by Shane Harris
November 15, 2014
Imagine it's the year 2022. Across the Pacific Ocean, a small country — an American ally — has provoked a big adversary nearby. Call them Red. Red's size and military capabilities are near those of the United States.
Red responds aggressively to its neighbor's provocation. Within days, the big adversary has crippled the smaller country's power grid, communications networks and other infrastructure through cyberwarfare. Then, Red launches a preemptive cyberattack against the small country's big ally: the United States.
If you were the U.S. military, how would you respond?
That was the scenario faced by a group of high-ranking officers huddled together at an Air Force base in Colorado for the 2010 Schriever Wargame.
"It was a really instructive and, I think, very scary war gaming exercise for people in the military," writer Shane Harris tells NPR's Arun Rath. "The adversary in this game really got the advantage very quickly and won pretty decisively, because the American side really hadn't developed a playbook for how you would go to war between two large militaries in cyberspace."
Harris recounts that 2010 Schriever Wargame in his new book, @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex.
The book looks cyberspace as war's "fifth domain" (after land, sea, air and space). Harris covers topics like the NSA, the role of cyber warfare in the Iraq troop surge of 2007, China's "rampant" espionage on American corporations — and the U.S. government's strategy of playing the victim.
Harris tells Rath that after that alarming war game, the U.S. military's cyberforces became much more organized and sophisticated — but that China, the real-life country that parallels the imaginary Red, also is believed to have impressive capabilities.
Interview Highlights
On what Obama might have been told on his first day in office
He actually got a little bit of a taste of this on the campaign, because his campaign email system was hacked, presumably by spies in China.
When he comes in on the first day, what he's presented with is the knowledge that the computers that control portions of the electrical power grid in the United States have been probed by foreign intelligence agencies. He is told that espionage, particularly by China, against American corporations is rampant, and that billions of dollars in intellectual property and in trade secrets are being lost every year. And that basically, there is no really coherent organized system in the U.S. government for how we're going to defend the internet, how we're going to defend the cyberspace and all of the businesses and the people that depend on it.
What he decides to do very early on in the administration is to, in his words, start treating cyberspace as a national asset, a strategic asset, and protecting it as such.
Shane Harris is a senior correspondent for The Daily Beast. Harris was previously a senior writer for Foreign Policy, a staff correspondent at The National Journal and contributed to The Washingtonian.
The thing that China has going for it that we do not have is people. The number of people within the People's Liberation Army, within the sort of intelligence apparatus of China, which is a very opaque system in its own right, is believed to be thousands of people, who are basically hired hackers who spend much of their day aggressively trying to penetrate the computer networks of U.S. corporations especially. China is sort of gathering information that they can then pass on to Chinese businesses and corporations that give them a leg up in negotiations and in the global marketplace. They're trying to advance their economy very quickly and stealing information to do it.
Less clear is how sophisticated their sort of military offensive apparatus is compared to ours. For instance, if China ever went to war with us in the South China Sea, let's say, how sophisticated and how good would their hackers be trying to break into our naval systems and confuse our ships? We know less about that but I think the conclusion we have to reach is that because they're having so many more people doing this than we do — I mean, we have a few thousand — that China is a really formidable force. And that makes a lot of sense that they would put so many resources in this. China will never be able to, at least in the near future, challenge us in a conventional military way. They can't go head-to-head with us on land or on the sea. Cyber is a place where they can gain an extraordinary advantage and do a lot of damage.
On the U.S. government positioning itself as a victim
The United States government loves to come out and talk about how relentlessly we're being hacked and how our intellectual property is being stolen from our businesses. And that's true.
I think one of the reasons why U.S. officials have been keen on showing how we're victimized is because they believe that U.S. businesses have not done enough to secure their own computer networks. From the government's perspective, they can't go in and necessarily force those companies (at least not yet) to improve their defenses, so it's been sort of more of a strategic, rhetorical calculation on the part of the government to come out and say, "We're victimized, it's terrible, lots of information is being stolen, and the only way we can stop this is you corporations have to do better security and work with us and let us help you do that."But what that covers up is that we are also one of the most aggressive countries going out there breaking into other countries' systems and spying on them. And we are one of the few countries that we know of that has launched offensive operations in cyberspace. We have used computer viruses to break infrastructure, physical things that are connected to computer networks. Very few countries are known to have done that.
So there's a reason why the U.S. has tried to play that victim card so repeatedly: It's because they want to get results from private businesses.
Bob Stasio never planned to become a cyber warrior. After he graduated high school, Stasio enrolled at the University at Buffalo and entered the ROTC program. He majored in mathematical physics, studying mind-bending theories of quantum mechanics and partial differential equations. The university, eager to graduate students steeped in the hard sciences, waived the major components of his core curriculum requirements, including English. Stasio never wrote a paper in his entire college career.
Stasio arrived at Fort Lewis, Washington, in 2004, when he was twenty-two years old. His new brigade intelligence officer took one look at the second lieutenant's résumé, saw the background in math and physics, and told Stasio, "You're going to the SIGINT platoon."
