Carl Prine
During my former gig at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I came up with the idea of working on a project called “World War III.” It would canvass the brightest minds inside the Pentagon, U.S. State Department, intelligence community and Wall Street to scribble a drama that would play out in the pages of the newspaper for weeks, with the United States military pitted against a rising China.
A few days into this effort, after yapping with generals and admirals and senior policymakers, Peter “PW” Singer and co-author August Cole published “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War.”
So I probably should be a bit cross with the man who’s been hailed as one of the great defense intellectuals of the 21st Century. But I’m not. Singer’s work is always fascinating. He’s cast a wide net in the past 14 years, writing important studies about mercenaries, child soldiers, robots on the battlefield, cyberwarfare and maritime strategy.
Singer, a senior fellow and strategist at the Washington, D.C.-based New America Foundation, recently sat down for an interview with me that sprawled across many of these topics, plus new insights into Russian espionage, the ethics of war and the Islamic State.
U-T: Your Twitter game is pretty good. So what I did was I put on Twitter, “What question would you ask P.W. Singer?” And I got six questions. It’s the most democratic way, I thought, to do any interview. I actually had nothing to do with them. So I’ll ask.
Your work “Ghost Fleet” has become part of the Pentagon’s canon. Everyone has read it. But in any large bureaucracy, you have communities within it that grab onto a book like yours for different reasons. How has the book informed planning for the next war? And how are some people possibly misusing it? What do these people get wrong about your book?
Singer: It’s been exciting to see the impact the book has had. It’s doubly amazing to me because I’ve written nonfiction books that have had a pretty good range of readership in the military, but nothing that compares to this. And I think it shows the evidence of what storytelling can do by dropping people into a world, into future scenarios, where they see themselves.
The impact has been of a couple of types. It’s been helping people to envision the future in general. The example there would be how it’s been put on the reading lists of the (service) academies or for professional officer lists.
Or there’s impact on a very distinct set of people, such as senior military leaders. They’ll say, “You paint a scenario — not just a general portrait of World War III but a very particular thing happens in your scenario. And I don’t want it to happen.”
So an example would be a hardware hack, where our supply chain is hacked. One admiral described it as “the one part of the book that kept me up at night.” He told another admiral who told me.
It sparked an investigation. It sparked a policy change. Those are very specific things, examples of the negative — “I don’t want it to happen.” Or it’ll be the alternative — “You pointed to some kind of technology that’s in prototype stage. How do we make that come true?”
That happens a lot of times with science fiction.
That’s the way people sell a program or product. They’ll say, “Oh, do you remember that scene in ‘Star Wars?’ Did you remember that technology that you read about in ‘Ghost Fleet?’ Do you remember technology XYZ and then what happened?” People will say, “Oh, it’s just like this ‘Star Trek’ holodeck” as a way of selling some product or a policy.
There’s three different types of things that are going on.
In turn, what do people get wrong? They’ll confuse you with the views of a character. And, look, when you’ve have lots of different kinds of characters, they do things right sometimes and you deliberately have them make mistakes. Or that character will say certain things that you might not agree with.
Sometimes people will think that you have an agenda that you don’t.
Here’s a funny one. The book has gotten a lot of kind endorsements from across the board in the Army. But the more that it took off, it then was read by people doing Army budgeting as helping to make the case for the Navy budget. And then they wanted to find out “how the Navy paid for this book.”
And we had a good laugh on that because obviously we weren’t paid by the Navy. But they were trying to figure out who’s behind it. That’s a very Washington budget thing. There always has to be an agenda. There always has to be a secret angle, people think.
At the same time, you had people in the F-35 program office saying, “Why are they saying such mean things about the F-35? There must be something else going on here.”
U-T: What, like Boeing was paying you?
Singer: In all these cases, no.
U-T: I could see how you would be troubled by this. You’re talking about future events and about weapon systems that haven’t quite gotten to where they will be in development. And you talk about them working in certain ways in the book. And you obviously aren’t shilling for any product. But has there been a defense contractor who has pointed to a place in your book and said, “Hey, it’s all right here? Check this out.”
Singer: It’s actually been the opposite.
Tom Clancy was a big influence on us, but the obvious difference is that in the Clancy books the technology always works perfectly. In the real world, it doesn’t. And in a lot of the science fiction I love as well, like (William) Gibson’s “Blade Runner,” it doesn’t either. And that’s both because technology never works perfectly in the real world and also because there’s this thing called “people.” People are working against the technology.
