East, the south Asian subcontinent, Bosnia and the Aegean -- which carry a high potential for conflict. Fifth are states and regions buffeted by human misery and large-scale suffering, states involved in or unable to cope with ethnic and civil conflict, forced migration, refugees and the potential for large-scale deaths from disease and starvation."

There was nothing particularly new in any of this. It was a speech that could have been made by most CIA directors at any time over the previous twenty years. Even the names would have been the same. What set Tenet's remarks apart was the few sentences at the end of his lengthy prepared statement.

"There's a new threat I've put in this transnational threat area and that is security to information systems in the United States. The tremendous growth in communications technology is shrinking distances and weakening the barriers to the flow of information. This technology also presents us with an important transnational challenge -- protecting our information systems. Recognizing this problem, we are assessing countries that have such potential, including those which appear to have instituted formal information warfare programs."

Despite the apparent recognition that information warfare is the next revolutionary technology, there remain fundamental disagreements among individuals, groups and nations about the significance of the Information Age in general and information warfare in particular. Some of the traditionalists in the military see IW as simply part of an evolutionary process that began with the longbow and has continued through gunpowder and repeating rifles, guided missiles and stealth technology. For those on the evolutionary wing, IW is both a promise and a threat. IW may allow for better use of existing forces but if it develops too far, it may threaten the very existence of those forces.

The real revolutionaries believe that for countries like the United States, IW offers the possibility of fighting and winning wars without the commitment of troops on the ground -- something that is considered heresy to military historians, who argue that troops will always be needed to take and hold ground. The revolutionaries argue that even the very definition of "ground" is changing as the world migrates from earth to cyberspace.

This debate is ongoing and will likely not be resolved for some years. In preparing this book, I have chosen to use a broader definition of both "information" and "warfare" to accommodate both sides of the argument. Some experts argue that our old definitions of both words are redundant as we migrate into the infosphere.

A conventional military view would suggest that information is simply a message or set of messages that flows from commanders to their troops and back again. In the context of information warfare, disrupting the flow can have a critical impact on the course of a war. But information is also a medium or glue that holds systems together. For example, a modern Abrams tank has fifty microprocessors, many of which talk to each other and are dependent on each other to work effectively. Disrupt their ability to communicate -- destroy the medium -- and the system becomes ineffective.

Finally, information can also be the actions taken to obtain intelligence from an opponent's information flows or databases. For example, the CIA might use computers to go inside the database of a criminal gang in Moscow to obtain the organization's financial records. The information gathered from that operation could be exploited to help combat global organized crime.

Information warfare therefore seems to break down into three distinct pieces: perception management where information is the message, systems destruction where information is the medium, and information exploitation where information is an opponent's resource to be targeted. To adequately address all three of these categories, I have cast a wide net to embrace the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and law enforcement, which all use weapons as diverse as viruses, sponge balls, and precision-guided ammunitions to achieve information dominance in the new conflicts.

Making full use of today's information revolution implies not only adopting new technologies but also rethinking the very bases of military organization, doctrine, and strategy. All this requires reformulation in order to fulfill Clausewitz's exhortation that 'knowledge must become capability' in the information age. The information revolution is not simply technological in nature; it has powerful conceptual and organizational dimensions as well. The new meanings of power and information...favor the argument that wars and other conflicts in the information age will revolve as much around organizational as technological factors.

The struggle confronting modern societies is how to incorporate the opportunities presented by information warfare while holding on to the foundations that have made societies and cultures function effectively. The scale of this challenge is enormous and the stakes just as large, for as the information revolution gathers pace, so information warfare in all its aspects can threaten us all. Just how this struggle will be resolved is unclear and will probably not become clear for some years. This book is a first attempt to frame the debate, to freeze a moment in time on the information roller coaster so that we may understand where we have come from, where we are, and where we are heading.