SIGINT, or signals intelligence, is the capture and analysis of electronic communications. Like all branches of intelligence, it's a blend of science and art, but it's heavy on the science. The brigade intelligence officer had worked at the National Security Agency and recognized that Stasio's physics training would come in handy, because so much of SIGINT involves the technical collection of radio signals, fiber-optic transmissions, and Internet packets.
Stasio's military training in college focused on how to use a rifle and lead a squad. But he had spent six months learning the basics of intelligence gathering and analysis at the army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. When he came to Fort Lewis, Stasio was assigned to a Stryker brigade, a mechanized force designed to be light on its feet, capable of deploying into combat in just a few days. It was Stasio's job to locate the enemy on the battlefield by tracking his communications signals. And he was also supposed to divine his adversary's intentions by eavesdropping on the orders a commander gave to troops, or listening for the air strike that a platoon leader was calling in from behind the lines. Stasio would join the Fourth Brigade, Second Infantry Division, "the Raiders," and deploy to Iraq. He'd be working with a team of linguists, who would be essential, since Stasio didn't speak Arabic. But when it came time to meet them, Stasio started to worry: nearly all of the linguists spoke only English and Korean.
The army had designed its signals intelligence system for the Cold War. Thousands of troops still served on the Korean Peninsula. They were still trained in how to fight a land battle with North Korean forces, in which the physics of SIGINT — locating tanks and troops — would be central to the mission. But the Raiders were going off to fight a network of Iraqi insurgents, volunteer jihadists, and terrorists. These guys didn't drive tanks. They didn't organize themselves according to a military hierarchy. And of course, they didn't speak Korean.
Stasio decided that his intelligence training would be mostly useless in Iraq, where the US occupation was coming unglued. Army casualties were mounting, the result of a well-orchestrated campaign of roadside bombings by insurgents. The soldiers who didn't die in these attacks were coming home with limbs missing, or with severe brain injuries that would impair them physically and emotionally for the rest of their lives. SIGINT wasn't preventing these attacks. Indeed, it was hardly being used at all. In October 2004 the military's top signals intelligence officer estimated that as much as 90 percent of all information in Iraq was being supplied by a network of human spies and informants — and they weren't helping the Americans reduce the bombing attacks and insurgent strikes.
Stasio read as much as he could about insurgencies, noting in particular how they organized themselves using a network model, with many independent nodes of people working in teams, separate from a central controller. This was the opposite design of a vertical, military bureaucracy, with orders filtering down from the top through several layers of officers. In principle, the intelligence discipline in which Stasio was trained should still work. He was expected to locate his enemy using electronic signals and figure out his next move. But the tools the army had supplied to do this were ill suited to the shadowy, urban battlefields of Iraq. The Raiders used a collection "platform" known as the Prophet system, a rugged truck affixed with a tall, roof-mounted radio antenna about the size of a streetlamp. The older officers in the brigade liked the Prophet because it told them what enemy forces were in their immediate area of operations. It was a tactical device, and they controlled it, driving it to wherever they wanted to collect intelligence.
But the Prophet was designed to collect radio waves, and on a wide-open and relatively flat area of battle. Stasio knew that the enemy fighters in Iraq were communicating using cell phones and e-mail and through videos they'd posted on the Internet. They were moving in small groups through the dense concrete maze of Baghdad and other crowded Iraqi cities. The Prophet wasn't the most useful tool. Indeed, when Stasio finally got to Iraq, he saw that the military intelligence units that had come before him were using the Prophet not to collect signals but to transport food and other supplies around the base.
There was another reason the old-timers liked the Prophet — it was theirs. They could drive it wherever they wanted. They had control over the collection and analysis of intelligence. Stasio thought that his more senior officers generally distrusted intel that came from back in the States, frequently from Washington, DC, and the national intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the NSA, which, from the battlefield, looked like big, lumbering bureaucracies filled with software engineers and computer geeks who were too removed from the on-the-ground tactical needs of forces in Iraq.
But Stasio knew the national agencies, and in particular the NSA, had something he needed: data. Namely, servers full of electronic communications and signals collected by the agency's listening posts around the world. Stasio thought that if he could tap into SIGINT from Iraq, he might be able to understand something about the size and shape of the insurgent networks by piecing together their communications records. This was painstaking work, and it would require hours sitting in front of a computer, probably in some air-conditioned trailer, not driving a Prophet through dusty streets. Stasio was a fan of the HBO series The Wire, and he was particularly fond of one character, Lester, who uncovers a network of drug dealers in Baltimore by tracking their cell phone calls. Stasio wanted to do the same thing in Iraq.
He pleaded with his brigade intelligence officer at Fort Lewis: instead of sending him out to the rifle range to practice infantry techniques and study the bulky Prophet, let him and a few of his fellow intelligence officers spend time in the state-of-the-art intelligence facility on the base, learning how to use software for diagramming networks and digesting Internet and cell phone traffic. These tools had been largely overlooked by tactical military intelligence units, Stasio argued. But they could be enormously helpful in Iraq.
The officer agreed.
Excerpted from @WAR: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris. Copyright 2014 by Shane Harris. Used by permission of Eamon Dolan Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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