I think what we’ve done in large part expresses what people in the Navy are actually saying. And that comes from the fact that the interviews for the book were with Navy ship captains, you know? Enlisted sailors. A Marine fighter pilot. Special Operations. Whatever.
So when someone in the book says, “The Littoral Combat Ship? More like ‘Little Crappy Ship,’” that’s not us making it up. That’s someone in the Navy, in the real world, who said that.
Or a character’s concern about having a crew size that’s small for efficiency sake — “But then what am I going to do whenever there’s damage control?”
U-T: People in the Navy had talked to you about that. You’d heard that.
Singer: Yeah. Or, a different example would be our conversation with an Air Force fighter pilot about what moves you’d pull in a modern dogfight — the kind we haven’t had happen for generations. This would be a dogfight between what we call “Fifth Gen” fighter jets. Stealthy, fast jets.
We got that kind of realism from him.
The other thing we talked about was, “How would you feel if there would be drones in the air alongside you?” What was interesting to me was how he’d feel because that’s why the Air Force is having such a hard time implementing its strategic plan to have a mixed unmanned and manned fleet. It’s not merely about the technology. It’s about pilot culture, right? It’s bringing those things together.
One thing I’d like to add, going back to misinterpretation, is how this is interpreted in other nations.
U-T: China.
Singer: Yeah. We got a lengthy review recently. It’s about five pages in the People’s Liberation Army’s Daily newspaper. It’s funny because large parts of the review were admiring. They were like, “We like the realism. We like some of the technology. But then it ended on this different part.”
U-T: Yeah, bad ending!
Singer: Yeah (laughing)! They were saying that it’s clearly part of the American agenda to paint China as an enemy, that it is chauvinistic.
But our agenda isn’t to say that there will be such a war. If there’s a political lesson from it, for geopolitics, it’s the idea that the kind of conflict — states fighting states — was thinkable for much of the 20th century. The two World Wars that happened versus the third World War, the fear of it throughout the Cold War. But then for the last generation, it’s been unthinkable. And now it’s thinkable once more.
U-T: Thucydides Trap.
Singer: The reason might be, as you lay out, that Thucydides Trap, that there are great powers rising and falling and in history they naturally kind of grind against each other. Or it might be some kind of mistake. Some kind of miscalculation. Two ships bump over a reef. Two planes bump in the air and things spiral out of control.
The point is that such a war is thinkable once more. You can’t deny it.
My push back to them would be, you say that’s “jingoistic.” I can go into the same newspaper and find a Chinese general who said a U.S.-China war is “inevitable.” I’m not saying it’s inevitable but one of your writers previously did.
U-T: You’re not going to get the benefit of homer treatment there. They’ll never give you the benefit of the doubt on that.
Singer: No. The other funny China thing was, well, you do a book tour and I’ll just say that some of their spy trade craft is not all that good.
U-T: Have they tried to turn you?
Singer: No! Not turning, but it’s like someone will show up and I’ll think, “You’re obviously working for a foreign government. Can you do that a little bit better?"
U-T: What would constitute an act of cyberwar?
Singer: So, the word “cyberwar” is about as abused and misused as the word “war” itself, right? “War” is everything from the actions leading up to armed conflict, that combines violence and politics — that’s what distinguishes war from crime — to the “War on Drugs” or the “War on Poverty” or the “War on Sugar,” right?
It’s the same way with “cyberwar.” You use it to describe all these things that aren’t actually war, like stealing secrets from a Hollywood studio or from a government agency.What would be actual cyberwar? It would be using cyber means to accomplish an act of violence that left people hurt or killed. We thankfully had that happen yet. If you were to see an outright conflict, you would see attacks via cyber means that would do that.
It would be things like what the U.S. did with Stuxnet against Iranian nuclear research facilities. We didn’t steal their secrets using a computer. Instead, we used a computer to physically damage the machinery and the nuclear materials they were working on.It caused damage like any weapon — a bullet, a bomb, a fist. It was a cyber weapon doing that.
U-T: So why wasn’t that an act of war?
Singer: No! No one died in Iran. Right? It’s an act of sabotage.
U-T: OK, so let’s pretend on Dec. 7, 1941 that the Japanese had dropped a lot of bombs but no one died. Act of war?
Singer: If they dropped a lot of leaflets, we probably would not have said, “We’re at war.” They dropped bombs that killed people? Yeah. We’re at war.
