[43888] in Cypherpunks
CJR_war
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Young)
Fri Nov 24 11:08:57 1995
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 11:05:52 -0500
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
SciAm, December, 1995:
"Fighting Future Wars. U.S. military planners may be
preparing for the wrong conflict."
Policy experts, technical gurus and defense contractors
have begun to study a range of other potential threats,
from a newly hatched superpower to a regional power with
dramatically altered fighting tactics, to legions of
mercenary hackers that bring down banks and stock
exchanges with computer viruses and other malevolent
software. The vast array of scenarios is a measure of
the speculative turn that has gripped the
military-planning establishment.
Debate on high-tech fighting culminates in the question
of whether information technologies -- a computer virus,
for one -- could make conventional military hardware
obsolete and whether they would make possible a virtual
invasion of the continental U.S. A battle of the bits
would be fought by destroying an enemy's information
assets, its financial, electrical, telecommunications
and air-traffic-control networks. Direct strikes at the
military would not be ruled out: cracking a government
computer is already a not infrequent hacker rite of
passage. In addition, more than 95 percent of military
communications travel over public networks.
CJR_war
