Lecture 1

Introduction to Information
Warfare

Mohamed Sharif

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 Lecture Contents

• Warfare
• Information Warfare
• Information Environment
• Information Operation
• Ethics

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 How to Study Information Warfare?

Discussions about Information Warfare tend to be either:

• High level discussions, riddled with trendy buzzwords,
with rhetorical debates about terminology and taxonomy.

• Highly technical discussions about a particular

technology.
• This course will try to plow a middle ground by
introducing each topic at the high level and then drilling
down to the technologies and their applications.

In this way, we will prepare students for more advanced

course work/career work in this field.
 What are the Origins of Warfare?

• Gimme your stuff!

•Fine! No problem man!

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 What is Warfare

• Armed fighting between groups

• Period during war
• Method of warfare
• Conflict
• Serious effect to end something
• There have been four generations

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 Four Generation of Warfare
• First Generation:
 Started with the rise of the nation-state
 Top-down Military Structure
 Limited weapons and armies
 Ended in the early 19th Century
• Second Generation:
 Started around 1860 in US
 Large Armies with artillery
 Formal assault tactics
 Mass weapon development
 Logistic support
 Ended around World War I (WW I)
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 Four Generation of Warfare (Conti)
• Third-Generation:
 Started in WW II by Germany
 “Shock-maneuver” tactics
 Weapon Mass Destruction
 Ended around 1980
• Four-Generation:
 Started around 1989 in US
 Television
 No distinction between military and civilian

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 Warfare in the Context of Social
Evolution

• Is violence necessary to achieve military

objectives?
– PGMs (precision guided munitions)
– Deterrence threat
– Emerging non-lethal weapons
– Sun Tzu (mid-first millennium BCE) who wrote a
famous military treatise stated that the objective
of war is the least possible loss of life and
utilization of resources.

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 Warfare in the Context of Social
Evolution

• Is violence necessary to achieve military

objectives?
– PGMs (precision guided munitions)
– Deterrence threat
– Emerging non-lethal weapons
– Sun Tzu (mid-first millennium BCE) who wrote a
famous military treatise stated that the objective
of war is the least possible loss of life and
utilization of resources.

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 Recent Wars

• In the 1991 Gulf War, despite the fact that

Iraq had one of the largest armies in the
world, the US had 382 casualties. This
success is attributed to superior night
vision, navigation, and precision guided
munitions.
• To date the 2003 Iraqi War has claimed
over 350 US, 50 British and 5000 lives.

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 Command Cycle is Becoming Shorter

Revolutionary Civil War WWII Gulf War Future

War Vicksburg, Bastogne, Kuwait, 2010
Yorktown, 1781 1863 1944 1991
Observe Telescope Telegraph Radio Near Real Real Time
Time
Decide Months Weeks Days Hours Minutes or
Immediate

Act A Season A Month A Week A Day Hour or

less

Adapted from Sullivan and Dubik, War In the Information Age.

SSI: US Army War College,1994

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 What is Information Warfare ?

“Information warfare is a coherent and

synchronized blending of physical and virtual
actions to have countries, organizations, and
individuals perform, or not perform, actions so
that your goals and objectives are attained and
maintained, while simultaneously preventing
your competitors from doing the same to you”
According to Andy Jones.

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 What is Information Warfare? (Conti.)

• “Information Warfare is about operations that

target or exploit information resources,” D.
Denning, Information Warfare and Security.
(1999) 21.
• “Information Warfare…is simply the use of
information to achieve our national
objectives,” George Stein, “Information
Warfare,” Airpower Journal 9: 1, 32 (1995).

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 Information Warfare (Conti.)

Information Warfare is Information

Operation conducted during times of
crises or conflicts to achieve or
promote specific objectives against a
specific adversary or adversaries.

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 Information Warfare (Cont.)

• Information Warfare is used to provide

your organization a competitive
advantage while at the same time
limiting the competition’s capability to
reduce your advantage and increase
their own.
• Information Warfare is not possible
with out control of your Information
Environments.
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 Information Environments

• Information Environment (IE) is the

aggregate of individual, organization, or
systems that collect, process, or
disseminate information including the
information itself.
• IE is the interrelated set of Information,
Information Infrastructures and
Information-based processes.

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 Information Environments (Conti)
Information
Data
Knowledge
Information Infrastructures
Display
Store
Process
Transmit
Information –based processes
Obtain
Exchange
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 Related Information Warfare

• Knowledge Management
• Network-Centric Business
• Coherent Knowledge-Based Operation

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 Information Warfare areas

• INFOSEC / Information Assurance

• Intelligence
• Computer network exploitation
• Network management
• Knowledge Management
• Information operations
• Command and Control
• Business Continuity
• Marketing
• Legal
• Research & Development
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 Examples of Information
Warfare

• Business
• Three Blind Men
• Industry

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 Attacks in Information Warfare

• Sources of Attack
• Internal
• External
• Forms of Attack
• Data attack
• Software Attack
• Hacking Attack
• Physical Attack
• Classes of Attack
• Passive attack
• Active attack

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 Defense in Information Warfare

• Awareness
• Policies
• Information Assurance
• Military Forces
• Intelligence
• Cooperation between government and
private sector

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 Information Warfare (Conti)

• Objective of Information Warfare:

 Exploitation
 Deception
 Disruption
 Destruction
• To achieve the objective of Information
Warfare
 Natural hazard and unintended threats
 Tactical attack
 Strategic attack

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 Information Warfare (Conti)

• Advantage:
 Less human causalities
 Less cost
 Information Technology
• Disadvantage:
 Trust
 Unexpected result
 Terrorism
 Un declare war

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 What is Information Operations ?

Information Operation is an action taken

to affect adversary information and
information systems while defending
one’s own information and information
systems

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 Information Operation Process
Planning

Offensive Defensive

Other Information Society

Media Influance
Infrastructures Systems

Perceptions Human
Influance

Actions

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 Ethics of Teaching Information
Warfare and Defense

• Will courses such as this result in greater or

lesser loss of life?
• Are we training hackers (in the bad sense)
or enabling society to defend itself?
• If we are to take the next step in cultural
evolution, should we be teaching and
studying conflict resolution rather than
warfare?

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 Ethics of Teaching Information
Warfare and Defense

• With precision guided munitions that allow

targeting within minutes, does life become
cheap, reduced to a video game?
• With life and death decisions being made in
real time, without adequate time for
reflection or analysis, does the world
become more dangerous?

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 Ethics (cont.)

• Finally, is the relative ease with which the US

won the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq likely
to lead to a false sense of security?
• For example, with “weapons of mass
disruption” might the US cause so much
confusion that an enemy might panic into doing
something extreme, such as launching a nuke.

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