It’s the same thing with cyber means. No nation has ever gone to war with another nation over the stealing of secrets. They do go to war over people dying, over people being hurt or killed, and they don’t care about the means. They don’t care whether it’s done with a plane or spears or a fire or whatever.
And in turn it means that you don’t limit yourself in response to it. Someone hits me with cyber means that kills people? I don’t go, “Oh, well, I can only hit back at you with cyber means. To use that Pearl Harbor parallel, Japan flies over dive bombers and torpedo bombers, we don’t say back to them, “Oh, well, we can’t use submarines against you.”
No. You’re at war.
U-T: You’ve talked about this before. Like the way we spoke metaphorically during the Cold War. There was going to be an overwhelming response. If someone dropped a nuclear bomb on us, we’d start hitting back with Minuteman missiles. With cyberwarfare, that’s difficult to do, right?
You don’t have the automatically proportional response. And you have many different actors that are non-state entities. They’re involved in the same messy business.
Singer: Yeah, the complexity of cyber security is that while people like to use Cold War parallels, there are so many differences. Two clear sides? No. Instead there are multiple different states and a wide range of non-state actors, from terrorist groups to Anonymous to criminal groups to states that use those non-state actors.
For example, you have Russia using criminal groups to attack American political organizations, right?
In the Cold War, your fear is nuclear Armageddon. And everything was shaped by the physics of a missile crossing the globe and then I’ve got to hit back within that 30 minute window. And there’s no doubt when I’m under attack. The missile’s coming at me and I know who shot it.
Today, the kind of cyber attacks range from stealing information to blocking information, to the fear of someone actually causing damage.
And, oh by the way, I might not even know when I’m under attack.
U-T: Malware might’ve been put on the system a long time ago. You don’t know when it’s going to be activated or even what it’s going to be doing.
Singer: Yeah. The average time between when someone enters your system and you become aware of it is 205 days.
OK, then what’s my best response to the attack?
If someone shoots a missile at me I’ve got to hit back as rapidly as possible. But once I’m actually aware that you’re cyber-attacking me, I can hit back quickly. I also can act like I don’t know that you’re there and then do things like feed you bad information or put you into little boxes to examine you and play with you.
It’s like revenge. My response might be to sit for a while. There are so many differences. And that’s what makes how we talk about it in our politics about it today so disappointing, right?”
U-T: We default to all the old ways of thinking and talking about “war.”
Singer: And that’s the best not the worst case! The worst is, “Oh, it’s a 400 lb. hacker.” Or, “It’s my 10-year-old son.” Right?
U-T: Well, we saw this in the Trump campaign, right?
This suggestion that the hackers were just a bunch of old fat guys sitting around, so how can you say it’s the Russians? Well, Russia’s pretty good at it. And Moscow had a motive.
I think Thomas Rid has spoken persuasively about this.
I think those guys have got this one.
Singer: Look, let me put it this way. “Was it the Russians?” was a silliness that played out during the election. There’s absolutely no way, shape or form that any serious person would say that now.
Let’s just go through it. The entire U.S. Intelligence Community, the FBI, they’ve all identified it as a Russian attack. Multiple allied intelligence services have identified it as Russian. Five different cyber security companies outside of government — private business, five different ones — have identified it. And it’s actually important that it’s not just one but five because in the cyber security business they’re actually incentivized to debunk each other’s work. And the fact is that they’re all agreeing.
And, oh by the way, both the past and the current president — begrudgingly — said it was the Russians. This is no longer the debate.
The debate is over this weird lack of reaction. We just had the most important cyber attack campaign in history. It hit both Republican and Democratic organizations — the RNC and the DNC. It hit prominent Democrat and Republican leaders — (John) Podesta and (Colin) Powell. It hit government agencies — the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs email system. It hit industry — banks. It hit nonprofits — universities, think tanks.
It started before the election. It continued after the election.
It hit allied governments’ agencies, everything from Norway to the Danish Defense Ministry to the German parliament. And, oh by the way, the same thing is playing out in the French election.
You can no longer paint this as “partisan.” You’re either going to react to it or you’re not.
U-T: Going back to your definition of an act of war, a lot of people will say that what the Russians did was pretty close. And they’ve used cyber alongside other forms of war-making.
Singer: This is where the “Cold War” parallels fit. It’s a Cold War-style jousting, back and forth between states engaging in everything from espionage to influence operations.
It matters. It’s a big deal. Are we in the equivalent of a Cold War-style competition with Russia? Arguably we’re leaning toward that kind of geopolitics. Are we in actual war with them? B-52 bombers dropping bombs on Russia? No.
U-T: But Russia has used cyber warfare alongside other more coercive types of warfare. In Georgia. In Ukraine.
Singer: But that would be a great illustration of the difference. Russia conducts cyber operations against Estonia. It does things like block government websites and tries to do influence operations. But NATO is not at war with Russia because of that.
Russia does the same thing in Ukraine, but oh by the way is also doing artillery strikes and missile strikes and we say, “Yeah, that’s what a real war looks like.”
Moving forward, any kind of actual war is going to involve some cyber side to it. That’s different from past conflicts.
U-T: Many people will ask whether this line has been crossed. You will say that it hasn’t been crossed yet. I’d argue that because the Russians use it in combination with traditional forms of violence that we could say Georgia was the first time it had been crossed.
Singer: When you say “cross the line,” what are you saying?
They used cyber during operations but it did not directly cause physical damage that left people dead. The kinds of things the Russians were doing were blocking the flow of information — which had a huge impact.
This can matter in war. It had a paralyzing effect on Ukrainian government and Ukrainian military units, so they’re sending out orders but the orders aren’t getting through.
It’s important, but it’s more akin to World War II and how signals intelligence turns the tide at the Battle of Midway, versus the actual carrier dive bombers.
U-T: You’ve written about the invasion of Iraq by ISIS, when Daesh went through Mosul. It actually was a relatively small force, but it had been preceded by thousands of tweets and images and other forms of information warfare.
To me, it’s Maoist. It’s this understanding that the important terrain is the human population. And their cyberwarfare is a way to condition them. It’s part of a larger narrative that uses violence to help shape the conduct of the war.
Singer: So what’s happening is that the Internet is changing and our use of it is changing.
With ISIS and their takeover of Mosul, we call that Web 2.0. Basically, what’s happening now is that we’re not just using the Internet to communicate directly. I send an email to you and then we send them back and forth.
We’re also on social media, distributing widely. And what ISIS did was spread its message before it, spreading a pattern of fear.
An example of the difference is that in war you tend to keep your offense a secret. The D-Day invasion, no one knows it’s coming. Contrast that with ISIS, who drops a hashtag — #AllEyesOnISIS— when it starts the military offense. It’s like a movie or a video game. Guys are crossing the desert and they’re posting images of themselves, killing people.
And the idea is to create this sort of fear. You have this ragtag force of about 2,000, pretty lightly armed. They’re in pickup trucks. They’re carrying AK-47s. And they defeat a force that’s about 10 times their size that’s supplied with U.S. tanks and the like. And much of it is because they’ve created a contagion of fear.
Some of it’s actual information. Some of it’s fake news. Some of the things they’re pushing out are messages that they took this town. And an Iraqi soldier reads that and says, “Wait, that’s the town right behind us. We’re already surrounded?”
And their commander is saying, “No, you’re not.” But they’re like, “No, I saw it on Twitter. I saw it on Facebook.”
Another thing you can do on the social media is send it on scale and you can tailor it to an individual. I can spread the word to thousands or millions. But with my message I can also say, “Carl, I’m coming for you.” Or, “Carl, I know where your family lives.” And in war that has a very different kind of effect.
U-T: So is it sophisticated?
Singer: This isn’t cyber war in terms of physical damage. It’s more information warfare or influence operations. The parallels that it has? What’s happening in politics or what’s happening in movies and TV and the like.
That goes to what you said about whether it’s sophisticated. It feels sophisticated. But any millennial instantly recognizes it. ISIS gets a lot of credit for coming up with new things, but it’s strategic plagiarism. It’s things that Katy Perry does.
U-T: But which our military does not do well.
Singer: It does not do it well.
U-T: It’s painful.
Singer: But you can see a big change between the first battle of Mosul, where ISIS takes over the city, versus now we have our counteroffensive. How did we announce our counteroffensive? With a hashtag.
U-T: Much of your work as a futurist involves what’s next in high tech. But when is low tech an advantage?
Singer: First, I’m not a fan of the word “futurist.” It feels like hucksterism.
U-T: I was going to ask you about that before! It’s a name that’s affixed to you, but I’ve never actually seen you use it?
Singer: No. I’m not a fan of it.
U-T: I hate it, too.
Singer: It feels huckster-like. That I should be like, “Buy this for $9.99!” Or, whatever.
Singer: I’m trying to put my finger on current trends, things that are happening now, playing out right now.
Notice that I didn’t say, “ISIS might do ‘X.’” I said, “ISIS did ‘X.’”
U-T: I always thought of you more as a “strategist.”
Singer: The rule in “Ghost Fleet” was that, yeah, that technology might be fiction, but here’s the prototype of it. It’s not what we call “vaporware.” I can actually put my hands on it, right? It’s not just a dream.
That part about high tech/ low tech, I think what we’re seeing is that just as with past wars, future wars will have that combination.
U-T: You’ve written about child soldiers. There’s nothing more primal in war than something like that. You steal kids. You weaponize them. And you use them as shock troops to kill other people. Is that as low tech as it gets?
Singer: Our historical example of this would be the blitzkrieg in World War II, the first mastery of the tank and the radio and the airplane working together. But, oh by the way, most of the German army was using horses.
Today in the battle for Mosul, we have low tech guys blowing themselves up, a high tech U.S. military using big data analytics and then things that used to be high tech but are low tech right now, such as drones.
ISIS has flown more than 200 drone missions — a third of them armed — over the last couple of months.
Now, you can look at them and say, “Those are kind of junky. Some of those they made themselves. Some others are clearly ones that they bought somewhere. Or that you or I could get.” Yeah, but 15 years ago that was science fiction.
U-T: OK, I’ve had a problem with this because every mission I’ve seen they’ve dropped this little grenade or this little mortar shell. They’re flying around, but wouldn’t the most efficient way to deliver that shell be by mortar? They just drop it in a tube. I think that there’s a novelty to their use by ISIS.
Singer: Go back to your social media aside. With a mortar, I can’t capture the video and post it online. It’s double messaging — “See those Americans who love their drones? Well, we’ve got them, too.” And, second, to Iraqi troops, “We can get you anywhere. We can get you from above.”
U-T: This is like the Zeppelins of World War I. They were never going to turn the tide, but they sowed fear.
Singer: But then you get this parallel, where people will say, “Oh, well, it’s not as good as the U.S. military.”No, of course not. It’s not as good. But is it effective? Does it create a threat that people have to be aware of, including our own troops? Who haven’t been bombed by an enemy air force since the Vietnam War? Most people think it’s the Korean War but it’s the Vietnam War.
U-T: North Vietnamese MiGs? Something like that?
Singer: No.
U-T: Ours?
Singer: The reason why it’s not known that well is because it was a military outpost in Laos. It wasn’t supposed to be there. It was bombed by North Vietnamese air force, Russian-made, propeller-driven cargo planes. Whereupon a CIA contractor Air America Huey helicopter takes off and shoots down the cargo planes with its prop wash.
The last time American troops were bombed and there’s a dogfight above them, it’s this strange event.
We haven’t had to think about this for, literally, a generation. And now you’ve got troops in Iraq and Syria who are being deployed with anti-drone rifles to protect them from this threat that didn’t exist a couple of years ago.
Let’s circle back to the story about social media. Part of the way that weapon was revealed was because a fan of “Ghost Fleet” in Iraq wrote to us. He said, “I enjoyed the book. I’ve been sharing it with others.” We said that we’d send him a box of books so that he could give them to a bunch of guys out there.
He took a photo of himself and his anti-drone rifle with a picture of the “Ghost Fleet” book and said, “Hey, thank you for sending this.” And that got posted on social media, which then revealed that we have anti-drone rifles there.
U-T: It’s this weird loop.
Singer: Yeah.
U-T: With machines, is there a difference between automated and autonomous? Or is it just the level of trust people place in them?
Singer: The way to think about it is the difference between a thermostat and a true robotic system. With a thermostat, the temperature is automated. Change the temperature setting and it reacts.
U-T: Put a thermostat on 72 and it’ll get you to 72.
Singer: When we’re talking about autonomy for robots, what you’re really talking about is the equivalent of a leash for a dog. So it’s not merely a 0 or a 1. Is the dog on the leash or is the dog running free? It’s also things like, how much leash should I give it? What do I allow it to do?
When we’re thinking about a parallel with drones, I’m remote controlling everything that the drone is doing and I’m doing it from afar. That’s something that the early Predator drones were like. Then it became, well, it can do certain things on its own. It can take off and land on its own. But then I control it in flight. Then it could do more complex tasks on its own, like go to mission way points and air-to-air refuel. Then it could recognize targets on its own.
U-T: It can recognize certain types of human behavior. It can appraise behavior that would appear to be insurgent activity.
Singer: Yeah. That’s what’s playing out with autonomy. And that’s always playing out in robotics on the civilian side — from the little tinker robots that happened years back to something like a car that is driving itself down the road.
U-T: But what about what Michael Horowitz has argued? Will autonomy perhaps create fewer ethical problems?
Singer: No.
U-T: Might it lead to machines that make better decisions than the human? At some point, there’s always a human in the system, but could it be possible that robots make us better?
Singer: Better morally?
U-T: We do make a lot of mistakes on the battlefield.
Singer: Sorry, there are two things there — “better morally” and “we make mistakes.”
We’re about to have a discussion that’s seemingly about technology but has nothing to do with technology.
U-T: It has everything to do with the human brain, right?
Singer: How do you judge bad action? Do you judge it by consequence? Or do you judge it also by intent? That’s at the essence of religious debates. Should we sentence that guy to death or do we let him off with a slap on the wrist?
Someone died. OK, is he a mass murderer who intended to kill him? Or someone died because there was an accident and it wasn’t the driver’s fault.
If you look at consequence — person dead — versus intent, intent for most of us matters.
Machines don’t have intent. They can have the intent of the original programmer. Or the user and we can judge it by that.
Did you intend to send the robot out to kill people? Was it Dr Frankenstein, and he didn’t mean for the monster to do it ? Or was he Dr Evil, right?
Where I come down on this, there are certain areas where I can see technology reducing mistakes. We already see this with air strikes. They allow much greater precision, right? It’s a lot easier for us to identify a target. Is it a tank or a truck? Is that guy carrying an AK-47, or not? Does that mean that there are no mistakes on the battlefield? Absolutely not.
Secondly, does that mean that the enemy doesn’t have a vote? So we see this right now. OK, you’re now targeting people in uniform, so what’s my reaction? I don’t wear a uniform.
Or, you’re trying to avoid civilian casualties. What do I do? Hide out in a civilian area.
This same thing will play out in robotics. For “Wired for War,” I remember speaking to someone about the scenarios using this system — it’s a machine gun armed robot. It’s the size of a lawn mower.
U-T: Carnegie Mellon was doing a lot of that stuff.
Singer: There’s a Chinese version now, a Russian version. But it faces two tough adversaries. One, a hacker. And, two, a 6-year-old with a can of spray paint.Because it will present an incredible dilemma, which will be either kill an unarmed 6-year-old or the 6-year-old will defeat it.
U-T: You’re putting a robot on the horns of a dilemma.
Singer: You’re not going to remove ethics or ethical dilemmas from war. Just like with driver-less cars, you’re still going to have ethical questions.
You can’t engineer your way out of ethics.
U-T: No. In fact, that’s been a debate. How do you program some of these cars to do certain things. You have to make a choice. What about the famous scenario poised by the Trolley Problem? The fat man hits the track?
Singer: Yeah, when they talk to ethicists, the engineers want the answer and the ethicists are like, “Are you a utilitarian? Or not? Well, if you’re utilitarian just go with the number of people you want to save. But if you say, ‘Oh, no, I care about doing the right thing.’”
U-T: We’re back to intent.
Singer: Intent! So don’t change the direction of it.
U-T: Saved by Kant’s categorical imperative. You’re not going to have to kill that person.
Singer: Engineers want “The Answer.” Well, welcome to ethics, right?
U-T: What’s the difference between electronic warfare and cyberwarfare? That question, by the way, was asked by a reporter from Popular Science.
Singer: Waves versus zeroes and ones, in a certain way.
U-T: Yeah, I see that..
Singer: Well, it’s starting to change.
U-T: A Growler can do things that, theoretically, you could do over telephone or Internet lines, I suppose.
Singer: Like land warfare and cyberwarfare, electronic warfare and cyberwarfare are starting to meld together. For example, you can use a wave signal to deliver software code that can sabotage a system.
U-T: Exactly.
Singer: But at the end of the day, you’re talking about different languages and their origins.
The other part is that the place, the domain, that cyberwar takes place in this space called “cyberspace.” That’s inherently civilian, in nature. It’s run by civilian companies. We’re all on it.
In electronic warfare, so far, there’s no “space” for it, right? But it’s also mostly been radar and missile guys contending back and forth. Where it takes place would be very different.
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